Science in the Soul

by Richard Dawkins

  ‘Jarvis, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Hake-Wortle…’

  ‘I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself, sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir? To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins…’

  ‘Let me guess, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?’

  ‘A considerable underestimate, sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again, sir.’

  ‘Jarvis, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.’

  ‘I have one in readiness, sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour when you returned from your club last night.’

  ‘Attaboy, Jarvis. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.’

  ‘No, sir, that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.’

  ‘Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jarvis, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, “a change”, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.’

  ‘Like a misprint in a book?’

  ‘Yes, sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say: “Mutation proposes, selection disposes.” ’

  ‘Rather neat that, Jarvis. Your own?’

  ‘No, sir, the pleasantry is an anonymous parody of Thomas à Kempis.’

  ‘So, Jarvis, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We see something that looks like a piece of natty design, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It can’t have got here by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.’

  ‘In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s alcoholically celebrated feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.’

  ‘What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jarvis? Which, by the way, is pretty likely.’

  ‘The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, and the calculation sufficiently approximate, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole…’

  ‘That’ll do, Jarvis, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the off. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?’

  ‘To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. Evolution happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitive. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed by a master engineer.’

  ‘But it only looks like the work of some slide-rule toting whizz with a drawing board and a row of biros in his top pocket?’

  ‘Yes, sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements in the same direction, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence being sufficiently prolonged to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called “Mount Improbable”, sir.’

  ‘Jarvis, that’s a doosra*2 of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I wasn’t too far wrong, was I, when I called it “evaluation” instead of evolution?’

  ‘No, sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen as progenitors of future generations. Mr Darwin realized that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.’

  ‘Or tigers, Jarvis. Tigers are very fast. Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Dregs only last week.’

  ‘Yes, sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had ample opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large predators.’

  ‘By Jove, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are the first ones to grab their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But this is amazing, Jarvis. This really prangs the triple twenty. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything else?’

  ‘Precisely, sir.’

  ‘But wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, I know what it’s like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.’

  ‘Very true, sir.’

  ‘So, well, dash it, I mean to say, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?’

  ‘Why indeed, sir?’

  ‘Jarvis, this is astounding. Incredulous.’

  ‘Incredible, sir.’

  ‘Yes, incredible. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly as we biblical scholars say. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick, and the binoculars Aunt Daphne gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies, the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me, Jarvis?’

  ‘No indeed, sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a further suggestion, sir?’

  ‘Suggest away, Jarvis, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.’

  ‘Well, sir, if you would care to follow the matter further, I have a small volume here, which you might care to peruse.’

  ‘Doesn’t look very small to me, but anyway, what is it called?’

  ‘It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who it’s by, Jarvis, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gents’ bespoke headwear if you please. I have
some intensive marvelling to do.’

  * * *

  *1 I enjoyed writing the previous parody enough to have another go the following Christmas. This one is previously unpublished.

  *2 Cricket again: another kind of deceptively spun ball, invented by the Pakistani bowler Saqlain Mushtaq.These are arcane matters and I confess to being vague about the details of how it differs from a googly.

  Gerin Oil*

  GERIN OIL (OR Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11 September 2001 were Gerin Oil trips: all nineteen of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniolism was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch-hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadors. Gerin Oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and of Ireland.

  Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts. These communities are usually limited to one sex only, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonized sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin Oil symptomatology. Gerin Oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a preoccupation with reducing the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the prurience with which many habitual ‘Oilers’ condemn homosexuality.

  As with other drugs, refined Gerin Oil in low doses is largely harmless, and can serve as a lubricant on social occasions such as marriages, funerals and state ceremonies. Experts differ over whether such social tripping, though harmless in itself, is a risk factor for upgrading to harder and more addictive forms of the drug.

  Medium doses of Gerin Oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality. Beliefs that have no basis in fact are immunized, by the drug’s direct effects on the nervous system, against evidence from the real world. Oil-heads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of other people’s welfare and mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics and hand gestures, manic stereotypies such as rhythmic head-nodding towards a wall, or Obsessive Compulsive Orientation Syndrome (OCOS: facing towards the east five times a day).

  Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who convincingly reports high-grade hallucinations may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such follower-pathology can long post-date the original leader’s death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of ‘drinking the blood and eating the flesh’ of the leader.

  Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to ‘bad trips’, in which the user suffers terrifying delusions, including fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world. Bad trips of this kind are bound up with a morbid punishment-lore which is as characteristic of this drug as the obsessive fear of sexuality already noted. The punishment culture fostered by Gerin Oil ranges from ‘smack’ through ‘lash’ to getting ‘stoned’ (especially adulteresses and rape victims) and ‘demanifestation’ (amputation of one hand), up to the sinister fantasy of allo-punishment or ‘cross-topping’, the execution of one individual for the sins of others.

  You might think that such a potentially dangerous and addictive drug would head the list of proscribed intoxicants, with exemplary sentences handed out for pushing it. But no, it is readily obtainable anywhere in the world and you don’t even need a prescription. Professional traffickers are numerous and organized in hierarchical cartels, openly trading on street corners and in purpose-made buildings. Some of these cartels are adept at fleecing poor people desperate to feed their habit. ‘Godfathers’ occupy influential positions in high places, and they have the ear of royalty, of presidents and prime ministers. Governments don’t just turn a blind eye to the trade, they grant it tax-exempt status. Worse, they subsidize schools founded with the specific intention of getting children hooked.

  I was prompted to write this article by the smiling face of a happy man in Bali. He was ecstatically greeting his death sentence for the brutal murder of large numbers of innocent holidaymakers whom he had never met, and against whom he bore no personal grudge. Some people in the court were shocked at his lack of remorse. Far from remorse, his response was one of obvious exhilaration. He punched the air, delirious with joy that he was to be ‘martyred’, to use the jargon of his group of abusers. Make no mistake about it: that beatific smile, looking forward with unalloyed pleasure to the firing squad, is the smile of a junkie. Here we have the archetypal mainliner, doped up with hard, unrefined, unadulterated, high-octane Gerin Oil.

  * * *

  * First published in Free Inquiry, December 2003, and then abridged, as ‘Opiate of the masses’, in Prospect, October 2005. I believe it was also translated into Swedish but I can’t find the reference. Not sure how they coped with translating ‘Gerin Oil’ in such a way as to preserve the essential feature of the name. They probably solved the difficulty by leaving it in English.

  Sage elder statesman of the dinosaur fancy*

  GREAT HUMORISTS DON’T tell jokes. They plant new species of jokes and then help them evolve, or just sit back and watch them self-propagate, grow, and sprout again. Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship is a single elaborated joke, nurtured and sustained through Lifemanship and One-Upmanship. The joke mutated and evolved with such fertility that, far from fading with repetition, it grew and became funnier. He helped it along by planting supporting memes: ‘ploy’ and ‘gambit’, the pseudo-academic footnotes, the fictitious collaborators, Odoreida and Gatling-Fenn – who just might not be fictitious. Now, thirty years after Potter’s death, if I were to coin, say, Postmodernship, or GM-manship, you would be primed for the joke and ready to go one better. Most Jeeves stories are mutants of one archetypal joke, and again it is a species which evolves and matures to become more funny, not less, with the retelling. The same could be said of 1066 and All That, The Memoirs of an Irish RM and certainly Lady Addle Remembers. How to Keep Dinosaurs belongs in that great tradition.

  Ever since our student days together, Robert Mash has been not just a humorist but a fecund propagator of new evolutionary lineages of humour. If he had a predecessor, it was Psmith: ‘That low moaning sound you hear is the wolf bivouacked outside my door’ is what I would think of as a Mashian way of saying ‘I’m skint.’ Psmithian, too, was Mash’s grave response to a woman who had just met him at a party. On learning that he was a schoolmaster at a famous school, her innocent conversational question was, ‘And do you have girls?’ His one-word reply, ‘Occasionally,’ was calculated to disconcert with exactly Psmith’s unblinking solemnity.

  Mash’s imaginative variants of ‘Stap m’vitals’ had his whole circle of friends busy inventing new ones, which became ever more bizarre as the species evolved through the memetic microculture. The same for names of pubs. The Rose and Crown in Oxford was our local (where, indeed, much of this early evolution took place) but it was seldom referred to so straightforwardly. ‘See you in The Cathedral and Gallbladder’ would have been heard somewhere along the evolutionary line. Later specimens seem funny only within the context of their evolutionary history. Another species that Mash planted was the indefinitely evolving variant of the ‘Our…friend’ convolution. To begin with, ‘Rose and Crown’
might be ‘Our floral regal friend’ but later descendants of the line evolved the baroque crypticity of a crossword clue and needed a classical education to decipher. The phylum to which all these Mashian species of humour ultimately belonged could be called deadpan circumlocution.

  But the youthful Robert Mash as humorist belies the serious scholar of his maturity. Nowhere is his serious side more evident than in this book where he brings together his lifelong expertise on dinosaurs, their habits and maintenance, in sickness and in health. His name has long been a byword in the dinosaur fancy. From show-ring to auction-hall, from racecourse to pterosaur-moor, no gathering of saurophiles is complete until the whisper goes the rounds: ‘Mash has arrived.’ Even the carnosaurs seem to sense the presence of the master and walk with an added spring to their bipedal step, an added sneer to their bacteria-laced jaws. He is ever ready with a reassuring pat to the diffident hindquarters of a Compsognathus or timely advice to its owner.

  Is your lap-dinosaur reaching that difficult (not to say uncomfortable) age of needing a spur trim? Mash will advise you on proper pruning before it all ends in tears and inadvertent (and oh so well-meant) laparotomy. Is your gun-dinosaur becoming over-enthusiastic? Call Mash in before it ‘retrieves’ too many beaters (your retriever’s mouth may be as soft as your ghilly’s muffled cries for help, but there are limits to both). For those embarrassing moments, as when a Microraptor forgets it is in the drawing room, Mash’s advice is as discreet as it is succinct. Or are you looking for a load of well-rotted Iguanodon manure for the smallholding? Mash is your man.

  Though nowadays better known as sage elder statesman of the dinosaur fancy, Robert Mash has seen his share of action. Few who saw him ‘up’ will forget his insouciant seat on ‘Killer’, as he nursed that peerless hunter over the twenty-foot jumps to yet another clear round. As for dressage, under ‘RM’s’ spirited martingale even a buck Brachiosaurus would prance like a thoroughbred Ornithomimus. His view halloo when whipping in that famous pack of twenty Velociraptor couple would quicken the pulse of any sportsman, and chill the already cold blood of the hapless Bambiraptor gone to ground. And when he donned his well-pounced leather, he was not to be snited at – indeed he was lucratively sought after as a consultant in Arabian royal houses. His freshly enseamed Pterodactylus, expertly cast off and with the wind in its sails, would ring up peerlessly before footing and trussing its Archeopteryx, with a final, satisfying feake on the gauntlet.