Also by Richard Dawkins

The Selfish Gene

The Extended Phenotype

The Blind Watchmaker

River Out of Eden

Climbing Mount Improbable

Unweaving the Rainbow

A Devil’s Chaplain

The Ancestor’s Tale

The God Delusion

The Greatest Show on Earth

The Magic of Reality (with Dave McKean)

An Appetite for Wonder

Brief Candle in the Dark

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press

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Copyright © Richard Dawkins 2017

Introductory material © Gillian Somerscales 2017
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Author’s introduction

I AM WRITING this two days after a breathtaking visit to Arizona’s Grand Canyon (‘breathtaking’ still hasn’t gone the way of ‘awesome’ although I fear it may). To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, that’s the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion, outclassing the petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world.

In the dark night I walked out along the south rim of the canyon, lay down on a low wall and gazed up at the Milky Way. I was looking back in time, witnessing a scene from a hundred thousand years ago – for that is when the light set out on its long quest to dive through my pupils and spark my retinas. At dawn the following morning I returned to the spot, shuddered with vertigo as I realized where I had been lying in the dark, and looked down towards the canyon’s floor. Again I was gazing into the past, two billion years in this case, back to a time when only microbes stirred sightless beneath the Milky Way. If Hopi souls were sleeping in that majestic hush they were joined by the rockbound ghosts of trilobites and crinoids, brachiopods and belemnites, ammonites, even dinosaurs.

Was there some point in the mile-long evolutionary progression up the canyon’s strata when something you could call a ‘soul’ sprang into existence, like a light suddenly switched on? Or did ‘the soul’ creep stealthily into the world: a dim thousandth of a soul in a pulsating tube-worm, a tenth of a soul in a coelacanth, half a soul in a tarsier, then a typical human soul, eventually a soul on the scale of a Beethoven or a Mandela? Or is it just silly to speak of souls at all?

Not silly if you mean something like an overwhelming sense of subjective, personal identity. Each one of us knows we possess it even if, as many modern thinkers aver, it is an illusion – an illusion constructed, as Darwinians might speculate, because a coherent agency of singular purpose helps us to survive.

Visual illusions such as the Necker Cube—

—or the Penrose Impossible Triangle—

—or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate that the ‘reality’ we see consists of constrained models constructed in the brain. The Necker Cube’s two-dimensional pattern of lines on paper is compatible with two alternative constructions of a three-dimensional cube, and the brain adopts the two models in turn: the alternation is palpable and its frequency can even be measured. The Penrose Triangle’s lines on paper are incompatible with any real-world object. These illusions tease the brain’s model-construction software, thereby revealing its existence.

In the same way, the brain constructs in software the useful illusion of personal identity, an ‘I’ apparently residing just behind the eyes, an ‘agent’ taking decisions by free will, a unitary personality, seeking goals and feeling emotions. The construction of personhood takes place progressively in early childhood, perhaps by the joining up of previously disparate fragments. Some psychological disorders are interpreted as ‘split personality’, failure of the fragments to unite. It’s a not unreasonable speculation that the progressive growth of consciousness in the infant mirrors a similar progression over the longer timescale of evolution. Does a fish, say, have a rudimentary feeling of conscious personhood, on something like the same level as a human baby?

We can speculate on the evolution of the soul, but only if we use the word to mean something like the constructed internal model of a ‘self’. Things are very different if, by ‘soul’, we mean a spook that survives bodily death. Personal identity is an emergent consequence of material brain activity and it must disintegrate, eventually reverting to its pre-birth nothingness, when the brain decays. But there are poetic usages of ‘soul’ and related words that I am unashamed to embrace. In an essay published in my earlier anthology A Devil’s Chaplain, I deployed such words to extol a great teacher, F. W. Sanderson, headmaster of my old school before I was born. Notwithstanding the ever-present risk of misunderstanding, I wrote of the ‘spirit’ and the ‘ghost’ of the dead Sanderson:

I went on to refer to the ‘shade’ of Sanderson, after describing another scene, from my own education, when an inspiring science teacher, Ioan Thomas (who came to the school because he admired Sanderson although he was too young to have met him) dramatically taught us the value of admitting ignorance. He asked us, one by one, a question to which we all wildly guessed answers. Finally, our curiosity aroused, we clamoured (‘Sir! Sir!’) for the true answer. Mr Thomas waited dramatically for silence and then spoke slowly and distinctly, pausing for effect between each word. ‘I don’t know! I … don’t … know!’

