Richard Dawkins - Flights of Fancy

ORNITHOPTER ' BY LEONARDO

A scene that happened only in imagination. But WHAT an imagination!

Do you sometimes dream you can fly like a bird? I do and I love it. Gliding effortlessly above the treetops, soaring and swooping, playing and dodging through the third dimension. Computer games and virtual-reality headsets can loft our imagination and fly us through fabled, magical spaces. But its not the real thing. No wonder some of the pasts greatest minds, not least Leonardo da Vincis, have yearned to join the birds, and designed machines to help them do so. Well come to some of the old designs later. They didnt work, mostly couldnt have worked, but that didnt kill the dream.

Flights of Fancy means, as youd expect, that this is a book about flying all the different ways of defying gravity that have been discovered by humans over the centuries and by other animals over millions of years. But it also includes wandering flights of thought and ideas which take off from thinking about flight itself. Digressions of this kind will be in smaller print, often with the phrase by the way in bold type.

To begin with fancy at its most fanciful, a 2011 Associated Press poll suggested that 77 percent of Americans believe in angels. Muslims are required to believe in them. Roman Catholics traditionally believe that each of us is looked after by our own private guardian angel. Thats a whole lot of wings, beating invisibly and noiselessly around us. According to the legends of The Arabian Nights , if you perched on a magic carpet you had only to wish a destination to be instantly whisked there. The mythical King Solomon had a carpet of shining silk, big enough to carry 40,000 of his men. Atop it he could command the winds, and they blew him where he willed. Greek legend tells of Pegasus, a magnificent white horse with wings, which carried the hero Bellerophon on his mission to slay the Chimera monster. Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad went on a night journey on a flying horse. He hurtled from Mecca to Jerusalem riding the Buraq, a horse-like creature with wings, usually portrayed with a human face like the fabled Greek centaurs. A night journey is something we all experience in our dreams, and some of our dream trips, including flight dreams, are at least as strange as Muhammads.

The legendary Icarus of Greek mythology had wings made of feathers and wax, linked to his arms. Icarus, in his pride, flew too close to the sun. It melted the wax and he tumbled to his death. A nice warning against getting above yourself, although in reality, of course, hed have got colder, not hotter, the higher he flew.

PRIDE GOETH BEFORE DESTRUCTION AND A HAUGHTY SPIRIT BEFORE A FALL '

Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell to his death.

CONAN DOYLE BELIEVED IN FAIRIES

Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Professor Challenger would have fallen for the hoax that fooled their creator. But he was a wonderful writer!

Witches were supposed to whizz through the air on broom-sticks, and Harry Potter has recently joined them. Santa Claus and his reindeer speed from chimney to chimney high above the December snow. Meditating gurus and fakirs fake their claim to hover above the floor in the lotus position. Levitation is a myth popular enough to inspire cartoon jokes, nearly as many as desert island jokes. My favourite, unsurprisingly, is from the New Yorker . Man in street looks at door high up in wall. Label on door: National Levitation Society.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the forensically rational Sherlock Holmes, first among fictional detectives. Another of Doyles characters was the formidable Professor Challenger, a ferociously rational scientist. Doyle evidently admired both, yet he allowed himself to be fooled by a childish hoax in a way his two heroes would have scorned. Literally childish, for he was gulled by a pair of playful children who made trick photographs of winged fairies. Two cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, cut out pictures of fairies from a book, stuck them on cardboard, hung them up in the garden and photographed each other hanging out with them. Doyle was only the most famous of many people fooled by the Cottingley Fairies hoax. He even wrote a whole book, The Coming of the Fairies , pushing his strong belief in those little winged people flitting like butterflies from flower to flower.