Richard Dawkins on Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity’s Crown

well good afternoon on this hot June afternoon what a delight it is to be here before we get to the main event let me just explain why I'm here to introduce my name is Angela McLean and until September 2019 I was an Oxford academic full-time and then for a while I worked in government and since this April I've been the government Chief Scientific Advisor now why faros forest was the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and it was for centuries one of the tallest structures made by anybody in the world his purpose it was a beacon guiding people as Darkness fell into a place of safety and of learning and in the same way these far-offs lectures serve as a beacon and an invitation to learning in a darkening age they're an ongoing series of free public lectures and conversations delivered by the most distinguished public intellectuals here in our own beautiful sheldonian theater the series was inaugurated in February this year with Lord Samson's lecture on the new round heads politics and the misuse of History and tonight's virus lecture will be delivered by Professor Richard Dawkins on science The Poetry of reality Jewel inhumanity's Crown Richard was born in Nairobi and is a world-renowned evolutionary biologist he's the best-selling author of 18 books the star of multiple scientific documentaries and perhaps the world's most articulate atheist he's a fellow of both Royal Society and the Royal Society of literature an Emeritus fellow of new college and was professor of public understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. so to name just one of his acclaimed Publications and contributions to science he coined the now ubiquitous term meme when he wrote The Selfish Gene which was published in 1976. Richard and I both worked in Oxford's zoology department for many years and I'm sure I'm not the only tutor in biology who experienced countless admissions interviews with anxious and very Earnest teenagers telling us that they had realized they wanted to study biology at University when they read Richard's book The Selfish Gene it did used to get to the point where we would ask and have you read any other biology books apart from the selfish Gene which is I believe it is a huge Testament to your influence that so many of our precious young people are so influenced by what you write and by your Fearless defense of our science may I invite you to come and share with us this afternoon this evening's Forest lecture which you have entitled science The Poetry of reality Jewel inhumanity's Crown thank you Richard [Applause] you could give Aristotle a tutorial and thrilled him to the core of his being Aristotle was one of the great intellects of all time yet not only can you know more than Aristotle you can have a deeper more penetrating more comprehensive understanding such as the privilege of living after Newton Darwin Einstein and Planck 25 years ago that's how I began my BBC Richard dimbleby Memorial lecture I wasn't belittling Aristotle's genius today he could walk into a seminar on philosophy or ethics no problem but not science is another matter this is because science advances cumulatively advances is a huge understatement Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great today any a-level science student could tutor Aristotle no the brain is not for cooling the blood it's what he used to do with your philosophy your logic and your metaphysics your rhetoric and your ethics is what you use to think about your material cause your formal efficient and final causes your loves and your hates your thoughts and your dreams they're all emergent consequences of nerve impulses chattering away like machine guns inside your skull your brain contains about 86 billion data handling units neurons neurons are linked by sophisticated logic gates synapses on average about 7 000 per neuron so that's about 600 trillion logic gates if pulses were clicks the cacophony inside your skull would be a raw of four quadrillion clicks per second you could make Aristotle gasp in astonishment if you're a physicist you might explain ligo the detection of gravitational waves that shake space-time except that you'd first have to go back and explain Einstein and before that you would have to two black holes collided space-time shivered and our species detected the reverberations from 1.3 billion light years away this demanded instruments of Staggering Precision mirrors four kilometers apart move through a distance less than the width of a proton and the instruments detected it independently detected it at two observatories three thousand kilometers apart imagine telling Archimedes how his 21st century successors held the Rosetta spacecraft through 6.4 billion kilometers that's about four Myriad myriad stadia here's a small moving Target a specified comet 10-year Journey using a calculated series of slingshots around Mars and Earth or show him the smartphone in your pocket imagine his surprise if you phoned him up from the other side of the World Imagine him putting a phone to his ear and hearing it translate in real time from English into Greek actually modern Greek but the point remains very idea of digital data processing would seem wondrous to Aristotle and Archimedes the noisy imperfections of analog signals are wiped clean by the idealized Perfection of digital all or