Was there a risk that readers of my earlier essay might misunderstand that ‘spirit’ of Sanderson ‘living on’; his benign, ruddy-faced ‘ghost’ beaming; or his ‘shade’ chuckling in the corner? I don’t think so, although, God knows (there we go again), there’s enough eager appetite for misunderstanding out there.

I have to recognize that the same risk, born of the same eagerness, stalks this volume’s title. Science in the Soul. What does it mean?

Let me sidestep before attempting to answer. I think it’s high time the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a scientist. I’m sorry to say the nearest precedent is a very poor example: Henri Bergson, more of a mystic than a true scientist, whose vitalistic élan vital was lampooned in Julian Huxley’s satirical railway train propelled by élan locomotif. But seriously, why not a real scientist for the Literature prize? Although, alas, he is no longer with us to receive it, who would deny that Carl Sagan’s writing is of Nobel literary quality, up there with the great novelists, historians and poets? How about Loren Eiseley? Lewis Thomas? Peter Medawar? Stephen Jay Gould? Jacob Bronowski? D’Arcy Thompson?

Whatever the merits of individual authors whom we might name, isn’t science itself a worthy subject for the best writers, more than capable of inspiring great literature? And whatever the qualities are that make science so – those same qualities that make for great poetry and Nobel-winning novels – don’t we have here a good approach to the meaning of ‘soul’?

‘Spiritual’ is another word that could be used to describe Saganesque literary science. It is widely thought that physicists are more likely to self-identify as religious than biologists. There’s even statistical evidence of this from the Fellows of both the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences. But experience suggests that if you probe these elite scientists further you’ll find that even the 10 per cent who profess some kind of religiosity have, in most cases, no supernatural beliefs, no god, no creator, no aspiration to an afterlife. What they do have – and they’ll say so if pressed – is a ‘spiritual’ awareness. They may be fond of the hackneyed phrase ‘awe and wonder’, and who can blame them? They may quote, as I do in these pages, the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, or the American physicist John Archibald Wheeler:

Einstein himself made it very clear that, though spiritual, he believed in no kind of personal god.

And on another occasion:

Though I wouldn’t use the exact phrase, it is in this sense of a ‘deeply religious nonbeliever’ that I consider myself a ‘spiritual’ person, and it is in this sense that I unapologetically use ‘soul’ in the title of this book.

Science is both wonderful and necessary. Wonderful for the soul – in contemplation, say, of deep space and deep time from the rim of the Grand Canyon. But also necessary: for society, for our well-being, for our short-term and long-term future. And both aspects are represented in this anthology.

I’ve been a science educator all my adult life, and most of the essays collected here stem from the years when I was the inaugural Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. When promoting science, I’ve long been an advocate of what I call the Carl Sagan school of thought: the visionary, poetic side of science, science to stir the imagination, as opposed to the ‘non-stick frying pan’ school of thought. By the latter I mean the tendency to justify the expense of, for example, space exploration by reference to spin-offs such as the non-stick frying pan – a tendency I have compared to an attempt to justify music as good exercise for the violinist’s right arm. It’s cheap and demeaning, and I suppose my satirical description could be accused of exaggerating the cheapness. But I still use it to express my preference for the romance of science. To justify space exploration I would rather invoke what Arthur C. Clarke extolled and John Wyndham named as ‘the outward urge’, the modern version of the urge that drove Magellan, Columbus and Vasco da Gama to exploring the unknown. But yes, ‘non-stick frying pan’ is unfairly demeaning to the school of thought that it labels in my shorthand; and it is to the serious, practical value of science in our society that I now turn, for that is what many of the essays in this book are about. Science really matters for life – and by ‘science’ I mean not just scientific facts, but the scientific way of thinking.

I write this in November 2016, bleak month in a bleak year when the phrase ‘barbarians at the gates’ tempts without irony. Within the gates, rather, for the calamities that have struck the two most populous nations in the English-speaking world in 2016 are self-inflicted: wounds dealt not by an earthquake or a military coup d’état but by the democratic process itself. More than ever, reason needs to take centre stage.

Far be it from me to devalue emotion – I love music, literature, poetry and the warmth, both mental and physical, of human affection – but emotion should know its place. Political decisions, decisions of state, policies for the future, should flow from clear-thinking, rational consideration of all the options, the evidence bearing upon them, and their likely consequences. Gut feelings, even when they don’t arise from the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. For some time now, such murky emotions have remained largely under the surface. But in 2016 political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic brought them into the open, made them, if not respectable, at least freely expressed. Demagogues led by example and proclaimed open season for prejudices which had for half a century been shamed into hole-in-corner secrecy.

Whatever may be the innermost feelings of individual scientists, science itself works by rigorous adherence to objective values. There is objective truth out there and it is our business to find it. Science has in place disciplined precautions against personal bias, confirmation bias, prejudgement of issues before the facts are in. Experiments are repeated, double-blind trials exclude the pardonable desires of scientists to be proved right – and the more laudable bending over backwards to maximize our opportunity to be proved wrong. An experiment done in New York can be replicated by a lab in New Delhi and we expect the conclusion to be the same regardless of geography or the cultural or historic biases of the scientists. Would that other academic disciplines such as theology could say the same. Philosophers happily speak of ‘continental philosophy’ as opposed to ‘analytical philosophy’. Philosophy departments in American or British universities might seek a new appointment to ‘cover the continental tradition’. Can you imagine a science department advertising for a new professor to cover ‘continental chemistry’? Or ‘the Eastern tradition in biology’? The very idea is a bad joke. That says something about the values of science and is not kind to those of philosophy.

Starting with the romance of science and the ‘outward urge’, then, I have moved on to the values of science and the scientific way of thinking. Some might think it strange to leave the practical usefulness of scientific knowledge till last, but that ordering does reflect my personal priorities. Certainly such medical boons as vaccination, antibiotics and anaesthetics are hugely important, and they are too well known to need rehearsing here. The same goes for climate change (dire warnings there may already be too late) and the Darwinian evolution of antibiotic resistance. But I will pick out for attention here one further warning, less immediate and less well known. It neatly joins the three themes of outward urge, scientific usefulness and the scientific way of thinking. I refer to the inevitable, though not necessarily imminent, danger of a catastrophic collision with a large extraterrestrial object, most likely displaced from the asteroid belt by the gravitational influence of Jupiter.

The dinosaurs, with the notable exception of birds, were wiped out by a massive bolt from space, of a kind which, sooner or later, will strike again. The circumstantial evidence is now strong that a huge meteorite or comet struck the Yucatán peninsula some sixty-six million years ago. The mass of this object (as large as a substantial mountain) and its velocity (perhaps 40,000 miles per hour) would on impact have generated energy equivalent, according to plausible estimates, to several billion Hiroshima bombs exploding together. The scorching temperature and prodigious blast of that initial impact would have been followed by a prolonged ‘nuclear winter’, lasting perhaps a decade. Together these events killed all the non-bird dinosaurs, plus pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, ammonites, most fish and many other creatures. Fortunately for us a few mammals survived, perhaps protected because they were hibernating in their equivalent of underground bunkers.

A catastrophe on the same scale will threaten again. Nobody knows when, for they strike at random. There is no sense in which they get more likely as the interval between them gets longer. It could happen in our lifetime, but that’s unlikely because the average interval between such mega-impacts is of the order of a hundred million years. Smaller – but still dangerous – asteroids, large enough to destroy a city like Hiroshima, hit the Earth about once every century or two. The reason we don’t fret about them is that most of our planet’s surface is uninhabited. And again, of course, they don’t strike regularly such that you can look at the calendar and say: ‘We’re about due for another one.’

For advice and information on these matters I am indebted to the famous astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who has become the most high-profile advocate of taking the risk seriously and trying to do something about it. What can we do about it? What could the dinosaurs have done if they’d had telescopes, engineers and mathematicians?

The first task is to detect an incoming projectile. ‘Incoming’ gives a misleading impression of the nature of the problem. These are not speeding bullets heading straight towards us and looming up as they approach. The Earth and the projectile are both in elliptical orbits around the sun. Having detected an asteroid, we need to measure its orbit – which we can do with increasing accuracy the more readings we take into account – and calculate whether at some date, perhaps decades ahead, a future cycle of the asteroid’s orbit will coincide with a future cycle of our own. Once an asteroid is detected and its orbit accurately plotted, the rest is mathematics.

The moon’s pockmarked face presents a disquieting image of the ravages we are spared because of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. The statistical distribution of moon craters of various diameters gives us a reading of what’s out there, a baseline against which to compare our meagre success in spotting projectiles ahead of time.

The larger the asteroid, the easier it is to detect. Since small ones – including city-destroying ‘small’ ones – are hard to detect in the first place, it is entirely possible that we might get very little warning, or none at all. We need to improve our ability to detect asteroids. And that means increasing the number of wide-field watchdog telescopes looking for them, including infra-red telescopes in orbit beyond the reach of distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.

Having identified a dangerous asteroid whose orbit threatens eventually to intersect with ours, what do we do then? We need to change its orbit, either by speeding it up so it goes into a larger orbit and therefore arrives at the rendezvous too late to collide, or slowing it down so its orbit contracts and it arrives too early. Surprisingly, a very small change in velocity will suffice, in either direction: as little as 0.025 miles per hour. Without even resorting to high explosives, this can be achieved using existing – though expensive – technologies, technologies not unrelated to the spectacular achievement of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to land a spacecraft on a comet, twelve years after its launch in 2004. You see what I meant when I spoke of uniting the ‘outward urge’ of the imagination with the sober practicalities of useful science and the rigour of the scientific way of thinking? And this detailed example illustrates another feature of the scientific way of thinking, another virtue of what we might call the soul of science. Who but a scientist would accurately predict the exact moment of a worldwide catastrophe a hundred thousand years in the future and formulate a high-precision plan to prevent it?

Despite the timespan over which these essays were written, I find little that I would change today. I could have deleted all reference to the dates of original publication but I chose not to. A few of these pieces are speeches made on particular occasions, for example in opening an exhibition or eulogizing a dead person. I have left them untouched, as they were originally spoken. They retain their intrinsic immediacy, which would be lost were I to edit out all contemporary allusions. I have confined updatings to footnotes and afterwords – brief additions and reflections that could perhaps be read alongside the main texts as a dialogue between me today and the author of the original article. To facilitate such a reading, the footnotes have been set in larger type than is customary for academic footnotes or endnotes.

Gillian Somerscales and I have selected forty-one of my essays, speeches and journalistic writings and grouped them into eight sections. In addition to science itself, they include my reflections on the values of science, the history of science and the role of science in society; some polemics, a little gentle crystal-ball gazing, some satire and humour, and some personal sadnesses which I hope stop short of self-indulgence. Each section begins with Gillian’s own sensitive introduction. For me to add to these would be superfluous but I have, as explained above, added my own footnotes and afterwords.

When we were debating various titles for this book, Science in (or for) the Soul was the front-runner, tentatively favoured by both Gillian and me over a large field of competitors. I’m not known for my faith in omens, but I have to admit that what finally swung me was the rediscovery, while cataloguing my library in August 2016, of a delightful little book by Michael Shermer. Called The Soul of Science, it was dedicated ‘To Richard Dawkins, for giving science its soul’. The serendipity was almost as great as the pleasure, and neither Gillian nor I had any further doubts as to what we should call this book.

My gratitude to Gillian herself is unbounded. In addition I would like to thank Susanna Wadeson of Transworld and Hilary Redmon of Penguin Random House USA for their enthusiastic belief in the project and for their helpful suggestions. Miranda Hale’s internet expertise helped Gillian track down forgotten essays. It’s in the nature of an anthology whose entries span many years that debts of gratitude span the same years. They were acknowledged in the original articles. I hope it will be understood that I cannot repeat them all here. The same applies to bibliographic citations. Readers interested in following them can look them up in the original articles, full details of which are given in the list at the back of the book.

Editor’s introduction

RICHARD DAWKINS HAS always defied categorization. One eminent biologist of mathematical bent reviewing The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype was startled to find scientific work apparently free of logical errors and yet containing not a single line of mathematics; he could come to no other conclusion than that, incomprehensible as it seemed to him, ‘Dawkins … apparently thinks in prose’.

Thank goodness he does. For had he not thought in prose – taught in prose, reflected in prose, wondered in prose, argued in prose – we should not have the exhilarating range of work produced by this most versatile of scientist communicators. Not just his thirteen books, whose qualities I need not rehearse here, but the embarras de richesses of shorter writing on many different platforms – daily newspapers and scientific journals, lecture halls and online salons, periodicals and polemics, reviews and retrospectives – from which he and I have distilled this collection. It includes alongside much recent work some vintage earlier pieces, mining the rich seams laid down both before and after publication of his first anthology, A Devil’s Chaplain.

Given his reputation as a controversialist, it seems to me all the more important to pay due attention to Richard Dawkins’ work as a maker of connections, tirelessly throwing word-bridges across the chasm between scientific discourse and the broadest range of public debates. I see him as an egalitarian elitist, dedicated to making complex science not just accessible but intelligible – and without ‘dumbing down’, with a constant insistence on clarity and accuracy, using language as a precision tool, a surgical instrument.

If he also uses language as a rapier, and sometimes a bludgeon, it is to puncture obfuscation and pretension, sweep distraction and muddle out of the way. He has a horror of the fake, whether it be false belief, science, politics or emotion. As I read and reread the candidate pieces for inclusion in this volume, I conceived of a group I called the ‘darts’: short, pointed pieces, sometimes funny, sometimes blazingly angry, sometimes heartbreakingly poignant or breathtakingly impolite. I was tempted to present a selection of these as a group of their own, but on reflection chose instead to situate a few of them among the longer, more reflective and sustained essays, both better to convey the range of writing overall and to offer the reader immediate experience of the changes of pace and tone that epitomize the buzz of reading Dawkins.

There are extremities here of delight and derision; anger, too – but never at what is said against himself, always at the harm done to others: especially children, non-human animals and people oppressed for contravening the dictates of authority. That anger, and the sadness that drifts behind it for all that is damaged and lost, are for me reminders – and I stress the perception is mine, not Richard’s – of the tragic aspect of his writing and speaking life since The Selfish Gene. If ‘tragic’ seems too strong a word, consider this. In that first explosive book he explained how evolution by natural selection proceeds through a logic that expresses itself in relentlessly self-seeking behaviour on the part of the tiny replicators by which living beings are constructed. He then pointed out that humans alone have the power to overcome the dictates of our selfish replicating molecules, to take ourselves and the world in hand, to conceive of the future and then influence it. We are the first species able to be unselfish. That’s some clarion call. And here’s the tragedy: instead of being able thereafter to devote his manifold talents to exhorting humanity to use the precious attribute of consciousness and the ever-increasing insights of science and reason to rise above the selfish drives of our evolutionary programming, he’s had to divert much of that energy and skill to persuading people to accept the truth of evolution at all. A grim job, perhaps, but someone’s got to do it: for, as he says, ‘nature can’t sue’. And, as he remarks in one of the pieces reproduced here, ‘I have … learned that rigorous commonsense is by no means obvious to much of the world. Indeed, commonsense sometimes requires ceaseless vigilance in its defence.’ Richard Dawkins is not only reason’s prophet; he is our ceaseless watchman.

It’s a shame that so many of the adjectives associated with rigour and clarity – remorseless, ruthless, merciless – are so brutal, when Richard’s principles are shot through and through with compassion, generosity, kindness. Even his criticism, stringent in judgement, is also astringent in wit – as when he refers in a letter to the Prime Minister to ‘Baroness Warsi, your Minister without Portfolio (and without election)’, or ventriloquizes a Blair acolyte promoting his boss’s promotion of religious diversity: ‘We shall support the introduction of Sharia courts, but on a strictly voluntary basis – only for those whose husbands and fathers freely choose it.’

I prefer to use images of clarity: incisiveness, forensic attention to logic and detail, piercing illumination. And I prefer to call his writing athletic rather than muscular – an instrument not just of force and strength but of flexibility, adaptable to pretty much any audience, reader or topic. There aren’t many writers, indeed, who manage to combine power and subtlety, impact and exactitude, with such elegance and humour.

I first worked with Richard Dawkins on The God Delusion, over a decade ago. If readers of what follows here come to appreciate not only the writer’s clarity of thought and facility of expression, the fearlessness with which he confronts very large elephants in very small rooms, the energy with which he devotes himself to explication of the complex and the beautiful in science, but also some of the generosity, kindness and courtesy that have characterized all my dealings with Richard over the years since that first collaboration, then the present volume will have achieved one of its aims.

It will have achieved another if it embodies a condition felicitously described in one of the essays reproduced here, where ‘harmonious parts flourish in the presence of each other, and the illusion of a harmonious whole emerges’. Indeed, it is my belief that the harmony resounding from this collection is no illusion, but the echo of one of the most vibrant, and vital, voices of our times.

....................................................G.S.

WE BEGIN AT the heart of the matter, with science: what it is, what it does, how it is (best) done. Richard’s 1997 Amnesty lecture, ‘The values of science and the science of values’, is a wonderful portmanteau piece, covering a huge amount of ground and trailing several themes developed elsewhere in this collection: the overriding respect of science for objective truth; the moral weight attached to the capacity to suffer, and the dangers of ‘speciesism’; a telling emphasis on key distinctions, as between ‘using rhetoric to bring out what you believe is really there, and using rhetoric knowingly to cover up what is really there’. This is the voice of the scientist communicator, the determined believer in marshalling language to convey truth, not to create an artificial ‘truth’. The very first paragraph makes a careful distinction: the values that underpin science are one thing, a proud and precious set of principles to be defended, for on them depends the perpetuation of our civilization; the attempt to derive values from scientific knowledge is an altogether different and more suspect enterprise. We must have the courage to admit that we start in an ethical vacuum; that we invent our own values.

The writer of this lecture is no fact-bound Gradgrind, no dry bean (or bone) counter. The passages on the aesthetic value of science, the poetic vision of Carl Sagan, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s ‘shuddering before the beautiful’ – these epitomize passionate celebration of the glories, beauties and potentialities of science to bring joy to our lives and hope to our futures.

We then make a change of pace and platform as the register shifts from the extended and reflective to the pithy and pointed: what I like to think of as the Dawkins Dart. Here, with steely courtesy, Richard pursues several points made in his Amnesty lecture in admonishing Britain’s next monarch on the perils of following the lead of ‘inner wisdom’ rather than evidence-based science. Typically, he does not absolve humans from using their judgement in respect of the possibilities offered by science and technology: ‘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 third piece in this section, ‘Science and sensibility’, is another wide-ranging lecture, delivered with a characteristic combination of gravitas and sparkle. Here too we see the messianic enthusiasm for science – tempered by a sober reflection on how far we could have come by the millennium, and the distances we have not covered. Typically, this is conceived as a recipe not for despair but for redoubled effort.

And where did all this unquenchable curiosity, this hunger for knowledge, this campaigning compassion come from? The section closes with ‘Dolittle and Darwin’, an affectionate look back at some of the influences that fed into a child’s education in the values of science – including a lesson in distinguishing core values from their temporary historical and cultural coloration.

Through all these disparate pieces, the key messages reverberate clearly. It’s no good shooting the messenger, no good turning to illusory comforts, no good confusing is with ought or with what you might like to be the case. They are ultimately positive messages: a clear, sustained focus on how things work, coupled with the intelligent imagination of the incurably curious, will yield insights that inform, challenge and stimulate. And so science continues to develop, understanding to grow, knowledge to expand. Taken together, these pieces offer a manifesto for science and a call to arms in its cause.

