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Dawkins Richard - Science in the soul selected writings of a passionate rationalist

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In 1976 Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene caused a seismic shift in our understanding of biology by proffering the gene-centered view of evolution and was called The best work of popular science ever written by the New York Review of Books. Then in 2006, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, transforming the worlds cultural and intellectual landscape once again with this takedown of religious faith. In this carefully curated collection of forty-two pieces of his shorter work, Dawkins focuses on what science is and how it is done, the inexhaustible wonders of nature, the importance of critical thinking, and the great minds who have changed his life--including Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Christopher Hitchens. The clarity of thought, felicity of expression, serious engagement and sober confidence in rationality that have made so many of his books bestsellers are on full display in these essays, showing Dawkins, again, to be an ingenious maker of connections and the fearless assassin of sacred cows

The legendary biologist, provocateur, and bestselling author mounts a timely and passionate defense of science and clear thinking with this career-spanning collection of essays, including twenty pieces published in the United States for the first time. For decades, Richard Dawkins has been the worlds most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans--all written with Dawkinss characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world. Though it spans three decades, this book couldnt be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they dont represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers. Dawkins has equal ardor for the sacred truth of nature and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles--whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution. At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy--a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation--and celebrates science as possessing many of religions virtues--explanation, consolation, and uplift--without its detriments of superstition and prejudice. In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author. Advance praise for Science in the Soul The illumination of Richard Dawkinss incisive thinking on the intellectual world extends far beyond biology. What a treat to see so clearly how matter and meaning fit together, from fiction to philosophy to molecular biology, in one unified vision!--Daniel C. Dennett, author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: Th ... Read more...
Abstract: In 1976 Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene caused a seismic shift in our understanding of biology by proffering the gene-centered view of evolution and was called The best work of popular science ever written by the New York Review of Books. Then in 2006, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, transforming the worlds cultural and intellectual landscape once again with this takedown of religious faith. In this carefully curated collection of forty-two pieces of his shorter work, Dawkins focuses on what science is and how it is done, the inexhaustible wonders of nature, the importance of critical thinking, and the great minds who have changed his life--including Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, and Christopher Hitchens. The clarity of thought, felicity of expression, serious engagement and sober confidence in rationality that have made so many of his books bestsellers are on full display in these essays, showing Dawkins, again, to be an ingenious maker of connections and the fearless assassin of sacred cows

The legendary biologist, provocateur, and bestselling author mounts a timely and passionate defense of science and clear thinking with this career-spanning collection of essays, including twenty pieces published in the United States for the first time. For decades, Richard Dawkins has been the worlds most brilliant scientific communicator, consistently illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. Science in the Soul brings together forty-two essays, polemics, and paeans--all written with Dawkinss characteristic erudition, remorseless wit, and unjaded awe of the natural world. Though it spans three decades, this book couldnt be more timely or more urgent. Elected officials have opened the floodgates to prejudices that have for half a century been unacceptable or at least undercover. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings, even when they dont represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice, should stay out of the voting booth. And in the essays themselves, newly annotated by the author, he investigates a number of issues, including the importance of empirical evidence, and decries bad science, religion in the schools, and climate-change deniers. Dawkins has equal ardor for the sacred truth of nature and renders here with typical virtuosity the glories and complexities of the natural world. Woven into an exploration of the vastness of geological time, for instance, is the peculiar history of the giant tortoises and the sea turtles--whose journeys between water and land tell us a deeper story about evolution. At this moment, when so many highly placed people still question the fact of evolution, Dawkins asks what Darwin would make of his own legacy--a mixture of exhilaration and exasperation--and celebrates science as possessing many of religions virtues--explanation, consolation, and uplift--without its detriments of superstition and prejudice. In a world grown irrational and hostile to facts, Science in the Soul is an essential collection by an indispensable author. Advance praise for Science in the Soul The illumination of Richard Dawkinss incisive thinking on the intellectual world extends far beyond biology. What a treat to see so clearly how matter and meaning fit together, from fiction to philosophy to molecular biology, in one unified vision!--Daniel C. Dennett, author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: Th

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Copyright 2017 by Richard Dawkins Introductory material copyright 2017 by Gi - photo 1
Copyright 2017 by Richard Dawkins Introductory material copyright 2017 by - photo 2Copyright 2017 by Richard Dawkins Introductory material copyright 2017 by - photo 3

Copyright 2017 by Richard Dawkins

Introductory material copyright 2017 by Gillian Somerscales

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Published in the United Kingdom by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a Penguin Random House UK company.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

HarperCollins Publishers: Net Gain by Richard Dawkins from How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? edited by John Brockman, copyright 2014 by Ed Foundation, Inc.; Essentialism by Richard Dawkins from This Idea Must Die, edited by John Brockman, copyright 2014 by Ed Foundation, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Intelligent Aliens by Richard Dawkins from Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by John Brockman, copyright 2006 by John Brockman. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN- P UBLICATION D ATA

Names: Dawkins, Richard, author. | Somerscales, Gillian, editor. Title: Science in the soul : selected writings of a passionate rationalist / Richard Dawkins ; edited by Gillian Somerscales.

Description: New York : Random House, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025118| ISBN 9780399592249 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399592256 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: SciencePhilosophy. | BISAC: SCIENCE / Essays. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution. | SCIENCE / Philosophy & Social Aspects.

Classification: LCC Q175 .D325 2017 | DDC 500dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025118

Ebook ISBN9780399592256

randomhousebooks.com

Cover design: Jamie Keenan

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Contents
Authors introduction

I AM WRITING THIS two days after a breathtaking visit to Arizonas Grand Canyon (breathtaking still hasnt 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, thats 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 canyons 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 canyons 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 - photo 4or the Penrose Impossible Triangle or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate - photo 5

or the Penrose Impossible Triangle

or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate that the reality we see consists of - photo 6or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate that the reality we see consists of - photo 7

or the Hollow Mask illusion demonstrate that the reality we see consists of constrained models constructed in the brain. The Necker Cubes 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 Triangles lines on paper are incompatible with any real-world object. These illusions tease the brains 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. Its 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 Devils 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:

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