none coding place I would have liked that best of all life itself runs on a single universal digital code quaternary rather than binary but otherwise exactly like computer information hindsight says it had to be so Evolution wouldn't work without the High Fidelity that digital genetics allows today we can read the DNA of any animal of any species in a matter of days or even hours we can compare the DNA recipes that made a rat and you by counting the discrepancies we can estimate how many millions of years separate you and the rat from your shared ancestor wait shared ancestor you mean I share an ancestor with a rat you certainly do she was approximately your 15 million Great's grandmother and she lived about 75 million years ago by the way here's a rather astonishing fact there was a single individual female who was the fork in the road she had two babies two little siblings playing in the dust one Playmate was our ancestor plus that of all monkeys apes and lemurs the other Playmate was the unknowing ancestor of rabbits rats porcupines beavers and capybaras also by the way giant extinct South American rodents imagine a guinea pig the size of a hippopotamus and while we're on surprising facts if you look far enough into the future it must be the case that you a particular individual sitting in this theater will either be the ancestor of everybody or of nobody I'll just leave that with you and hurry on my purpose is not to belittle the Ancients the point is only that science is cumulative if Aristotle had been born in 1800 he might have beaten Darwin to it Archimedes might have given Newton a run for his money the scientist of any age stands on the shoulders of not just Giants as Newton said but lesser shoulders of countless ordinary worker day scientists cumulatively collectively science climbs to where our vision outreaches The Horizon of a lone individual out toward the Event Horizon of the very Cosmos itself and back to the dawn of time and space energy and matter that is science and science is glorious I shall be accused of the sin of scientism the belief that science can answer all questions I plead guilty but with mitigation the accusation often goes with one of deficient poetic imagination that's preposterous I'll give just one quote from the Great Indian physicists subramanian chandrasekhar this shuddering before the beautiful this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in nature persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound this is the accusation of arrogance of claiming to know everything but science is humble has to be we love what we don't know because it gives us something to do here are some of the things we don't know how did Life Begin I wish we knew we know the kind of thing the answer will look like it will be the origin of the first self-replicating molecule it wasn't DNA DNA is a high-tech replicator it must have had a forerunner a proto-replicator which did more amateurishly what DNA does professionally we don't know how subjective Consciousness evolved in brains in this case we don't even know the kind of thing an answer might even look like we don't know whether it will come from biology alone or whether as I suspect from biology Plus Engineering and computer science we know when the universe began about 13.8 billion years ago we don't know how or why it happened nor whether when meant anything before it happened we don't know why a handful of fundamental physical constants have the values that they are measured to have physicists would dearly love to find The Theory of Everything which eluded Einstein to the end the Holy Grail that unites relativity with quantum theory how can we interpret the ultra weird yet experimentally unimpeachable results of quantum theory by unimpeachable I mean predictions experimentally fulfilled to so many decimal places it's equivalent in Richard feynman's words to specifying the width of North America to one hairs breath such prodigious accuracy indicates that the common sense-defying assumptions of quantum mechanics must in some sense be true but in what sense is shreddinger's cat neither alive nor dead until the box is opened that seems ridiculous which was the point of shreddinger's joke is the cat alive in some universes them dead in others or should we as Richard Feynman advised just shut up and calculate I love the New Yorker cartoon where a Veterinary nurse is breaking the news to a pet owner about your cat Mr Schrodinger I have good news and bad news there is much that science doesn't know but there's also a plenty that we do know and let's not be shy of proclaiming it philosophers of science love to say that present scientific knowledge is only an unfalsified approximation to a deeper truth but have you noticed how often they rely on a single hackneyed example Newtonian gravity as a workable approximation to general relativity how many other examples fit the pattern in my own field of evolutionary biology we have facts which are not just temporary unfalsified approximations they're just plain true if you trace your great great grandparents and the chimpanzees great great grandparents back sufficiently far you'll hit a common ancestor that's not an approximation it's a simple fact imagine you're standing in Oxford holding the hand of your mother he holds the hand of her mother your grandmother your grandmother holds the hand of your great-grandmother and so on in a chain the chain extends into Cornwall until it hits Land's End and can go no further somewhere around cirencester the handholders would be Homo erectus by taunt and they look like Lucy Australopithecus and standing on the rocks of Land's End would be the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees now with our other hand the matriarch of Land's End grips the hand of a different daughter that daughter holds the hand of her daughter and so on parallel chain now wins its way along the road back up to Oxford the two chains of increasingly distant cousins face each other along the way and by the time the chain of daughters reaches Oxford we have modern chimpanzees face to face with modern humans these modern cousins facing each other belong of course in completely different species they cannot interbreed yet every step of the way along the chain of ancestors Round The Hairpin Bend at Land's End and back to Oxford every individual is the same species as her neighbor there is gradual change so gradual as to be far below the threshold of perception I once had a puzzled letter from a lawyer he brought the full weight of his legal Acumen to bear on the following nice point if species a evolves into species B he reasoned closely there must come a point where a parent belonging to the old species a gives birth to a child belonging to the new species B members of different species cannot by definition be interbreed with one another you can't expect children to be so different from their parents as to be incapable of interbreeding with their kind I put it to you he wound up wagging his metaphorical finger in the special way of barristers this is a fatal flaw in the theory of evolution that lawyer needs to take a long walk from Oxford to Land's End while thinking about it his error is an egregious example of what I've called the tyranny of the discontinuous Mind the very worst sort of essentialism tyranny of the discontinuous Mind hits us every day how many families live below the poverty line what line wealth or poverty is continuously distributed you can move the line at will along the continuum here in Oxford we do it every year in our final examination exam marks are continuously distributed a bell-shaped distribution examiners conscientiously double Mark or even triple Mark they meticulously add up the marks but then they throw away almost all that information forcing candidates into four discrete bins first two one two two third yet every examiner knows the top of one class is far closer to the bottom of the class above than it is to the bottom of its own class tyranny of the discontinuous Mind when in embryonic development does personhood begin it doesn't begin once again it's a continuum Ernst Meyer blamed Plato for the surprising fact that a theory as blindingly simple yet massively powerful as Darwin's had to wait till the mid-19th century before anyone thought of it Plato the geometer saw a circle or a right triangle as a messy approximations to Ideal forms hanging pristine in a Never Never Land of abstract perfection if you think a rabbit or a rhino is a messy approximation to an ideal rabbit or ideal Rhino the possibility of evolutionary change will not cross your mind I suspect there are other reasons why Humanity took so long to Tumble to evolution but platonic essentialism is certainly what misled my lawyer correspondent the tyranny of the discontinuous Mind oddly enough if you ask me as a biologist for one really good example where the discontinuous mind gets it right I'd have to say sex the male female divide really is as binary as you're ever going to get young versus old short versus tall thin versus fat almost everything is a smooth Continuum but female of us as male really is a true binary I pleaded guilty to the sin of scientism but with mitigated circumstances scientism in the strong pejorative sense thinks science can answer every question of course it can't it doesn't try science is not in the business of telling whether karayan or Schulte was the better conductor that's personal preference nor can science tell right from wrong good from Evil we must decide on other grounds science cannot tell you that it's wrong to inflict pain on sentient beings but if you decide on other grounds that inflicting pain is wrong science can help you decide what is likely to be painful and which beings are likely to be sentient as an evolutionist I could even offer a moral argument which you might find surprising we tend to think intelligent species are more able to suffer and more entitled to moral consideration but if we ask the darwinian question what is pain for it can lead to the opposite conclusion pain is a warning don't do that again this time your action led to pain next time it might kill you but why does it have to be so damn painful why not just raise a little red flag in the brain saying don't do that again it's a difficult question which I won't take time to answer here but now here's the Paradox an unintelligent species should need pain to be more painful in order to drive home the lesson don't do that again so perhaps we have our morality these are the other species upside down and it is a scientific argument that led us to that ethical conclusion the other territory over which scientism is accused of trampling is fundamental questions of existence what's it all for why is there something rather than nothing why are there these laws of physics rather than other laws that one could imagine or that one could not imagine it may be that science can never answer these deep questions but if science can't answer them no other discipline can the Wonder is that we understand as much as we do the human brain evolved as the onboard computer needed to control the behavior of a medium-sized animal built to survive in pleistocene Africa built to pass on its genes by interacting with other medium-sized objects moving far slower than light given this design spec for a utilitarian brain it's a wonder that our species somehow managed to throw up an Einstein a Beethoven a Shakespeare we have no right to presume that our brains will prove capable of yet higher levels of achievement levels that might be within the grasp of other evolved beings in the universe here we approach science fiction and I believe good science fiction can teach us things about science Fred hoyle's black cloud is a gigantic superhuman intelligence which arrives and Parks itself in orbit around the sun eventually Our Heroes get in communication with it they ask it to impart its knowledge one after another two brilliant physicists submit to being instructed and each in turn dies from brain overload the black cloud suspected that there were deep problems which even its giant brain could not comprehend as a biologist by the way I think Fred Hall made a major error at one point the only biologist in the story asks the cloud about the original first member of its kind the cloud replies I would not agree that there ever was a first member at this two senior astronomers exchanged knowing glances oh there we go that's one in the eye for the exploding Universe boys this of course is an in-joke by Fred Hoyle he was the leading proponent of the steady estate theory of continuous creation a universe with no beginning the very phrase Big Bang was sarcastically coined by Hoyle for the theory that rivaled his own and ultimately prevailed but my point is this even if Fred hoyle's steady-state Theory had been right even if the universe had no beginning even if the universe was always there with new galaxies being continuously formed it is not possible that complex life could have always been there complex life could only come into being as a result of a long cumulative process a process of which darwinian evolution is the only example we know something as simple as matter might conceivably spring spontaneously into existence as in the steady state Theory something as complex as a living organism could not that's pretty much what complexity means the human brain is complex it not only is what had to be built cumulatively it evolved to assist survival to hunt antelopes over the ground and tubers under it to find water and shelter for the night and avoid lions and crocodiles the brain was never built to do algebra this alone understands space-time or quantum entanglement it was never built to compose a Requiem Mass or serenade a coin mistress in iambic tetrameters these faculties and many others are emergent properties electronic computers were originally built to do high-speed arithmetic it emerged that without modification they could play chess simulate Vancouver compose a sonnet or complete the unfinished Symphony a brain originally enlarged to assist survival in pleistocene Africa couldn't help generalizing to mathematics philosophy Art and Science for some reason our pleistocene brains turned out emergently capable of calculus and chemistry but that's already an amazing bonus we're not entitled to expect our neural equipment to understand everything we may encounter deep problems that will forever be Beyond us meanwhile that presents a challenge we're going to have a damn good try emboldened by science's track record so far I'm not sure who coined the phrase physics Envy long attributed to Peter medowa it has the Ring of Sir Peter's effortless Patrician wit he was a deadly foe of pretentious obscurantism does physics Envy Drive some academics to language up their writings so they appear more profound than they really are in parkinsonian terms I try to express the pointers dawkins's law of the conservation of difficulty obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity here's a prime example from Felix Qatari fashionable French intellectual we can clearly see that there is no by univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or arcade writing depending on the author and this multi-referential multi-dimensional machinic catalysis the symmetry of scale the transversality the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion all these Dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticized previously I learned that this remarkable quotation and some others I shall mention from Alan Circle and jean-breakman's book fashionable nonsense I think of medowa's own ringing declaration in all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to including those upon which literature has also a proper claim no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief qatari's teacher the celebrated Jacques Lacon in invoked the square root of -1 physics Envy again when he said that the erectile organ is equivalent to the square root of -1 of the signification produced above of the juicers that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier minus one what conceivable connection could that be between the square root of -1 and the erectile organ the only people I can imagine being impressed would be those in Meadows words again with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought physics Envy can spill over into active hostility to physics and science generally Barbara aaronreich and Janet McIntosh quote the following disturbing story a social psychologist called Phoebe Ellsworth was speaking at an interdisciplinary seminar on emotions and she mentioned the word experiment immediately hands shot up the experimental method was the brainchild of white males Ellsworth bent over backwards to admit that white male scientists have their faults but she contrary but she credited them with for example discovering the structure of DNA this elicited the withering retort you believe in DNA science has been tarred as a tool of patriarchal power physics is masculine controlling dominating the postmodern literary critic Catherine Hales expounds the philosopher loose irigaray's explanation for why the for why turbulent flow is difficult to analyze quote whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids from this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive a successful model for turbulence the problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids and women have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders I'm fond of metaphors I suppose I've perpetrated a few in my time in my book titles but it's possible to get unproductively drunk on metaphor metaphors must do genuine explanatory work they're not ends in themselves the same goes for colorful personification it can be usefully productive I once heard the great French molecular biologist Jack mono say he sometimes solved chemical Problems by asking himself if I were an electron what would I do at this point I'm one of those like the late WD Hamilton who works through evolutionary conundrums by asking if I were a gene what would I do at this point to increase my representation in future Generations you'll get the right answer in your calculations if you think like that and of course we don't really believe Regina's a little Gremlin doing calculations in his little head physicists sometimes take helpful shortcuts by imagining that a particle or body is striving to minimize some quantity the principle of least action helps us understand refraction for instance those are helpful metaphors the sexual dichotomy of stiff versus fluid is a useless metaphor which does not help to illuminate the problem of fluid dynamics doesn't help one tiny little bit nor does Sandra Harding calling Newton's mechanics a rape manual she gets there via deconstructing Francis Bacon bacon was making the point that mere observation of nature is not enough you have to intervene experimentally and repeat your experimental interventions here's what bacon said for you have but to Hound nature in her wanderings and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again neither ottoman to make scruple of entering and penetrating into those holes and Corners when the Inquisition of Truth is his whole object today's readers familiar with Freud more than the nuances of 17th century English can get a sexual innuendo from Bacon's words but to accuse bacon of saying nature is rapable as Harding does is a stretch to say the least and when she generalizes the point to Newton I can only quote her and stand back speechless in that case why is it not as Illuminating and honest and honest to refer to Newton's Laws as Newton's rape manual as it is to call them Newton's mechanics be fair to Hardy she did later regret those words oh well many of us have said things we later regret but unfortunately her kind of thinking is influential I quote the moving lament of the historian and philosopher of science naresha kurtka quote instead of exhorting young women to prepare for a variety of technical subjects by studying science logic and Mathematics women's studies students are now being taught that logic is a tool of domination the standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are incompatible with women's ways of knowing the authors of the prize-winning book with that title report that the majority of the women they interviewed fell into the category of subjective knowers characterized by a passionate rejection of Science and scientists these subjectivist women see the methods of logic analysis and abstraction as alien territory belonging to men and value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth Stephen Pinker has this to say in the same vein among the claims of difference feminists are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate that they do not argue from General moral principles and other insults insults is exactly right such patronizing insults to women form of sexism and cultural relativism perpetrates parallel insults which could fairly be called racism here's an example from astrobiology the search for extraterrestrial life an exciting field of science first and background evidence for extraterrestrial science will come if at all via radio Transmissions from the aliens themselves alien life capable of transmitting radio information must belong to a small subset that has developed an advanced technology it must not just be life but intelligent life but recently Lawrence Krauss reports some younger astrobiologists want to decolonize the science of astrobiology they object