.....................................................G.S.

The values of science and the science of values^1, fn1

THE VALUES OF science; what does this mean? In a weak sense I shall mean – and shall take a sympathetic view of – the values that scientists might be expected to hold, insofar as these are influenced by their profession. There is also a strong meaning, in which scientific knowledge is used directly to derive values as if from a holy book. Values in this sense I shall stronglyfn2 repudiate. The book of nature may be no worse than a traditional holy book as a source of values to live by, but that isn’t saying much.

The science of values – the other half of my title – means the scientific study of where our values come from. This in itself should be value-free, an academic question, not obviously more contentious than the question of where our bones come from. The conclusion might be that our values owe nothing to our evolutionary history, but that is not the conclusion I shall reach.

The values of science in the weak sense

I doubt that scientists in private are less (or more) likely to cheat their spouses or their tax inspectors than anybody else. But in their professional life scientists do have special reasons for valuing simple truth. The profession is founded on a belief that there is such a thing as objective truth which transcends cultural variety, and that if two scientists ask the same question they should converge upon the same truth regardless of their prior beliefs or cultural background or even, within limits, ability. This is not contradicted by the widely rehearsed philosophical belief that scientists don’t prove truths but advance hypotheses which they fail to disprove. The philosopher may persuade us that our facts are only undisproved theories, but there are some theories we shall bet our shirt on never being disproved, and these are what we ordinarily call true.fn3 Different scientists, widely separated geographically and culturally, will tend to converge upon the same undisproved theories.

This view of the world is poles away from fashionable prattlings like the following:

That way madness lies. I can best exemplify the values of one scientist by saying that, if there comes a time when everybody thinks like that, I shall not wish to go on living. We shall have entered a new Dark Age, albeit not one ‘made more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science’fn6 – because there won’t be any science to pervert.

Yes, Newton’s Law of Gravitation is only an approximation, and maybe Einstein’s General Theory will in due season be superseded. But this does not lower them into the same league as medieval witchcraft or tribal superstition. Newton’s laws are approximations that you can stake your life on, and we regularly do. When it comes to flying, does your cultural relativist bet his life on levitation or physics, Magic Carpet or McDonnell Douglas? It doesn’t matter which culture you were brought up in, Bernoulli’s Principle doesn’t suddenly cease to operate as soon as you enter non-‘Western’ airspace. Or where do you put your money when it comes to predicting an observation? Like a modern Rider Haggard hero you can, as Carl Sagan pointed out, confound the savages of relativism and the New Age by predicting, to the second, a total eclipse of the sun a thousand years ahead.

Carl Sagan died a month ago. I met him once only but I have loved his books and I shall miss him as a ‘candle in the dark’.fn7 I dedicate this lecture to his memory, and shall use quotations from his writings. The remark about predicting eclipses is from the last book he published before he died, The Demon-Haunted World, and he goes on:

Of course, scientists often disagree with each other. But they are proud to agree on what new evidence it would take to change their minds. The route to any discovery will be published and whoever follows the same route should arrive at the same conclusion. If you lie – fiddle your figures, publish only that part of the evidence that supports your preferred conclusion – you will probably be found out. In any case, you won’t get rich doing science, so why do it at all if you undermine the only point of the enterprise by lying? A scientist is much more likely to lie to a spouse or a tax inspector than to a scientific journal.

Admittedly, there are cases of fraud in science, and probably more than come to light. My claim is only that in the scientific community fiddling data is the cardinal sin, unforgivable in a way that is hard to translate into the terms of another profession. An unfortunate consequence of this extreme value judgement is that scientists are exceptionally reluctant to blow the whistle on colleagues whom they may have reason to suspect of fiddling figures. It’s rather like accusing somebody of cannibalism or paedophilia. Suspicions so dark may be suppressed until the evidence becomes too overwhelming to ignore, and by then much damage may have been done. If you fiddle your expense account, your peers will probably indulge you. If you pay a gardener in cash, thereby abetting a tax-dodging black market, you won’t be a social pariah. But a scientist who is caught fiddling research data would. He would be shunned by his colleagues, and without mercy drummed out of the profession for ever.

