Of course
no one is perfect, not even Richard Dawkins! Why?! Because there is not a
universal definition for “being perfect”, since we all like or dislike
different aspects of different things. It is that simple! Religious theory is
that “perfection means God”, and I am not sure about that either. Speaking of
Richard Dawkins, it is hard not to side-step to God, or delusion of him, in any
discussion! If God created humans according to his own image and there is so
much suffering tolerated by human being, as one has to go to doctors
specializing in various parts of bodies, and still suffer the whole life; in
addition, getting abused by the system and society when underprivileged, being
image of a perfect being would be far from reality. One may ask what
perfection, or lack of it, has to do with the subject at hand here. In an
interview Richard Dawkins praised colonialism, which is not uncommon for a
European raised in a colonized Africa, to hold such views. This may be far
distanced from anti-Thatcherism liberal viewpoint Dawkins holds; his
progressive views on other subjects cannot be discounted, as no one is perfect
anyway. This will be discussed again later.
It is not
easy to determine a specific field Richard Dawkins engages in, as he had been a
biology and science professor for many years, an ardent and aggressive
anti-religion activist, and author of popularized science writings, not to
mention many films and TV shows he has presented. His latest book, or books as
they came out back to back dealing with the same subject, is an autobiography.
The first book was titled “An Appetite for Wonder” that covered his life
through adulthood. The second part, “Brief Candle in the Dark”, is about the
rest of his life through the present time, which happened to be his latest book
as well. The second book, or part two, does not follow the trend that the first
part was written, as it is not in a chronological date order, and the subject
of each chapter is about certain events or categories (each containing between
ten to forty pages, except the one before the last chapter that is divided into
several sub-chapters). Subjects are varied and don’t necessarily have any
relation with each other. Some topics discuss his particular activities, whereas
others deliberate on his viewpoints, whilst reflecting on an event.
First chapter of the book is titled ”Flashback at a Feast”, which
appropriately flash backs to the first part (first book of biography) in a few pages,
and then digresses to a literary party, starting with a few kind-hearted anecdotes.
Second chapter begins with: “From 1970 to
1990 I was University lecturer in Animal Behaviour in the Zoology Department at
Oxford,…” and the rest of the chapter is compilation of some memories of
those twenty years. Third chapter is a short story of Richard Dawkins’ research
in an island off Panama Canal. There is an interesting discourse in chapter
four about organisms and their economy of scale. We make many unconscious
decisions that lead to certain beneficial results without our knowledge. This
is even more pertinent to plants and animals: “Every decision that an animal takes, whether behavioural (when to tug
on which muscle) or developmental (which bits of the body to grow bigger than
others), is an economic decision, a choice about the allocation of limited
resources among competing demands. So are decisions on how much of the time
budget to allocate to feeding, how much to subduing rivals, how much to
courting a mate and so on. So are decision on parenting (how much of the
limited budget of food, time and risk to spend on the present child and how
much to hold back for future children). So are decisions on life history (how
much of life should be spent as a caterpillar, growing by feeding on plants,
and how much as a butterfly, sipping aviation fuel from the nectaries of
flowers while pursuing a mate). It’s economics everywhere you look: unconscious
calculation, ‘as if’ deliberately weighing up the costs and benefits,” (P.55).
The
following chapter is titled “The Delegate’s Tale”, where he tells the story of
six conferences as samples of many conferences he had attended to. “Christmas
Lectures” is the title of a television program that was performed every
Christmas aimed to popularize science for kids, as it is the title of the next
chapter. Dawkins discusses some of the science projects that he performed in
these lectures, including the famous cannonball experiment. His trip to an
island in Japan is the subject of the following chapter. Dawkins has written
many books, a list of which is at the beginning of this book. Writing books
requires having constant interactions with publishers. In the next chapter, he
talks about some of his favorite publishers. Television is the title, and the
subject of the next chapter. Readers are perhaps familiar with his many
television appearances, whether in the form of discussion, interview, book
reading, or performing a scientific experiment. He describes some of television
acts, which with the exception of one, they were all television shows and
programs. Next topic is debates and encounters, with the same title. Dawkins
starts with describing the form of debates or discussions that he is not very
much found of, versus the format he prefers. As he offers some events whether
he participated or he merely was a part of the audience in a debate or an
encounter, he side-steps towards some religious events: “As did British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who invited Lalla and me to
dinner in his house with some of London’s leading Jews. It was at that dinner
that I learned the stunning fact that Jews, who constitute less than 1 per cent
of the world’s population, have won more than 20 percent of all Nobel Prizes.
This makes a poignant contrast with the derisorily low success rate of the
world’s Muslims, who are orders of magnitude more numerous in the world. I
thought – still do – the comparison revealing. Whether you think of Judaism and
Islam as religions or cultural systems (neither is a ‘race’, despite widespread
misconceptions), how could it not be revealing that one of them has a success
rate per head which is literally tens of thousands of times higher than the
other, in the fields of intellectual endeavor celebrated by Nobel? Islamic
scholars were notable in keeping the flame of Greek learning alive during the
middle ages and dark ages of Christendom. What went wrong? Incidentally, Sir
Harry Kroto has written to me of his belief that the great majority of Nobel
laureates listed as Jews (including himself) are actually non-believers,”
(P.249). Dawkins raises a question of how this phenomenon could appear,
while he makes a “cultural” comparison between Islam and Christianity. The
answer to the question Dawkins is raising is partly covered by his statement. The
statement that he made about most of the Jewish Nobel Laureates are not
practicing Jews, should be undelined. Not only a great majority of the
scientific mind is from a traditional Jewish family, in every field a vast
number of them (in comparison to their population) have been on the top of
their field. It is cultural because education is very important in a Jewish
family, and a Jewish family is well structured where hierarchy is observed. In
art and politics, many of the torch bearers are Jewish (again from a Jewish
tradition who don’t practice, such as Einstein, Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and many
others who are on the left of the political spectrum). Hopefully this is what
Dawkins meant by culture. On the other hand, Zionism, which is the mirror image
of Fascism, with their present practice of apartheid and genocide, is a Jewish
phenomenon as well. We should remember that the word “ghetto” is a Jewish word
meaning slum, where people of this religion were forced to live. The largest
militarist country of the world is supporting a small Jewish colony surrounded
by Arabs in the Middle-East. Is this by accident, or it goes back to many years
of Imperialistic hegemony? Dawkins rightfully mentioned Middle-Ages, when Islam
(or to be exact, countries which were won over and dominated by this religion)
introduced the West with advancement in science, which was not only “keeping
the flame of Greek”, but also subjecting Europe of the Dark Ages to many
advancement achieved in the East throughout centuries, of which Moslems were
beneficiaries. The fall of the Islamic countries, whether in the Middle-East or
in Africa, began by the West’s military advancements and colonization of the
East, which Dawkins is so found of (discussed at the beginning of this article).
The downfall of the East started when Western Imperialism moved in and started
colonization and enslavement of those people. More importantly, the West prevented progress in those countries by
stifling any nationalistic or leftist movements, and any movement that would
bring core industry and technology to those nations. Religion has always
been, of course, the best weapon to keep people uneducated and superstitious
and fanatic. Many uprising of the third world nations have been redirected to a
form of dictatorship by the West, as BBC’s current revealing of the accord of
religious leaders with CIA in 1979 Iranian revolution. The most recent uprisings,
titled Arab Spring, where people demanded at the minimum the kind of democracy
Westerners are enjoying, have been derailed or stifled in each country, from
Egypt, to Tunisia to Libya to Syria. That is why the progress stopped in
countries where Islam was, or still is, in power. There is no doubt that
religion by itself is a constraint in progress, but religion is a tool in the
hands of politicians. Moslem Brotherhood is the oldest international political
religious movement, and it has been supported by the West from birth. It is
clear to everyone by now that Taliban, and its offshoots operating in Iraq and
Libya and Syria today were founded by the US, and they are presently financed
by US main allies in the region, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Emirates.
Simonyi Professor is the title of the next chapter where Dawkins
describes through some interesting stories, those who bear this title. In the last
chapter, he discusses some of his books, which sound refreshing to those who
have read his books. He revisits some of his books and explains a few points
made in them, or stories related to them. Touching upon his book “An Appetite
for Wonder”, he talks about Fox P2 and its linguistic relationship. This
provides him with the platform to talk about: “Noam Chomsky is the genius mainly responsible for our understanding of
hierarchically nested grammar, as well as other linguistic principles. He believes
that human children, unlike the young of any other species, are born with a
genetically implanted language-learning apparatus in the brain. The child
learns the particular language of her tribe or nation, of course, but it is
easy for her to do so because she is simply fleshing out what her brain already
‘knows’ about language, using her inherited language machine. Hereditarian
tendencies in intellectuals nowadays (though not always in the past) tend to be
associated with the political right, and Chomsky, to put it mildly, hails from
the opposite pole of the political spectrum. This disjunct has sometimes struck
observers as paradoxical. But Chomsky’s hereditarian position in this one
instance makes sense and, more to the point, interesting sense. The origin of
language may represent a rare example of the ‘hopeful monster’ theory of
evolution,” (P. 383). The book is filled with scientific ideas and light-hearted
stories that make it a pleasant read to anyone who enjoys science, without
having any education on the subject. Of course, since this is an autobiography,
one can learn more about Richard Dawkins, if the reader enjoys this scientist
and author, as much as the author of this article does!
Brief
Candle in the Dark; Copyright 2015 by Richard Dawkins; Harper Collins
Publishers- Hardcover
