In a fascinating piece on his website, my friend Matt Ridley is sceptical that anything so well-written as the King James Version could really be the work of a committee. And indeed, he follows Brian Moynahan's Book of Fire in arguing that the KJV (or at least the well-written bits) is actually the work of one man, William Tyndale, executed in 1536 (strangled in public while tied to the stake at which his body was then burned). In Ridley's words, Tyndale was "Murdered – for translating the bible – at the behest of the very church, which 75 years later adopted so much of his text without acknowledgement." All that the King James committeemen did was collate and edit Tyndale's translation.

Incidentally, Matt doesn't mention it but he has a family interest in the theological disagreements of the period, as his own forebear Bishop Nicholas Ridley was burned at the stake in 1555, along with Bishop Hugh Latimer, who uttered the memorable martyr's valediction while they were burning: "Be of good comfort Master Ridley and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

(Please, if you comment on this, don't derail the thread by banging on about Matt's views on other, and totally irrelevant, matters. Thank you.)

Richard

Comment 129 by xmaseveeve :

Ridiculous posturing from Michael Gove. Disgusting and pointless waste of money, albeit from patronising, charitable charlatans flaunting their pitiless piety. Odious, outrageous move.

Brilliant reaction from Richard Dawkins. He picked up their grenade and casually chucked it back, saying they forgot to pull out the pin. Michael (dim and not even nice) Gove.... I'll edit myself here... oh, you missed some good insults.

Rebuild society? This government couldny put a nut in a monkey's mooth.

Thank you xmaseeve, you really get what I was trying to do. And thank you Susan Latimer for seeing it too, with your usual perceptiveness.

Richard

Oh please, I of course never said read it from cover to cover. I used the unkind phrase 'verging on the barbarian' only for people who had never read a single word of it, not even the word "Matthew".

Richard

Do you know that over 99.9% of all claims in science has been wrong?

When you read something like that, you don't even need to investigate it. You KNOW it has been simply made up (Christian apologists are so used to swallowing stuff that has been simply made up, it's not surprising if they think nothing of making up new stuff whenever it suits them). The third decimal place is specified, which seems to suggest a very precise statistical survey of some kind. But what survey could conceivably be made of "all claims in science"? How would you decide what constituted a "claim in science"? Something published in a peer-reviewed journal? Something said in a pub by somebody who called himself a scientist?

If you really believed that only 0.1% of scientific claims were correct, you would never trust a plane to fly, never trust a ship to float, never have a vaccination or take an antibiotic, never trust a telescope or a microscope or a doctor. When somebody makes a stupid remark like this, the best you can say is that they have probably picked up a smattering of the history of science, say a couple of erroneous theories like phlogiston or ptolemaic epicycles, and somehow distorted that into "99.9%".

The statement was made by the same Christian apologist who claimed, and failed to produce evidence, that I called the bible "filthy literature". I now think it is not worth responding to him by name (why give him the satisfaction?) But it is perhaps instructive to call attention in general to ways in which you can tell, from internal evidence alone, that a claim is not to be taken seriously. In particular, note the bogus appeal to accuracy of that third decimal place.

Richard

Comment 35 by ConsciousMind : Why would Richard Dawkins want all children to read the bible, I thought he said earlier that children should not be exposed to, what he refers to as "filthy litterature". Have you changed your mind Richard?

Please either document your statement that I referred to the bible as "filthy literature" or apologise.

Richard

In 1856, three years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, and before he wrote the famous letter to Asa Gray about the Ichneumonidae quote above, Darwin wrote to his friend Hooker:

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.

I adopted the phrase A Devil's Chaplain as the title of my book of collected essays and wrote one new essay with the same title, which deals with this whole question. I follow T H Huxley and George C Williams in regarding natural selection as an object lesson in how not to behave and how not to plan human society. Huxley was uncompromising:

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

And here is Williams, saying much the same thing a century later:

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbor at getting genes into future generations, in which those successful genes provide the message that instructs the development of the next generation, in which that message is always "exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximise our genes' success", in which the closest thing to a golden rule is "don't cheat unless it is likely to provide a net benefit"?

Bernard Shaw's revulsion actually led to his preferring to believe in a kind of Lamarckian evolution. He said of Darwinian selection:

When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.

Shaw fell into the common trap of assuming that because something is unpleasant it cannot be true. Even Darwin tried to mitigate the horror, at the end of his chapter on the Struggle for Existence:

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

I wish I could believe it. Terrible as it is, I stand by what I wrote in River Out of Eden:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

And I ended the chapter in melancholy vein:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E.Housman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither care nor know.

DNA neither cares nor knows. And we dance to its music.

