Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim

An Interview with Richard Dawkins
(from Salon.com)

Why are we here on earth? To Richard Dawkins, that's a remarkably stupid question. In a heated interview, the famous biologist insists that religion is evil and God might as well be a children's fantasy.

In the roiling debate between science and religion, it would be hard to exaggerate the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins. The British scientist is religion's chief prosecutor -- "Darwin's rottweiler," as one magazine called him -- and quite likely the world's most famous atheist. Speaking to the American Humanist Association, Dawkins once said, "I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."

Not surprisingly, these kinds of comments have made Dawkins a lightning rod in the debate over evolution. While he's a hero to those who can't stomach superstition or irrationality, his efforts to link Darwinism to atheism have upset the scientists and philosophers, like Francis Collins and Michael Ruse, who are trying to bridge the gap between science and religion. Yet, surprisingly, some intelligent design advocates have actually welcomed Dawkins' attacks. William Dembski, for instance, says his inflammatory rhetoric helps the I.D. cause by making evolution sound un-Christian.

Dawkins' outspoken atheism is a relatively recent turn in his public career. He first made his name 30 years ago with his groundbreaking book "The Selfish Gene," which reshaped the field of evolutionary biology by arguing that evolution played out at the level of the gene itself, not the individual animal. Dawkins now holds a chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Thanks to his tremendous talent for clear and graceful writing, he's done more to popularize evolutionary biology than any other scientist, with the possible exception of Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins has a gift for explaining science through brilliant metaphors. Phrases like "the selfish gene" and "the blind watchmaker" didn't only crystallize certain scientific ideas; they entered the English vernacular. And his concept of "memes" -- ideas themselves evolving like genes -- spawned a new way of thinking about cultural evolution.

Dawkins' latest book turns to his more recent passions. In "The God Delusion," Dawkins fulminates against religious moderates as well as fundamentalists. He argues that the existence of God is itself a scientific conjecture, one that doesn't hold up to the evidence. And he dismisses the entire discipline of theology: "I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all."

[Salon] spoke with Dawkins by phone in Oxford shortly before he launched his American book tour. We talked about the dangers of unquestioned faith, the politics of the evolution debate, and why atheists are among the most intelligent people in the world.

Aut vincere aut mori

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes


"Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny—and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do)."

— "Capturing the Center," Natural History 107 (December 1998): 18.



“Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal world’; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's enormously arborescent bush—a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.”

— "The Evolution of Life On Earth," Scientific American 271 (October 1994): 91.



“We talk about the ‘march from monad to man’ (old-style language again) as though evolution followed continuous pathways of progress along unbroken lineages. Nothing could be further from reality. I do not deny that, through time, the most ‘advanced’ organism has tended to increase in complexity. But the sequence from protozoan to jellyfish to trilobite to nautiloid to armored fish to dinosaur to monkey to human is no lineage at all, but a chronological set of termini on unrelated darwiniana trunks. Moreover life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense—only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.”

— "Tires to Sandals," Eight Little Piggies, New York: W. W. Norton, 1993, p. 322.

Aut viam inveniam aut faciam

Nonoverlapping Magisteria

by Stephen Jay Gould


Incongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"


Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense."

"Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."

"Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival."

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty."

"Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition."

"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

"We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction."