Jerry Coyne's Reading List

"The reason why I chose The Origin is because of all the books that have ever been written on science that are accessible to the layperson, this is the most important. It’s the one book you have to have read if you want to be considered an educated person. An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology , this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things. I first read The Origin as an undergraduate. I’ve read it every year or two since then, so I must have read it 20 times. Each time I read it I get something out of it. I think it was Freud who said that, historically, there have been two great revolutions in human thought spurred by science over history. The first was the [Copernican] discovery that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. The second was the discovery that humans are just animals who evolved, like all other animals. And that was from Darwin. To read The Origin properly, you must put yourself in the position of a Victorian reader – who is religious, who thinks humans have been specially created – and see how your worldview is turned inside out by these 500-odd pages of prose. You actually participate, when you read this book, in the revolution in humanity’s worldview, in its self-image, that took place in the latter part of the 19th century. The Origin came out 150 years ago, and it’s still readable, it’s still accessible. It is written in Victorian prose. But if you can read George Eliot or Jane Austen , I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with it. The difficulty comes with trying to unpack what he says about science in some places. His chapters on hybridism are pretty dire. Sometimes he gets deeply confused himself. He wasn’t right about everything, and that’s why I recommend the annotated version. There’s also another book that explains it in more detail. It’s called An Interpretative Guide to the Origin of Species by David Reznick, with an introduction by Michael Ruse. They’re trying to re-explain The Origin in modern prose. If you have trouble with The Origin , you might want to consult that. But I think the annotated version I recommend might be sufficient. No, they don’t. You’d be surprised how many evolutionary biologists haven’t read The Origin . Professionals! None of the biology students at the University of Chicago read it. I tried to make my undergraduates read it in class and they balked. They don’t want to read 500 pages of Victorian prose. So then I give them an abridged version, which is not really satisfactory. They don’t even like that. That’s what led me to write my own book . A lot of the evidence in the book is taken from Darwin, but it’s written in a way that makes it more accessible. He was definitely an inductive reasoner, building up the big picture from details. One thing people don’t realise about The Origin is that the rhetoric is magnificent. It’s built on anecdotes and details, all of which are carefully designed to one single end, and it gradually dawns on the reader that Darwin is right. What he’s doing is assailing you from all sides with evidence from different areas of biology – from animal breeding (to show that natural selection can work because artificial selection does), from geography, from embryology. He didn’t have much of a fossil record, so he doesn’t talk a lot about fossils, but he does talk about vestigial organs. And all that comes together to point to one ineluctable conclusion – that evolution happens and probably by natural selection. All the details are carefully chosen from a much larger series of details that Darwin never published. The Origin was supposed to be an abstract for a much larger book, a bit of which still survives and is called The Red Book . He wasn’t going to write The Origin as it stands, but he was forced to because he had competition. Alfred Russel Wallace had come up with the same idea. So Darwin wrote it quickly – otherwise it would have been even longer. It’s the evidence that convinced people more than anything else. You can’t just say, “This is my theory about how things work” and have it persuade people without supporting data. That’s why Darwin was such a success and Alfred Russel Wallace wasn’t. Wallace published a short note in 1858, and that was it. Darwin supported his theory with all these details. It’s just magisterial. He spent years writing to naturalists, to breeders, to obscure people in different corners of the world and collecting all this stuff. Then he built it into an edifice which changed the world. We’re still feeling the repercussions of it today, particularly in America where people absolutely refuse to believe it, simply because it goes against their religious beliefs. That was part of his rhetorical strategy as well. If you read the famous last line of The Origin , he goes back to the idea of planets cycling around each other and around the sun according to the law of gravity, and compares that to his law of natural selection causing evolution. Evolution was not rejected because there is anything wrong with it. It was rejected because it went against people’s religious beliefs. There is no other way to understand it. If you look across countries of the world, you see a dramatic negative correlation between the degree of religiosity and the acceptance of the theory of evolution. The more religious the country is, the less willing they are to accept Darwin. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, France and Norway, with high degrees of Darwin acceptance – up to 80-90% – have low degrees of religiosity, 10-20% (defined as “Do you pray every day?”) That suggests to me that people are conditioned to reject evolution because of their preconceived religious beliefs. If we didn’t have religion in this world, there would be no controversy. Evolutionary biology would be something as broadly accepted as the germ theory of disease."