to the use of the word intelligence intelligence they say is a white construct patronizing is inadequate to describe this insult it is downright racist I recently returned from New Zealand where I became embroiled in an ongoing dispute Jacinda ardern's government implemented a Science Education policy which originated in the department of the present prime minister Chris Hipkins when he was minister of Education they announced that mataranga Maori Maori ways of knowing shall be taught in science classes and give an equal standard with what they call Western science belongs elsewhere in the curriculum in history classes anthropology religious studies perhaps but not in science classes and certainly not given equal standing with so-called Western science the very phrase Western science is uncalled for science is just science and it belongs to all Humanity the New Zealand government contrasts it with indigenous ways of knowing this contrast is all of a piece with the council or relativist notion that Western science is a tribal myth like any other evolutionary biology and big bang cosmology are just the origin myths of white men having no more standing than the indigenous myths of the Maori in New Zealand or indeed any other indigenous peoples and that immediately gives the light of the claim of the New Zealand government if indigenous Maori science is indeed true science then it must be true all over the universe there cannot be important scientific facts that are true in New Zealand and not elsewhere science I declined to call it Western science science should be seen as clearly Superior to indigenous ways of knowing for two reasons first it works it flies to Pluto predicts eclipses to the nearest Second predicts experimental results to eye watering significant numbers of significant figures eradicate smallpox decodes the Genome of any animal you wish puts you in instant communication with anybody on Earth has almost certainly saved your life second science has a methodology explicitly designed to guard against self-deception against being misled by beliefs that are no more than Traditions handed down or no more than private internal feelings to guard against subjectivism in other words indigenous ways of knowing and women's ways of knowing are prime examples of subjectivism one of the best safeguards against subjectivism is the double-blind control trial suppose they want to know whether a new drug works against hypertension high blood pressure half the patients get the drug and half get the control blood pressure measurements are notoriously erratic they vary with time of day mood recent activity patient anxiety levels and many other things if a patient knows whether he's been given the drug or the control this could influence his anxiety level and hence his blood pressure and also scientists are only human with the best will in the world it's hard to be sure one is not biased in taking measurements that blood pressure reading should be discarded because the telephone rang and startled the patient on the other hand the machine the measurement itself gave a low reading suppas we don't need to discard it after all you can see how easily the vice of subjectivism can creep in I chose blood pressure because measuring it is notoriously erratic but the principle applies to measurements of all kinds there is only one way to guard against self-deception and only one way to convince the world that you have guarded against self-deception in such experiments and against all subjective biases that way is a double-blind method either the patient nor the nurse who gives the dose or takes the blood pressure measurement literally nobody is allowed to know which patients receive the drug which patients the control everything is anonymized by means of codes locked inaccessibly and only unlocked when the experiment comes to a predetermined end predetermined is important otherwise the experimenter might terminate the experiment when the results seem to be going his way I once jointly conducted for Channel 4 television a double-blind experiment to test the claim of Dowsers water diviners we laid out a matrix of buckets some contain water others the control buckets contain sand the buckets were covered and the dancer's task was to diagnose using their Hazel wand or other preferred instrument which buckets had water we advertise for dancers and got a good response from all over the country we explained the experiment to them and asked whether they accepted the conditions they had a practice run with the buckets uncovered to make sure their wands were working yes they were The crucial experiment neither the Dowsers nor iron or the other experimenter were allowed to watch our accomplice as he arranged the buckets according to a random pattern and covered them then the accomplice was sent away so that he couldn't betray by any inadvertent Clues which buckets contained water this was to guard against the clever hands effect clever hands was a German horse who could do arithmetic could set him an addition subtraction multiplication or division sum and hands would wrap out the answer with his hoof properly controlled experiments finally in 1907 explained all hans's owner Wilhelm Von Austin had to be present otherwise hans's mathematical ability vanished in all innocence Von Austin perhaps by tensing his body posture was inadvertently cueing Hans when to stop tapping with his