The ancestor’s tale

A voice of reason in irrational times, Richard Dawkins is both theorist and explainer of one of the greatest discoveries of the human mind

Thomas Henry Huxley, the great contemporary populariser of Charles Darwin’s ideas, declared it his aim to “smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying”.

That is a fair summary of Richard Dawkins’s achievement in four decades of public advocacy of science and its methods. Professor Dawkins does not altogether avoid the use of invective in the controversies that he joins. But he would reasonably point out that the promotion of critical thinking and an appreciation of scientific discovery are far from merely personal obsessions. In his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, from which The Times is publishing extracts next week, he lucidly expounds evolution and its mechanism of natural selection.

The book’s most obvious accomplishment is to rout “scientific” creationism and its equivalent (and equally absurdly named) doctrine of Intelligent Design. But while that is an exhausting and necessary task, it is only indirectly Professor Dawkins’s message. He is rightly impatient that scientists need devote any time to dogmas that are not testable and yield no predictions, and that are thus exactly unlike science.

In his book, Professor Dawkins compares the relation of Intelligent Design to science with that of Holocaust denial to history. The analogy is deliberately inflammatory and entirely correct. The objection to Holocaust denial is not, as many believe, that it is offensive and xenophobic (though it is, of course, both). It is, rather, that Holocaust denial is false. It is impossible to argue consistently that the Holocaust never happened except by ignoring or faking the historical evidence. Creationism and Intelligent Design are like that. They are not even wrong; they are just bad ideas.

Pseudoscientific beliefs can never be refuted, because their proponents do not recognise the concept of evidence. Evolutionary theory, by contrast, accurately predicted that there must be a mechanism by which traits would pass from one generation to the next. The discovery, a century after Darwin, of the structure of DNA confirmed the explanatory power of his theories. How all species descend from a common ancestor is an extraordinary narrative. Through the power of reason, observation and experiment, evolutionary biology is able to grasp it. And Professor Dawkins has made it his particular skill to tell it.

He has advanced explanations of patterns of kinship and hence of altruism among species, by positing the essential unit of evolution as the gene. His book The Blind Watchmaker demonstrates how natural selection, unplanned but not random, explains complexity without the need to invoke design or purpose. And there is his dismissal of all religious explanations.

Religious faith can be entirely compatible with science and reason. Professor Dawkins’s belief that “moderate religion makes the world safe for extremists” is mistaken and tactically disastrous. There is an intense common interest among all those who believe in science, liberal rights and sexual equality that moderate religion, which recognises the value of free inquiry and political pluralism, should prevail over theocratic extremists.

But the frequent criticism of Professor Dawkins that he is a scientific fundamentalist is wrong. (And the claim of one writer that by his militancy Professor Dawkins has become the “top pin-up” of the Intelligent Design lobby is patently absurd.) Evolution through natural selection is among the greatest discoveries of civilisation. As Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist, wrote, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. And much in other fields is illuminated by it. Professor Dawkins combines the role of theorist, synthesist and explainer in that cause as no one else does.