"This book may be the best scientific biography that I’ve ever read. I was quite surprised, as Janet’s previous publications have been largely scholarly ones, though well written. Then, somehow, when she wrote this biography she came into her own. She was able to write in an almost novelistic way, except this is fact and not fiction. It’s just absolutely engrossing. The first volume, Voyaging , is about Darwin’s early life and the voyage of the Beagle. In the first part of his life, he is a man of action. He’s catching beetles as a kid, he’s travelling around England trying to study theology and failing to do so. Finally he becomes the companion to the ship’s captain, Captain Fitzroy – not the naturalist on the Beagle, that was someone else. On the voyage he did a lot of collecting, he rode into South America. He left the ship as often as he could as he had terrible seasickness. He collected fossils, he shot animals and so on. Then he got back to England in 1836 and basically sat in his study for the rest of his life. The second volume is called The Power of Place , and it’s about his life at Down House where he stayed permanently after then. He never left England again. He just sat there and produced this magnificent theory. It shows the power of the life of the mind. Despite not being peripatetic, he had an extremely rich life through his correspondence, his children, his family. Also a slightly tragic existence, with the death of his beloved daughter. But he continued the adventure in his head, and produced not only The Origin but a number of other books, many of which are quite good. He got material, but far more often people would send him letters. He would write to someone saying, “Is it true that in Kazakhstan you found a donkey that was born with stripes on it?” And the guy would write back and say, “Yes, I have a donkey with stripes on it”. From that Darwin would deduce that the ancestral horse, that gave rise to the donkey, had stripes and this was an ancestral trait that had reappeared. It was this constant accumulation of detail. It must have been quite exciting. His mail alone must have been very interesting. Plus he was doing experiments, and getting his kids to do them – like soaking seeds in seawater to see if they could survive the long periods it would take them to get across the ocean. Yes, it’s incredible how much he managed to get done, because he was an invalid for the greater part of his adult life. There has been a lot of speculation about what made him sick. Janet doesn’t go into that much, but people are starting to think he had something called cyclical vomiting syndrome. He had all sorts of horrible symptoms – constant vomiting, headaches, depression, fits of crying. There’s also a discussion of this delay in the Gould book I recommended, Ever Since Darwin . I think the best guess is that the delay wasn’t because his wife was religious. But I think his wife’s religiosity was the reason why there is nothing in The Origin about the evolution of humans. There’s only one sentence, which says something like “light will be shed on the origin of man”. That’s it! It is manifestly clear that he did that on purpose, because he didn’t want to get into religious controversies at that stage of his career. He wanted to convince people that evolution had occurred, and obviously the conclusion would be that humans had also evolved. But it was only 12 years later, in 1871, that he published The Descent of Man , which was much more explicit about the evolutionary origin of humans. I think the reason he had been delaying is because he wanted to be absolutely sure that he was right. Darwin was very careful to make statements that were completely accurate. So throughout The Origin , you will see him hedging, saying, “Well, maybe this is wrong,” or, “Here’s a possible objection you may raise as a reader”. It’s part of his rhetorical strategy, but it’s also part of being a good scientist. He’s always trying to find out what would prove him wrong and deal with those objections. There’s even a chapter in The Origin called “Difficulties on Theory” about the problems with it. One of these was the evolution of a bee colony, with all these sterile workers helping their mother. How can sterility possibly be of evolutionary advantage? Even for us today, he’s a model scientist in the care with which he does things. This is all described in Janet’s book in a way that you cannot get from reading just The Origin . She provides a view of the man, his life and the adversities that he overcame, everything that fed into this revolutionary work of human thought. When he was younger he was probably religious by default, in the way that most liberal people were religious in Britain back then. He was actually going to train to be a minister, but didn’t like