pratclif.comRICHARD DAWKINS THROWS BACK HIS HEAD AND LAUGHS. HE'S IN THE MIDDLE OF RECOUNTING A CONVERSATION HE HAD RECENTLY WITH ONE OF HIS COLLEAGUES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. WHAT IF, SUGGESTED THE COLLEAGUE, DAWKINS WERE TO ANNOUNCE TO THE WORLD THAT HE HAD SUDDENLY AND MIRACULOUSLY BEEN CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY. INVITATIONS WOULD COME FLOODING IN - TO WRITE BOOKS, TO LECTURE ON THE AMERICAN CONFERENCE CIRCUIT, TO APPEAR ON TV CHAT SHOWS...DAWKINS COULD BECOME A MILLIONAIRE OVERNIGHT.
Of course, it's not going to happen. Dawkins, Oxford University's professor of the public understanding of science has no intention of ever turning to God. Indeed, he has been engaged in a running battle with the religious fraternity for years about where life comes from and how it developed. It's a row which has, at times, almost threatened to overshadow his work in biology, a field in which he has carved out a reputation as an influential thinker and populariser of science, partly on the strength of a series of best-selling books.
Best-known of all of them, perhaps, is his 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, in which Dawkins advances the case for a selfish entity, the gene, that 'works' to preserve and propagate itself. The argument of the book is that the Darwinian theory of evolution via natural selection operates at the level of the gene and not at that of groups, species or even individuals. Besides conducting a running argument with those who insist that God made the world and all its riches, Dawkins has also sparred with fellow biologists. The Blind Watchmaker includes an attack on the 'punctuated equilibrium' theory of American scientists Niles Eldredge and Stephen J Gould. Eldredge and Gould believe that the evolution of a species may stand still for long periods and then change very fast in a short time - hence the phrase 'punctuated equilibrium'. Dawkins has no problem with this but feels that its revolutionary nature has been hugely exaggerated.
In his most recent book Unweaving The Rainbow Dawkins launches a stronger attack on Gould's claims about the 'Cambrian explosion' and its alleged brief and exuberant burst of evolution.
The overnight-evolution theory has been promulgated by Gould's followers, and Dawkins holds Gould to blame. Yet Dawkins has seen many of his own ideas take wings and fly beyond his control, and he even has a theory to account for the phenomenon: he has coined the term 'meme', by analogy with 'gene', to describe a selfish, self-replicating idea, one that survives and evolves through generations.
Dawkins introduced the theory of memes, not as a theory of human culture but 'to make the point that what matters in any theory of Darwinism is self-replicating information.' The human brain provides a new foundation for replication, not, this time, of genes - but of ideas. 'You have, in effect, a new primeval soup. Once you have got that new primeval soup, a new replicator could be the basis of a new Darwinism.'
Would Dawkins describe this reproduction of ideas as 'life'? 'It does not matter how you define life. If on another planet there is Darwinian replication and evolution, that is the interesting thing that I would like to find on another planet, and I think I would probably want to call it life. But if someone else preferred not to, that is their privilege.'
Dawkins has not carried out any laboratory research for several years now and, while such work still has an allure, he says he is too busy explaining and popularising science to really miss it. 'On the whole I am happy doing what I am doing. If you do a good piece of research and you publish a very clever paper it is read by people and cited by them but the actual impact you have on most people's minds is not that great. But I think I have found my level and what I do best. I like to think that I may inspire other people to do the important work of research and maybe even encourage people to come into science'.
I hope that during the 21st century the last vestiges of vitalism will be laid to rest. In practice this will mean that we finally understand what consciousness is and how it works.
Once upon a time people thought there was something special and unique about the chemistry of life. It was called organic chemistry for this reason. Now we understand that organic chemistry is just the chemistry of carbon. An organic substance is straightforwardly organic, whether or not it has any connection with life. Later, living matter was thought to be made of a special and unique material called protoplasm - quivering with throbbing vitality, and greater than the sum of its parts. Nobody speaks of protoplasm any more.
Living stuff is made of molecules like anything else, organized in a complicated way. The principle that drives the organization to become complicated is also now fully understood. This was the great contribution of nineteenth-century biology, in the shape of Charles Darwin. Twentieth-century biology, in the shape of James Watson, Francis Crick and their colleagues, went on to remove the mysticism from the gene. Once again, any idea of a mysterious essence of life was replaced by something rigorously and totally understood, in this case the DNA code which is now about as mysterious as a computer tape.
Consciousness is vitalism's last desperate holdout. Twentieth-century biology still finds it genuinely mysterious, just as nineteenth-century biology found life mysterious. Life is no longer mysterious, and I have every hope that consciousness will go the same way. There are those who feel, along with Daniel Dennett in his book Consciousness Explained, that it is a non-problem. There are times when I think I see the force of this. At other times - when I experience the intense green of a banana frond in bright sunlight, or the smell of onions or the sound of bells, and when I reflect that all of these sensations are produced by trains of nerve impulses in the brain - at such times I see consciousness as a deep riddle that I long to answer, even while I find myself incapable of clearly formulating the nature of the question.
I believe that during the twenty-first century the ancient philosophical mind-body problem will be solved, and solved not by philosophers but by scientists.
Mis à jour le 01/04/2016 pratclif.com