hoof there are Kruger hunts was undoubtedly a very clever horse but mathematician he was not the Dowsers totally failed to secure above to score above chance level they were all extremely surprised even dismayed of their failure all had been convinced beforehand that they would succeed they'd never before been subjected to a double-blind test one woman I was distressed to see actually wept double blinding is an ideal unfortunately it isn't always feasible I imagine a few patients would agree to be a controlled subjected to a dummy operation cut open and simply sewn up again nevertheless a double-blind control trial remains an ideal to make the point science bends over backwards as far as it can to eliminate bias of all kinds and science has many other safeguards you cannot hope to get us the truth about reality if the truth is contaminated by subjective bias and subjective bias is precisely the name of the game when we look at today's influential stirrings of anti-scientific bias such as the belief that a woman is defined not by objective scientific criteria but by the subjective feelings of a person a person may be in possession of a penis but if they choose to declare I am a woman then they are a woman and in Canada at least you might be in trouble if you deny it science is richly armored with safeguards against subjective bias the double-blind truck controlled experiment is just one example lived experience and Indigenous ways of knowing have no safeguards at all worse so-called indigenous ways of knowing frequently appeal to a mystical Supernatural or vitalistic forces mataranga Mari explains everything in terms of a vital essence or Mori which resides in all living things and even in inanimate rocks science has discarded vitalism not because it is provably false but because it doesn't explain anything and gets in the way of real theories that do the nearest approach to a scientist among winners of the Nobel Prize for literature was an avowed vitalist Ari bergson he believed that life was distinguished from non-life by a mysterious vital Julian Huxley satirized this by proposing that her Railway train is propelled by Ella locomotif in 1930 the historian of science Charles singer concluded his book with a piece of pure unadulterated vitalism so egregious yet so representative it's worth quoting further despite interpretations to the contrary the theory of the gene is not a mechanist theory the gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or for that matter the organism itself it exists only as a part of the chromosome and the chromosome only as part of a cell if I ask for a living chromosome that is for the only effective kind of chromosome no one can give it to me except in its living surroundings any more than he can give me a living arm or leg the doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body they exist and function only in relation to other organs thus the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started in the presence of a power called life or psyche which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions Watson and quick blew that out of the water every single one of singer sentences is flat wrong not just factually wrong but deeply wrong in spirit since 1953 all this change changed utterly and a terrible beauty is born this is the beauty of digital coding the crystalline beauty of DNA there's nothing beautiful about an unexplained life force not only is it unexplained it doesn't explain anything either Francis Crick in his autobiography tells how Jim Watson was invited to speak at to an exclusive Cambridge scientific society called the Hardy Club it was accustomed to wine and die in the speaker before in Peter house College Watson had done too well and all he managed to say in conclusion gazing up at the model of DNA was it's so beautiful you see it's so beautiful then of course as Crick said it was children in New Zealand are to be taught the beauty of DNA but at the same time they'll be confusingly told it was all initiated by the sky father and the Earth Mother moreover every living creature and every rock is driven by a vital mysterious essential energy it's Mori what will be the future of Science in the land of Ernest Rutherford perhaps the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday I wonder that aloud to my audience in New Zealand and was warmly applauded except by one woman who yelled in protest she was politely invited to participate in the discussion but chose to walk out instead one could write this New Zealand story off as ditsy harmless absurdity but there is an ugly side to the story and it echoes a species of nastiness that can be seen on all sides today I refer to the puritanical censoriousness of the new round heads as Jonathan sumption called them in the previous lecture of this series seven leading scientists and Scholars including three fellows of the New Zealand Royal Society wrote a joint letter to the listener magazine opposing the government's education policy among them was Professor Garth Cooper one of New Zealand's most distinguished medical scientists himself of Maori descent the tone of their letter could not have been more conciliatory or reasonable but the new round heads broke no compromise their antennae of fine-tuned to the slightest breath of heresy the seven were disowned by the Vice Chancellor of their University of Auckland even as she hypocritically