In Defence of Dawkins

I must say I don’t understand why some people choose to follow Richard Dawkins on Twitter.  He is an outstanding academic and a clearly brilliant man, who thinks hard and asks question designed to encourage more thinking, yet most of his followers simply half read his questions and reply with the first thing that enters their heads.  That’s not how it works!  You need to answer with the tenth thing that you think of, after the previous nine have been considered and dismissed as flawed.

Yesterday Professor Dawkins posted the factually accurate information, that Trinity College Cambridge has more Nobel laureates that the entire Muslim world.  This seems to have caused quite a storm, especially amongst the hard of thinking or those who just operate on their preconceptions.

It is of course possible to quote facts in a manner intended to support bigotry, to use them as an attack.  He has been accused of racism, even though as Professor Dawkins points out, Islam is not a race.  However, in defence of his critics, the history of the persecution of the Jews has often referred to the Jewish race, even though there is no such thing, so our language and our culture has previous when it comes to grouping a faith together and labelling it race.  A proxy race is you like?

He could, it has been suggested, have said that Trinity College has more Nobel’s than all the black laureates combined, which would also, they say, have been a true statement.  But we all know that fact is because of a deliberate historical exclusion, an exclusion we all hope has ended now.  Another scientist I follow on Twitter is Neil deGrasse Tyson, considered by many, myself included, as the new Carl Sagan.  Science complements probably don’t come higher, except possibly been called the new Richard Feynman, and we may be waiting some decades for that.  That Mr Tyson is black has never once been pertinent, he’s simply a brilliant and engaging astrophysicist.  I hope that our scientific institutes and the Nobel committee are as blind to race as I am.

I’ve read a number of Professor Dawkins’ books and while some of the points are rather laboured and his arguments can be quite convoluted, once you take the time to go through them with care they are very rigorous and compelling. I can certainly find no fault with his very detailed reasoning.  So I don’t believe he is a racist, as racism is an intellectual bust.  The most obvious, and from the racists view point most important difference between the regional populations of the earth is the expression of the pigment Melanin, controlled by a number of genes; MC1R, KITLG, SLC45A2, and a dozen others.  Do any of these genes affect the ability to do great work?  Do they affect intelligence, or imagination, or genuinely new and radical thinking?  No.  There are doubtless genes that do have an effect on those qualities but the list is likely to be vast and environment could well play the greater role.  Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, he understands all this, far far better than me anyway.

So if it is not racism, what is it?  Well about a quarter of the world’s population is Muslim, which means they should have a quarter of the world’s very clever people.  I doubt very much that Professor Dawkins is suggesting that they don’t; that somehow we are cleverer than they are, as that would be an indefensible position, and having worked through his arguments in the past I know he likes to hold well defended, well-reasoned ideas.

If we exclude the peace prize, then Nobels are awarded for genuinely new and original ideas.  Things that yesterday the human race had never considered.  That is why there is often such a gap between the idea been published and the award given, because it takes years of follow up research to show the idea is true.

In which case there must be something about the Muslim world that prevents these ideas from flourishing?

In his 2012 Dimblerby lecture, Sir Paul Nurse made the connection between freedom and scientific endeavour.  Moving the Earth from the centre of the universe, or showing animals weren’t created but evolved, were ideas that challenged the accepted orthodoxy.  It is only possible to do that in a society that allows it.

If, this evening, there was a knock on your door and the Prime Minister was there, you could, if so motivated, give him a piece of your mind; a proper dressing down.  And the only person who would suffer is the PM as it would be repeated on the news over and over for the next two days.  You, as a regular citizen can confront the national leader and suffer no reprisals of any kind.  Because we are free.

If you challenge the hierarchy in a dictatorship or theocracy, you tend not to be heard from again.

Science, is by and large funded by government, and government bodies that are religiously inspired do not tend to be keen on science, because every time science meets scripture, scripture loses.  None of the events in these books happened, there are no miracles, thermodynamics says so.  And don’t argue they are miraculous and beyond such rules.  No they are not.  The laws of physics apply at every point of time and space; that is what makes them beautiful.  If you are relying on an ancient book to give you political or social authority, then the last thing you want is a healthy science sector rendering the same book obsolete.  Besides all that free thinking and challenging accepted wisdom might give the general population ideas.

What I think Professor Dawkins was trying to say, in one hundred and forty characters, is can you think of an important factor at play in the Muslim world that leads it to be massively underrepresented in a list of awards that celebrate original, ground breaking ideas?

I’ve got one.  Have you?