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Sunday 7 September 2008

A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

An unlikely bestseller championing atheism will fill many stockings this Christmas. Rod Liddle meets its author, Richard Dawkins, and asks if his opposition to religion is as devout and credulous as the faith he attacks so passionately

Which brings me to the difficult stuff — and Darwinism. It is a creed to which Dawkins cleaves with the fervour of the fundamentalist, the true believer. And it is the real chink in his armour. For example, because Darwin showed us that life forms progress from the simple to the complex over hundreds of thousands of years of gradual modification, it therefore follows (according to Dawkins) that there cannot have been a divine being present before the amoebae swam in those soupy oceans at Earth’s toddler stage — because he would have had to be more complex than those organisms which followed him. And that doesn’t fit with the theory. But what if the theory, in its entirety, doesn’t hold — as Dawkins concedes might be possible? Even now, a century and a half after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged (most recently by the evo-devo school, which believes that sudden change can occur within species within a single generation). Like all scientific theories, Darwinism will be amended — perhaps beyond recognition. Perhaps it will be discarded entirely. Either way, disavowing a divine being because it doesn’t quite fit in with another here-today-gone-tomorrow theory seems a tad peremptory. The question Dawkins can never satisfactorily answer is: what if Darwin was wrong? And yet, as a scientist, he must be aware that the likelihood is that Darwin was wrong here or there. In which case, where does that leave his philosophical argument?

And then there is this. For Richard Dawkins, the human being is a creature propelled by the blind impetus of his or her genes. Everything we do is, at root, guided by a cold mechanism designed to propagate the survival of these incalculably minute and ruthless constituents. There is nothing more. And yet Dawkins insists that as human beings we might uniquely overcome this mechanism. Why should we, alone among animals, be able to do so, to defy our genes? And how?

‘I mean that it is the selfish gene, not the selfish individual,’ Dawkins says.

Well, yes, sure; we talk about reciprocal altruism for a time. Clearly, though, Dawkins means that we can progress beyond even that. So what was it that gave us the ability mysteriously to overcome this implacable mechanism?

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