Richard

Oh behalf of RDFRS US, I am immensely proud of the videos that Sean is now putting out. They are truly superb, and I especially like the way he ends them with an appeal for action. In this case, please respond to his appeal for information about the infamous "Liberty" University. It surely deserves to lose its accreditation to award degrees – in biology at least. Otherwise, the degrees given by real universities are devalued.

Richard

This is exactly the kind of image I love to use in presenting science, because it is counter-intuitive, yet very easy to check the calculation. Just note the diameter of the 'droplet' of water (a substantial fraction of the width of North America), then remember that the volume of an object goes up with the cube of the linear dimension, then smear the volume (4/3 pi r cubed) of water out over the available surface area and it all makes sense.

It's valuably counter-intuitive in the same sort of way as those calculations that show that every time you take a breath you are inhaling at least one molecule that went through the lungs of . . . name any historical character you like.

Of course, I am not an evolutionary biologist so what do I know ?

Indeed.

Am I suffering from déjà vu, or didn't we post this quite a long time ago?

Comment 160 by guwest :

Great programme and who was the left wing commentator who thought Dawkins' work led to Thatcher's election, as mentioned in it?

The following is from A Devil's Chaplain

I should be allowed a personal word here because I am tired of being identified with a vicious politics of ruthless competitiveness: accused of advancing selfishness as a way of life. Soon after Mrs Thatcher’s election victory of 1979, Professor Steven Rose wrote, in New Scientist, as follows:

I am not implying that Saatchi and Saatchi engaged a team of sociobiologists to write the Thatcher scripts, nor even that certain Oxford and Sussex dons are beginning to rejoice at this practical expression of the simple truths of selfish genery they have been struggling to convey to us. The coincidence of fashionable theory with political events is messier than that. I do believe though, that when the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.

The ‘Sussex don’ was John Maynard Smith, and he gave the apt reply in a letter to the next issue of New Scientist: What should we have done, fiddled the equations?

Irritating, headline-seeking rubbish. This creature may be our most distant eucaryotic cousin, but that makes it a very close cousin compared with bacteria.

Richard

As a PS to Orwell's Rules of Writing, Samuel Johnson said, "'Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'" I can't believe he really meant it as a general rule, but occasionally I kind of get it.

Richard

No they are not a clone. and no the colony doesn't behave as a single organism. It's much more interesting than that. It's the middle of the night and I must try to get back to sleep, but it isn't hard to look up. It's all in The Selfish Gene and lots of other places.

Good night.

Comment 13 by Steven Mading :

Doesn't an ant colony all share the same DNA? The workers, the soldiers, the queen - they're all the same genes, and differentiate only based on what they are fed - is that true?

If so, then I don't see what the difference is between group selection and kin selection in an ant colony. They're the same thing. If you're an ant, then your whole group you interact with is the tightest sort of kin you can have - they're your clones.

Could it be that someone who studies ants primarily would mistake kin selection for group selection because of this?

Sean is one of the most electrifying speakers I have ever heard. No wonder audience members regularly shout "Faircloth for President!" He not only gives great prepared speeches but is extremely quick on his feet too. On our previous joint tour, I recall one reporter in Detroit – actually from Fox News, which makes the story even better – who asked me a challenging question. I wasn't confident of my answer, so I deflected the question to Sean. Sean battered the reporter into the ground and the reporter then turned to me and said, "I want this guy as my lawyer."

Also, he knows how to punctuate, and how to spell criticism.

Richard

On the question of the stacking of the audience by Catholics, the following interesting comment by mitchgarside is reproduced from Pharyngula:

I can shed a little light on the audience, I’m a politically involved uni student in Aus and I heard about this from a few contacts: First some context, the show Q&A is on the ABC, a publicly funded channel, and is principally a political show that attempts to find real balance by having the best of all sides involved (not like the faux balance of many news programs, especially in the US). Hence the audiences are vetted by political leaning to attempt to produce a balanced crowd of right and left leaning, the way they do this is by asking which party you support/vote for when you apply to be in the audience.

This week the Catholic groups on campus discussed plans to stack out Dawkins appearance by applying as both Coalition voters (which would be true, they are our conservatives, yet still closer to the Democrats really, heh) and also as Green party voters (the most left wing party that has seats in Australian Parliament). So they managed to stack out both sides of the audience.

Bearing false witness being a sin doesn’t seem to have come across in this plan.

I too was disappointed in this so-called debate. I don’t want to put all the blame on my jet lag (I had spent the whole night on the plane from Los Angeles and, incidentally, missed the whole of Easter Day crossing the Date Line). The two things that really threw me were, first, the astonishing bias of the audience and, second, the interfering chairman.