paid lip service to the virtues of free speech the three fellows of the New Zealand Royal Society were threatened with a penal investigation the investigation was dropped but Garth Cooper and Robert NOLA who subsequently died resigned from the Royal Society in protest Dr Kendall Clements was barred from teaching his course on Evolution at Auckland University on the grounds that students felt unsafe being taught by him unsafe who are these cringing little wimps who feel unsafe in the presence of a lecturer's words what on Earth do they think a university is for Puritans to quote the title of Andrew Doyle's book or feeling their oats elsewhere in the world This concerns me especially where it affects science earlier this year the journal trains in ecology and evolution published the recommendations of the ecology and evolutionary biology language project they laid down a list of words and phrases which they want purged from our scientific language these include double blind experiment might be offensive to blind people non-native species offensive to immigrants male female man woman even survival of the fittest offensive to disabled people fruit fly geneticists often need to refer to a previously unmitted females and they commonly call them virgin females virgin 2 is on that pro-scribe list because it is a social construct that reinforces heteropatriarchal norms mother and father are both forbidden words they must be replaced by egg donor and sperm donor respectively sounds horribly like Brave New World the 14 authors of this bowdlerizing project are perhaps too young to have read 1984 either and refer them to Orwell's appendix on Newspeak that grab colorless in human language that Big Brothers Regime was developing to replace old speak what we would call English the language of Shakespeare and Wordsworth Yates and Alden quote the purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world view and mental habits proper to the devotees of ing sock but to make all other modes of thought impossible it was intended that when around the year 2050 Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and old speak forgotten a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable end of quote I have already used the analogy of zealous heresy Hunters burning at the stake is no longer acceptable but isn't there a whiff of smoke in the air today not least in Oxford where two weeks ago a baying mob tried to stop Kathleen's stock making a speech in Defense of Women the theological analogy goes further Catholic Doctrine insists that consecrated wine becomes Divine blood in its whole substance hence the word transubstantiation the wine that remains in the Chalice is but an Aristotelian accidental similarly a person may have a male body and male strength but that is a mere accidental in true Essence she is a woman because she uttered the magic incantation I am a woman the doctrine that trans women are women is nothing less than neo-transubstantiation indeed there's yet a third theological analogy a veritable Trinity the Theology of Paul and Augustine teaches that we're all born in sin the original sin of Adam from which we have to be Redeemed by the blood sacrifice of Jesus even a tiny baby too young to sin is weighed down at Birth with the sin of Adam scientifically literate theologians no longer think Adam existed but his sin lingers on in sermons and Christian theology original sin is loaded on each baby at birth like the burden on the back of banyan's pilgrim as John mcwhirter has observed the post-christian version of original sin is white guilt over slavery and colonialism the moment we are born white we are stained with the sins of our long dead ancestors in the words of Exodus 20 the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the third and fourth generation but only if we are white we are born in sin because of what was done by people whose skin was the same color as ours is that not pure racism historically the benefits of science to humanity need no listing although admittedly when applying for charitable status for a charity that I set up to promote reason and science I was startled when the charity commission asked me to kindly explain how science benefits human welfare I did my best to oblige them I take it there's no need to do so for this audience only one all species has managed to work out why it exists a product of darwinian evolution only one species knows what it is made of atoms belonging to a known list of elements and it knows what atoms are made of up quarks down quarks and electrons only one species knows how to discover such things the scientific method which belongs to all Humanity faint Hearts find it oblique and cold conclusion that we are machines made of atoms living finitely on our Rock spinning around an ordinary star hanging in a vacuum in the suburbs of a galaxy one Galaxy among billions but the universe owes us no comfort and there is a Savage nobility in standing up to face the truth I cannot think of a better way to enjoy our transient brush with reality than to work at understanding it science is the Poetry of reality Zenith of human achievement Jewel in our species Crown thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Pharos Lectures

Views: 39,723

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Id: -I4ZmfAhAx4

Length: 53min 54sec (3234 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023