A barrister who uses eloquence to make the best case he can, even if he doesn’t believe it, even if he selects favourable facts and slants the evidence, would be admired and rewarded for his success.fn8 A scientist who does the same thing, pulling out all the rhetorical stops, twisting and turning every way to win support for a favourite theory, is regarded with at least mild suspicion.

Typically, the values of scientists are such that the charge of advocacy – or, worse, of being a skilled advocate – is a charge that needs to be answered.fn9 But there is an important difference between using rhetoric to bring out what you believe is really there, and using rhetoric knowingly to cover up what is really there. I once spoke in a university debate on evolution. The most effective creationist speech was made by a young woman who happened to be placed next to me at dinner afterwards. When I complimented her on her speech, she immediately told me she hadn’t believed a word of it. She was simply exercising her debating skills by arguing passionately for the exact opposite of what she considered to be true. No doubt she will make a good lawyer. The fact that now it was all I could do to stay polite to my dinner companion may say something about the values that I have acquired as a scientist.

I suppose I am saying that scientists have a scale of values according to which there is something almost sacred about nature’s truth. This may be why some of us get so heated about astrologers, spoonbenders and similar charlatans, whom others indulgently tolerate as harmless entertainers. The law of libel penalizes those who knowingly tell lies about individuals. But you get off scot-free if you make money lying about nature – who can’t sue. My values may be warped, but I’d like nature to be represented in court like an abused child.fn10

The downside to the love of truth is that it may lead scientists to pursue it regardless of unfortunate consequences.fn11 Scientists do bear a heavy responsibility to warn society of those consequences. Einstein acknowledged the danger when he said: ‘If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.’ But of course he wouldn’t really. And when the opportunity came, he signed the famous letter alerting Roosevelt to the possibilities and dangers of the atomic bomb. Some of the hostility meted out to scientists is equivalent to shooting the messenger. If astronomers called our attention to a large asteroid on a collision course for Earth, the final thought of many people before impact would be to blame ‘the scientists’. There is an element of shooting the messenger about our reaction to BSE.fn12 Unlike the asteroid case, here the true blame does belong with humanity. Scientists must bear some of it, along with the economic greed of the agricultural foodstuffs industry.

Carl Sagan remarks that he is often asked whether he believes there is intelligent life out there. He leans towards a cautious yes, but says it with humility and uncertainty.

Mistrust of inner, private revelation is, it seems to me, another of the values fostered by the experience of doing science. Private revelation doesn’t sit well with the textbook ideals of scientific method: testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, and independence of cultural milieu.

There are also values of science which are probably best treated as akin to aesthetic values. Einstein on the subject is sufficiently often quoted so here, instead, is the great Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in a lecture in 1975, when he was sixty-five:

I find this moving in a way that is missing from the skittish dilettantism of Keats’ famous lines:

Going only a little beyond aesthetics, scientists tend to value the long term at the expense of the short; they draw inspiration from the wide open spaces of the cosmos and the grinding slowness of geological time rather than the parochial concerns of humanity. They are especially prone to see things sub specie aeternitatis, even if this puts them at risk of being accused of a bleak, cold, unsympathetic view of humanity.

Carl Sagan’s penultimate book, Pale Blue Dot, is built around the poetic image of our world seen from distant space.

For me the only bleak aspect of the passage I have just read is the human realization that its author is now silenced. Whether the scientific cutting down to size of humanity seems bleak is a matter of attitude. It may be an aspect of scientific values that many of us find such large visions uplifting and exhilarating rather than cold and empty. We also warm to nature as lawful and uncapricious. There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them. The principles that operate here prevail there – and ‘there’ means out to distant galaxies. Charles Darwin, in the famous ‘entangled bank’ passage which ends The Origin of Species, notes that all the complexity of life has ‘been produced by laws acting around us …’ and he goes on:

The sheer time it has taken species to evolve constitutes a favoured argument for their conservation. This in itself involves a value judgement, presumably one congenial to those steeped in the depths of geological time. In a previous work I have quoted Oria Douglas-Hamilton’s harrowing account of an elephant cull in Zimbabwe: