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Prince Charles vs Richard Dawkins
25-05-00
Hello Astronomy Interest Group & SETI@home Team
About a week ago Prince Charles delivered an important lecture on BBC Radio.
He said some very silly and inaccurate things about Genetically Modified
foods and in fact about Science in general.
It makes one wonder where world leaders like him find their scientific
advisors.
Thankfully the renowned and outspoken scientist Richard Dawkins was quick
off the mark and replied with the following open letter to Prince Charles
published in The Guardian.
Basically Dawkins hits the Prince for a six.
I thought you would enjoy his eloquent and intelligent insights, especially
with so much ill-informed 'science-bashing' going on all around us.
Clear-thinking persons the world over realise that Science is the only real
hope humanity has ever had - and ever will have.
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The Prince and the great debate
Don't turn your back on science
An open letter from biologist Richard Dawkins to Prince Charles
Richard Dawkins
Sunday May 21, 2000
Your Royal Highness,
Your Reith lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and
admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve
those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually
contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you
deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: 'Of course we must be
open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.'
Let's look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer
over scientific reason. First, intuition, the heart's wisdom 'rustling like
a breeze through the leaves'. Unfortunately, it depends whose intuition you
choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your own intuitions
coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of long-term stewardship
of our planet, with its diverse and complex biosphere.
But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein's black heart? What
price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler's twisted leaves? The Yorkshire
Ripper heard religious voices in his head urging him to kill. How do we
decide which intuitive inner voices to heed?
This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My
own passionate concern for world stewardship is as emotional as yours. But
where I allow feelings to influence my aims, when it comes to deciding the
best method of achieving them I'd rather think than feel. And thinking,
here, means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it did,
science would incorporate it.
Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness of
'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been
unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer
lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the
evolutionary timescale.
Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for
Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our
food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not
artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a
genetically modified grass seed, just as a Pekinese is a genetically
modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!
The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural
revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction
of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and
technological and medical) artefact. It is far more unnatural than the
population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or
not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture - all agriculture - is
unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.
Does that mean there's nothing to choose between different kinds of
agriculture when it comes to sustainable planetary welfare? Certainly not.
Some are much more damaging than others, but it's no use appealing to
'nature', or to 'instinct' in order to decide which ones. You have to study
the evidence, soberly and reasonably - scientifically. Slashing and burning
(incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being 'traditional')
destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely practised by
'traditional' cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into
desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered
fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future; indiscriminate use of
antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.
Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the
possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite
dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution
of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian
might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately
the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the
baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'
Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to
materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about
real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a
terrible case of crying wolf?
Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some sort
of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good role
model? Here, we must think carefully. There really is a sense in which
ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their constituent
species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the corporate
thuggery that is destroying the rainforests is so criminal.
On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of
Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature
really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise,
natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term
stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other
profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what
all wild creatures have done for three billion years.
No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation
of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you
cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it
even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and
exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no other species
of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to
us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big
enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences. Natural
selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it
stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill,
for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the
other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that
present selfish gains are leading to species extinction - and indeed, 99 per
cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.
The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can
see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards
distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of
stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists
only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is
precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect
it.
It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the
future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature
is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a
devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and
horridly cruel works of nature.'
Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be
cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in
preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable.
In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an
arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your
quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else
drives us to find out?
What saddens me most, Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your
back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science
myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another
author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I'd call
your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the Dark .
- Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is 'Unweaving
the Rainbow' .
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