A Devil's Chaplain
Richard Dawkins
�16.99 Weidenfeld & Nicolson
THE title is a quotation from Charles Darwin. In a letter to a friend, he
wrote, "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful,
blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature." At the beginning of
his book Dawkins points out that nature is not cruel nor kind, but
indifferent. He uses the word "callous" to describe it. These are terms
that have a human content and this has led critics of Darwinism to lay
horrors such as the Holocaust at its door. Dawkins demolishes this argument
in a lively introduction to a collection of his published essays
interspersed with new ones.
A Devil's Chaplain is a rare treat and it comes in seven servings, each
with an introduction by the author. It is possible, and even tempting, to
go through the lot at one sitting, but readers will find it more rewarding
to take it a bite at a time, dipping in as you would at a buffet. The
titles of the seven sections don't give much of a clue to their themes -
for instance "Light will be thrown" and "Even the ranks of Tuscany" - but
it doesn't matter, because each essay will grip you at once.
Of course, Dawkins is a controversialist and passionate about evolution, so
he gathers antagonists, if not enemies. He is goaded by a confidence trick
played on him by an Australian film crew, who asked for an interview which
he suddenly realised was aimed at showing he could not answer a question
posed by a creationist. His resentment at this resulted in a marvellous
explanation of what "information" means technically and how it applies to
genetics.
Here, too, is his hilarious review of the book by Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont (Intellectual Impostures, Profile, 1998) about submitting a paper
that was deliberate nonsense from start to finish to a postmodern American
journal. The paper was treated seriously, but even its title was
meaningless. This essay includes a web address for a similar paper,
grammatically correct, unique and similarly meaningless.
Dawkins's closely argued case for preferring to be tried by a judge sitting
alone and not relying on the "12 good men and true" of a jury is another
delight, though his opinion of lawyers seems to be the common one. There
are formidable attacks on religion that will reinforce unbelievers and
outrage the devout.
What might surprise some readers are a number of tributes to friends who
have died: they are graceful, affectionate and grieving. The name of Peter
Medawar crops up admiringly throughout. He was a master of clear exposition
of science and its liberating power, as is Dawkins.
Roy Herbert
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23822
MC Hawking has a couple of reasonable jokes in his latest opus,one is about
the Darwinian struggles between scientists,I'll scan it in soon.