it very much. As he became older, he started shedding all these appurtenances of belief. He would still use words like Creator. For example, he says in The Origin that the Creator breathed life into one or more original forms of life. People take that to mean that he was religious. But if you read his autobiography, or his letters to [Thomas] Huxley and others, it’s clear that he didn’t believe in any kind of personal God at all. He says, for example, that he could not believe that a God could exist who would design a cat that would torture mice, or a wasp whose larvae eat their prey from the inside. The horrors of nature convinced him that the world was a naturalistic, materialistic phenomenon. I doubt there was any vestige of real religion left in Darwin by the time he was a middle-aged man. He didn’t go to church even though his wife, Emma, did. And he never made any expression of religious belief. Creationists are always trying to promulgate the myth that Darwin was religious, but there’s simply no evidence for it. Almost all of us who have read Darwin realise that. He may have called himself an agnostic – which is, by the way, a term invented by his friend Huxley – because atheist was a strong word back then. But I don’t think he believed in God, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t think he was going to go anywhere after he died. They want him to be religious in the same way that they want Christopher Hitchens to be religious. Hitchens is seriously ill and may die, and they’re thinking, “This’ll show him!” So they like to think that Darwin, despite the fact that he came up with this theory, still believed in God. Remember that evolution is not anathema to all religious people. A lot of religious people accept evolution. They’re accommodationists. People like to think there is no inherent conflict between science – in particular evolution – and religion, and to show that Darwin could have been a religious man shows that religion and science can be friends. I don’t think they can, no. To me, they are completely conflictual world views. People always point to the fact that Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, is an evangelical Christian. They use him as an example that religion and science are not incompatible, because here you have a religious scientist. They’re trying to do the same with Darwin. To me, showing that somebody can hold two diametrically opposed views of truth in their head at the same time doesn’t show these two views are compatible, but simply that humans have a remarkable ability to compartmentalise."

"It was a tough decision. Climbing Mount Improbable is a similar book that’s very good, The Extended Phenotype is another one. I would say read all of Dawkins – that would be my recommendation. But if I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one. His most famous book is The Selfish Gene because it lays out the gene-centred view of evolution, but it’s a bit of a tough slog. All the stuff you find in it you can also find in The Blind Watchmaker . This is the original version of intelligent design. It comes from William Paley, who was a natural theologian in the 18th century. Paley wrote a book called Natural Theolo gy to try to explain why the perfection of animals testifies to the existence of God. He says, “I’m walking across Hampstead Heath, my foot pitches up against a watch, I look at this thing and it’s marvellous. It has these cogs and gears, it tells the time and the time is correct. It is extremely well made for what it does”. Then he says, “Look at an animal”. In my book I use the example of a woodpecker. It has a tough beak, it has stiff tail feathers to prop it against a tree, it can hit its head 15 times a second at 16 miles an hour against the trunk without hurting its brain because it has padding around its brain. Its eyes close at the moment of striking so it doesn’t get woodchips in its eyes, it has feathers in its nostrils so it doesn’t inhale woodchips. A woodpecker is the organic equivalent of a watch. Paley’s view is that since you can infer the existence of a designer or watchmaker from looking at the perfection of a watch, you must be able to infer the existence of a designer from looking at the perfection of animals and plants. That was basically the worldview of all biologists before Darwin: that the perfection of nature testified to the glory of the Creator. That’s what Darwin changed in The Origin . He showed that that perfection of design could be arrived at through a completely blind, purposeless and materialistic process. That is the reason why Darwinism is so despised by religious people. I can’t speak for Richard, but it’s pretty clear that natural selection, which is what the book is about, is the blind watchmaker. It produces things as intricate