Right from the start when we were introduced, it was clear that the studio audience was dominated by a Catholic cheer squad. The cheered whenever the Cardinal said anything, however stupid and ignorant. To be fair to the ABC, I am confident that they were not responsible for stacking the audience. I believe it was genuinely first-come-first-served, and I can only think that the Catholics must have got off the mark very swiftly and rallied the troops. Our side just isn’t very good at doing that: perhaps it is one of our more endearing qualities. It was encouraging that the vote of viewers at large came down heavily on our side, to the evident surprise and discomfort of the studio audience.

Such an extreme audience bias was a little off-putting, but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the chairman had allowed us to have a proper debate instead of continually racing ahead to get in another dopey question. There were times when the Cardinal had doled out more than enough rope to hang himself but then, in the nick of time, the chairman blundered in and rescued him with yet another samey question from the audience. The only time the chairman did a good job was when he pressed the Cardinal on what seemed perilously close to anti-Semitism.

More and more, I am thinking that discussions of this kind are positively ruined by an interfering chairman. That was also true of my encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, which could have developed into an interesting conversation but for the meddling chairman who, to make matters worse, was a ‘philosopher’ with special training in obscurantism.

Cardinal Pell had evidently been well prepped, formally briefed (for example with his alleged fact that Darwin called himself a theist on page 92 of his autobiography). I knew it wasn’t true that Darwin was a theist and said so, but I obviously couldn’t counter the “Page 92″, which duly got a cheer from the touchline. I’ve since had a chance to look it up and, as expected, it refers to the way Darwin felt earlier in his life, not his maturity when he said he preferred to call himself ‘agnostic’ because the people “are not yet ripe for atheism”.

Another missed opportunity on my part was when the Cardinal nastily insinuated that I had not read to the end of Lawrence Krauss’s book having written the Foreword. Actually I didn’t write the Foreword, I wrote the Afterword, which suggests that the Cardinal hadn’t read the book. Indeed, the content of what he said suggests that he (or whoever briefed him) had read only the infamous review in the New York Times, again by a philosopher not a scientist.

Altogether an unsatisfactory evening. Much better was the radio interview the following morning, which served as a kind of postmortem, after I had had a night’s sleep and had my wits more properly about me:

Richard

The whole film is long, but well worth watching. One highlight, for me, was the spectacularly stupid woman around 0:22:40. She begins by denying that God could ever sanction slavery. Scott then gets her to read aloud the relevant passage from Leviticus and she then completely changes her tune, saying that homosexuality is worse than slavery. That's right: homosexuality is WORSE than slavery. Why? Because the Bible condemns homosexuality and (as she has just that minute learned from Scott) it doesn't condemn slavery.

Even more horrifying is the section (starting around 0:59) labelled "Following Orders": a covert allusion to the Nuremburg Defence. Scott asks people to put themselves in the position of Joshua, ordered by God to slaughter the native peoples already living in the promised land, or of Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his son. One after another, the faith-heads say (reluctantly in the case of the young man with glasses and curly hair, but with something close to relish in the case of the odious man with a bald head and little beard) that yes, they would commit genocide and infanticide if God ordered them to. This is as clear an illustration of the evil of religion as I have come across for a long time.

Richard

It's Monday morning in Sydney and I've just landed from Los Angeles where I took off on Saturday. By crossing the International Date Line, I managed to miss Easter Day completely, but it has left me rather jet lagged on the morning of the day I am to encounter the Cardinal Archbishop. I'll try to sleep during the day.

Richard

Comment 1 by mordacious1 :

When I saw Richard in Berkeley, I was very happy to be 3rd in line with some other very ardent fans. We got good seats just a few feet from Richard (just had to show up early). It was obvious to me that no one there had big bucks, just common working people and some students. With this talk in San Diego, I see it would cost $50 to be in the two front rows, and $25 for reserved seating, probably the next several rows. So people with money get to show up late and get the best seats.

I understand the need to raise as much money as possible, but think this should be balanced with allowing poor fans (like students) to be able to get good seats also. I wonder if this is going to be the policy in the future.

No, no change in policy; indeed no particular policy to change. The local group hosting the event in San Diego needed to charge, in order to pay for the theatre. Large venues of this kind are not free. Perhaps the event in Berkeley that you attended was subsidised by my publishers, but this event in San Diego is not part of a book tour. You could say the relatively rich people paying premium rates for the front row seats are subsidising all the other seats, which would otherwise have had to be more expensive.

Comment 27 by AspieFred :

Mockery is a good counterpart to that what people call holy.

. . . we can mock any sports team, compare presidential candidate to toys. So why shouldn't we do the same with crazy rituals and world views?

This is funny: "Marxism no longer corresponds to reality" says Man in Giant Hat who speaks to Invisible Cloud People.

Thank you, Cartomancer, for your typically valuable contribution. Next time Michael Ruse, or any other faith-loving atheist, invites me to study 'sophisticated theology', I shall know what to say to him.