as a watch and even more so. Any animal is infinitely more complex than a watch is, but that animal has been produced by the simple, materialistic, blind, purposeless process of natural selection. The whole point of Richard’s book is to show that we no longer need recourse to a celestial designer to explain the wonders of nature and the marvellous “design” of organisms. It’s implicit in Darwin, but he doesn’t go into detail. He did not go into a polemic about how his theory would replace natural theology. Darwin was not a polemicist in the way Richard is, hammering it into people. Yes, he’s working out the details and showing all the amazing ways that we’ve learned, since Darwin, that this blind materialistic process operates. He goes through kin selection, arms races, all sorts of modern aspects of evolution. A lot of it I knew, but not all of it. Even when you know this stuff, there are two things about Dawkins that it make profitable for the professional biologist. First, the quality of the writing is just magnificent. Let me read you a passage that I think is one of the best. He’s watching a colony of army ants in Panama. He’s trying to find the queen, but he can’t get to her because she is surrounded by workers that are going to try to kill anybody who tries to get to her. He writes: “I never did glimpse the queen, but somewhere inside that boiling ball she was, the central data bank, the repository of the master DNA of the whole colony. Those gaping soldiers were prepared to die for the queen, not because they loved their mother, not because they had been drilled in the ideals of patriotism, but simply because their brains and their jaws were built by genes stamped from the master die carried in the queen herself. They behaved like brave soldiers, because they had inherited the genes of a long line of ancestral queens whose lives, and whose genes, had been saved by soldiers as brave as themselves.” That’s magnificent prose that tells you exactly what is going on in language which is clearly literary. It teaches you how to write as a scientist. The whole book is filled with passages like that. There’s another one where he is contemplating the seeds dropping by the bank of the river on which his house sits. He writes, “It’s raining DNA,” and from there he goes into his discussion on the dispersion of seeds and why that’s beneficial. So there is the literary aspect. Second, I’ve always thought of Dawkins as an extremely smart child. He is not a child of course, he’s a really brilliant man. But he looks at things with the eyes of a child, in a way that I don’t think any scientist who wrote really well, including Stephen Jay Gould, ever could. He sees things with this fresh viewpoint that brings them alive. Plus you get a sense of the man. I think that’s another reason he’s such a popular writer. You feel that behind the prose there is a person whom you know, and whom most people like. And I did learn some new things about natural selection from it. Not so much in the principles – which are few and clear to most of us – but from the examples he uses. For example, in chapter two he has an exposition of how bats use sonar to find their prey. It’s really an amazing and engrossing description of a single adaptation, far more complex than a watch – how bats echolocate and all of the things that are involved in it. It’s very complicated and he describes it magnificently. I had no idea about any of that stuff. When you read it, it just impresses you with the amazing perfection this process can come up with. They say scientists are spiritual. I hate to use that word, because of its connotations of religiosity. But the feeling of awe at what this simple process of natural selection can do is something that’s pervasive in Dawkins’s book. Yes, he picks up the old saw of “What use is half an eye?” Again, that’s an intelligent design objection: How can evolution possibly produce a feature which doesn’t work unless all the parts are there simultaneously? And he shows that rudimentary eyes can be built up bit by bit, each one being functional, and each advance representing an adaptive improvement over the form before. Many of the common misconceptions or objections to evolution are dealt with in The Blind Watchmaker , which is another reason why it’s good. It’s implicitly anti-creationist. Another objection he deals with is the idea that evolution cannot make complexity, or build up an increase in the information encoded in organisms’ DNA. He has very good examples dispelling that. He’s a master teacher about this stuff. Even as a professional, you can learn so much from him about how to write, how to teach. You learn the importance of examples, and you get a sense of wonder. Which, after all, is what keeps most of us evolutionists going from day to day."

"I took one of his classes and he was on my thesis committee. I knew him quite well. Gould was a brilliant man and a credit to the field. He was a polymath. He got more stuff done in a day than any scientist I’ve ever known in my life, mainly because he subsisted on almost no sleep and he worked all the time. He was an excellent teacher, just like my own adviser Richard Lewontin. Both of them were part of the anti-sociobiology movement at Harvard when I was there, the Marxist collective that they had. I had a lot of respect for Gould, but over the years it waned. He became enamoured of his theory of punctuated equilibrium which I thought was really wrong. I still do. He and I had several exchanges in the literature about that theory, with me saying it was bunk and him saying it wasn’t. His intransigence in the face of the facts made me lose some respect for him. Also, he had extreme positions towards sociobiology, almost to the point where he wanted to deny the existence of any differences between human groups at all. He had this Marxist viewpoint towards biology which in the end made him almost reject natural selection, or at least relegate it to a very minor part in the history of life. The other thing I would say about him is that as he grew older and got more lionised, his prose began to suffer. That’s why the books I’ve chosen are early ones. The book that was published just before his death, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory , is almost unreadable. I’m sorry. You asked me about my relationship with him. I consider Gould and Dawkins the two greatest science writers of our time. I think Gould’s lasting legacy in science will be twofold. First, his books and his popularisation of evolution. Second, his contribution to bringing back palaeontology as an important part of evolutionary biology. It had been marginalised but Gould’s own activities and vociferousness, his lectures and writings, made people see that palaeontology was exciting and had something to say to evolution. I’m recommending these books because I think people would profit from them. Gould as a man was a flawed individual. He made mistakes with his science. To people that knew him he was a somewhat arrogant and blustering individual. But we all know that jerks can produce magnificent work. It’s no denigration of his books to say that a lot of his pure scientific stuff was wrong and his later prose was bloated and overblown. But the early stuff is magnificent. I’ve always felt that we evolutionary biologists are the most fortunate of all scientists, because the whole purview of life is our study. On any given day, I’ll be reading papers on molecular biology, on biogeography, on physiology, on embryology, on the fossil record. It all rolls into the process of evolution. There is always something exciting that comes up and I think it’s Gould and Dawkins who best convey that excitement to the general reader. The Mismeasure of Man is about the history of using science as a tool for promoting racism. It involves things like the early cranial measurements that were used to show that the skulls of blacks and Indians are smaller than those of whites. He debunks that, and then goes through eugenics and IQ testing to show that at every step of this process scientists, based on their own racial prejudices, contributed to the stereotyping of people. He is not just saying that racism is wrong and that science participated in it, but he actually takes apart the data, which is particularly telling in the case of IQ testing. It’s written so well, and it’s so engrossing. There’s a lot of statistics and discussion of mathematics in there, but it’s a really good book – in the last couple of paragraphs you can find some of the finest prose I’ve seen written in science. That said, a paper just came out a couple of weeks ago showing that Gould screwed up in a small part of this book. It’s about the cranial measurements by Samuel Morton, who measured skulls by filling them with seeds and buckshot to show that the skulls of “inferior” races had smaller brains. A group of people reanalysed Gould’s analysis and found he was completely wrong. So those 20 to 30 pages of the book are discredited. But I would still say that this is his finest stand-alone book. It’s well worth reading, if for nothing else than to remind us that scientists are human. We have our own biases and very often, although we try not to let them, they feed into our scientific results. Gould is really good on that, and we have to be careful about it. The other book of his I would recommend is Wonderful Life , about fossils. Gould’s analysis turned out to be largely wrong. He saw these particular fossils [in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia] as forms of life that had completely vanished, leaving no traces, and so he argued that modern life could have turned out very differently. If certain things hadn’t happened, like the asteroid striking the earth, if you rewound the tape of life and started over again, things might be completely different from how they are now. We might not even have humans. That was the point of the book. It turns out that most of the fossils that Gould described are actually now recognised to be parts of existing animal groups, so that aspect of the book is wrong. But it hardly matters, because most of it is about the description of these amazing imprint fossils from the Canadian Rockies – what they looked like, and what they were. Yes, because if I had to choose one thing of Gould’s to read, and you asked me if it would be an essay or a book, I wouldn’t know where to come down. You have to read both. I’m recommending his first collection, Ever Since Darwin , but there are many equally good early collections. Yes, it supplements the whole thing – what Darwin really did, what he meant, what was going on in his life at the time. Then Gould goes on to other things like sociobiology. In this book he’s much milder about sociobiology and is pretty accurate. He dispels many misconceptions about evolution, and then has lots of examples of interesting features of evolution – the Irish elk, the fly that eats its mother from the inside. Like Dawkins, Gould is a master of the anecdote, using these small details to tell larger tales."

"This is the wildcard on my list, the one book that evolution aficionados might not have heard of. It’s important because it is the one book that really lays out in great detail, for the non-specialist, some of the strongest evidence for evolution, which is the fossil record. Don Prothero is a professor in California. This book is more like a textbook than any of the others. But it’s written in a popular style and is easily accessible to the layperson. If you doubted that evolution was true before, and then you looked at this book, I don’t see how you could possibly continue to question it. It’s stuffed full of figures showing fossil transitions, and descriptions of the evolutionary process. I found it fascinating and absolutely convincing. It supplements Darwin, who had almost no fossils. It just goes to show that the evidence for evolution is so strong and multifarious, and from so many disciplines, that even if you leave out one area – like the fossil record – the evidence will still be massive. Darwin did have some fossils and he used fossils in a couple of examples. But he had no transitional fossils showing the origin of major new types of animals. In his 1871 book [The Descent of Man] he says that it is more probable than not that the ancestors of humans were primates that lived in Africa. That was prescient, because they didn’t find those until the 1920s. Prothero’s book, more so than any book that is accessible today, fills in that missing evidence from Darwin. You can tell people about biogeography or embryology and how they attest to evolution, but in the end people like to see a good old fossil in front of them. There’s nothing like looking at an Australopithecus in a museum – something that has a human-like post-cranial skeleton with an ape-like skull perched on top of it – to really drive home the fact that there were these three and four-foot creatures that were half-way between us and our primate ancestors. This book is just full of them. And humans are just a small part of the book. It’s about the evolution of whales from land animals, of reptiles from amphibians, of mammals from reptiles and amphibians from fish. All of these major transitions in the history of life are documented. If you’re one of these people who likes to read Dawkins, Gould and Darwin, I would highly recommend Prothero’s book. I’d love to give it more publicity because it deserves a much wider audience. That’s probably true. Antibiotics have definitely been overprescribed. But, interestingly, there are no creationists when it comes to antibiotics. There’s a cartoon about that in Prothero’s book – a creationist opting for the drug that the bugs haven’t developed immunity to. But it’s more just a practical thing. If you’re a doctor, and a drug stops working because you use it too much and people become resistant to it, you stop using it. The theoretical basis is natural selection, but you don’t really have to understand that to take the proper action. I’ve always thought the practical applications of evolutionary biology to medicine are pretty overblown. My colleagues are going to kill me for saying that, but in general I think of evolutionary biology more as an adventure of the human spirit than as a way of making money or helping us get healthier. I really was not trying to produce any literary classic. But I was trying to show that when you understand how evolution works your appreciation of the world is immensely enhanced. That’s one of the great lessons from the books Gould and Dawkins have written. There are all these people who say that scientism and reductionism and evolution take away the wonder of the world. I guess their wonder comes from the contemplation of a non-existent celestial realm. But when you can see these material processes at work, and realise that it’s a true story – that we evolved from apes, that we did so largely by natural selection, and that we’re related to every other plant and animal on Earth – that’s the ultimate source of wonder. The world becomes so much richer when you understand how it got to be the way it is."

"Of all these books, this is the one that resonates most for me. It was edited by his wife and published in 2006. It’s a distillation of the Gifford Lectures , a very prestigious series of lectures given in Scotland, endowed to give famous people a chance to talk about natural theology i.e. the relationship between science and religion. They’ve been going more than 100 years by now and they gave rise to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience , a very famous book. Sagan was a Gifford lecturer in 1985 and he titled his book after James’s. It’s a reflection, at the end of his life, on the dangers of superstition and of faith. It’s very well written and a lot more succinct than his more popular book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark which was a big bestseller in the US. That’s a bit bloated. This book is much more concise, much more tightly argued. It makes a good case for basing your actions on rationality rather than superstition and he talks about the dangers of not doing so from his experiences in fighting medical quackery, UFOs, the purported existence of canals on Mars etc. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The reason I like the book is that he makes a lot of good points. First of all, he maintains that pseudosciences — and he includes religion in that — have to be judged as sciences, because they make empirical claims about reality. That’s a claim that most religious people instinctively reject. Shelley was the first person to say that God is a hypothesis, therefore believers should be forced to give evidence for it. This is more or less Sagan’s view. Second, he shows that the way pseudoscientists insulate their beliefs from disconfirmation is very similar to the way religionists do. Sagan is often thought of as somebody who attacked pseudoscience but was friendly to religion. If you read this book, you’ll see that he was not. It’s clear that he sees religion as just one of the many brands of irrationality he was fighting his whole life. He was a New Atheist before there were New Atheists. A lot of people do. Because aliens are naturalistic phenomena whereas gods are supernatural and we don’t have evidence for anything supernatural. Sagan was involved in the SETI project to detect alien life. He was unsuccessful, but if I had to put my money on either, ‘Is there life somewhere else in the universe?’ or ‘Is there a supernatural being?’ I’d definitely bet on the former. It is likely that there are other forms of life somewhere. Yes, but on the other side is his famous pale blue dot speech: we’re a lonely spot in the universe and so we have to take care of it and take care of each other. He wasn’t doing down humanity, he was just trying to give us some perspective. It’s not so much that humans are worthless, but that that the universe is large and there’s many mysteries to be discovered. That, in itself, is worthy of awe."