I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."

Politicians who curry favour with voters by claiming religious affiliation should learn the downside of such self-serving claims. They should be made to defend, in public, the ridiculous beliefs of the religion to which they pretend loyalty.

Richard

Comment Removed by Author

Comment 1 by sycorax :

Love the picture !

I don't. How has something beautiful (fucking) become debased, in our language, in the service of an insult? Suppose you translated the words of the sign into their literal meaning: "Copulate with this guy." Yuck. Yuck squared.

Now let's forget the stupid picture, which might have been deliberately designed to turn people off the Reason Rally, and talk about the article itself. I suppose it's mildly encouraging that the rally found its way into the British press.

Richard

Michael Aus's coming out is very good news. And the very next day, at the American Atheist conference in Bethesda, Maryland, another reverend member of our Clergy Project took the same brave plunge. Teresa MacBain, known to her Clergy Project colleagues as 'Lynn' came out as a non-believer. Teresa, who says she feels elated and 'great', will be joining the Humanists of Florida.

That's two brave ex-clergy in two days. Congratulations to both and welcome to the world of sane reality. You are both among friends.

Richard

Suppose a political candidate has sensible enough views on economics, taxation, foreign policy etc, but lets it be known that PRIVATELY he believes he is a poached egg. I wouldn't vote for him. Would you? Believing that a priest, by blessing a wafer, can turn it literally into the body of a first century Jew is of the same order of lunacy as believing you are a poached egg. I would not be impressed by this politician's promise to be scrupulously careful never to let his belief that he is a poached egg influence his policies. He believes something ridiculous and should be called out on it, because a voter might reasonably doubt the judgment of a man who thinks he is a poached egg.

What about Jack Kennedy, you say? Well, he claimed to be Catholic and that commits one to the ridiculous transubstantiationist belief. I don't think for a moment that Kennedy did believe in transubstantiation, but I think he should have been publicly challenged to deny it and therefore to deny his Catholicism. Actually, I doubt that somebody as intelligent as Kennedy believed in God at all. Again, I think politicians should have their religious beliefs publicly challenged: should not get away with hiding behind the convention that it is somehow not polite to ask about somebody's religion.

Richard

What a devastatingly brilliant speech. Please pass it around, and also recommend Katherine Stewart's chilling book The Good News Club.

Richard

Comment 7 by Stafford Gordon :

Comment 1: mgjinich.

"I would love to read Richard's opinion."

My first thought; is group selection back in the frame?

What a maddening, infuriating, enraging talk, a talk as badly misguided as it is well delivered (albeit with a style of slick, adman showmanship that rubs me personally up the wrong way). I have to go and catch a plane, so no time to spell it out. But, briefly:-

1. No, group selection is not back in the frame. E.O.Wilson, for all his merits, has never understood kin selection. Even in 1975, in Sociobiology he was treating kin selection as a kind of group selection, which it utterly is not. Maynard Smith coined the phrase 'kin selection' precisely in order to distinguish it from group selection.

2. The social insects work entirely by kin selection. The theory is well-worked out and it works. Sterile workers contain copies of genes that are also in reproductives. The worker phenotypes are driven by those genes to work for their copies in reproductives.

3. Mitochondria and other 'membrane-bound' examples. As I have spelled out at great length in numerous places (e.g. The Extended Phenotype, The Selfish Gene, Unweaving the Rainbow) the key here is that groups of genes who share the same exit route from the present vehicle into the future have common interests and work together. My earliest attempt to explain this actually made use of exactly the same metaphor of rowing crews (developed at some length in two places in The Selfish Gene).

4. It is true that Darwin, in The Descent of Man, did uncharacteristically resort to a form of group selectionism for the particular example of humans. But I suspect that if Darwin had known of the later work of men such as Hamilton, Trivers and Maynard Smith, he would not have done so. The only good part of Haidt's talk, where he evokes the group solidarity of humans, for example in warfare, is beautifully explained in non group selectionist terms. For example, kin selection using 'fictive kin'. Consider the lengths to which military and paramilitary units go to foster notions of 'brotherhood'. Look it up in Andy Thomson's excellent book.

Got to rush, sorry

Richard

The four headings are indeed by me, from my open letter to my ten-year-old daughter. But I don't think the rest of the text is by me. And I do know how to spell 'navel'.

Richard

I hope lots of people will take advantage of the child care facilities that RDFRS US is providing in Washington.The purpose of this initiative, which was originally announced at TAM in 2011, is to enable people, who might otherwise be unable to attend events like this because of the responsibilities of child care, to do so. It seemed that an important and highly valued constituency was missing from our meetings, and that we should do something about it.

Richard