"Like what? What he says about free will? Some of it is and some of it isn’t. The main point he makes, that we are material objects and have to obey the laws of physics, is uncontroversial. It’s also uncontroversial among scientists and philosophers that the form of libertarian free will — and this is something I’m deeply involved with right now — that people think they have, where we are conscious agents that can make choice A or choice B if we want to, is simply insupportable. The only people who really believe that are people who a) haven’t thought much about it — and that’s a lot of people or b) religious people who have this dualistic view that there is something more to your behavior and your choices than the laws of physics. There’s two aspects to what you’ve just asked. First of all, that this kind of determinism causes nihilism and lassitude. The answer is that it doesn’t, because we cannot overcome our feeling that we’re agents. Even if you think about it, even if you truly, deeply realize it, you still go ahead and act like you act, because we’re programmed like that by evolution. Which is the second part of the question, why don’t I just stay in bed all day or walk around like a robot? It’s because evolution has made you think you’re an agent. Which leads to a very interesting question. Why do we have this false sense of being able to choose, when we don’t really have it? We don’t know. There are several explanations I could give you for why we have this false sense of agency, this illusion of free will… I can explain it to you in one second why we don’t, and it’s this: our brains are made of molecules. Molecules obey the laws of physics therefore everything that comes out of our brain, including our behaviors and choices, must obey the laws of physics. Therefore, in so far as those laws apply, everything we do is basically determined. It may be determined on a macro-level or fundamentally indeterminate on a quantum level but we cannot affect how our brains work by thinking about it, because even our thinking is physically-based. So that means we can’t make a choice. If you were to go back to last night, when you were drinking wine, you didn’t have a choice how many glasses you had. It could have been predicted in advance by the circumstances of nature. People hate that, they really hate it. That’s one reason Alex’s book has received a lot of scorn and dislike, because it basically speaks the truth. We are physical automatons. And there are good things about that. Determinism does have some beneficial social consequences. Right now we have the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston , they’ve been weighing up whether or not to kill him because of the Boston Marathon bombing. They’re trying to judge whether or not he had a choice to do what he did and the defense are saying, “Well, he was influenced by his brother.” It’s as if the more choice he had, the guiltier he is. If he had some kind of brain disease, or if he was under the sway of his brother, then maybe he should just be sent to prison for life. The problem is that none of this is true. He didn’t have a choice about what he did, no matter what the situation was. It was the result of his genes and his environment. Therefore, and Alex talks about this, you shouldn’t punish someone based on the false assumption that they can choose to do good or bad, because they can’t. You can only do one thing at any one time in your life and if that’s bad, that’s not because you made the choice to be bad. It’s because all your environmental and genetic history impinged on you to behave in this way at that time. That has enormous consequences for how we treat people, for punishment and reward, as well as how we regard our own lives. Our feelings of sorrow (I should have behaved this way!) will all vanish, as well as invidious social consequences like the theory that people are poor because they deserve it, or that people get what they deserve in this life. That’s the basis for conservative politics. And it’s all wrong. People don’t get what they deserve, they get what they get because of the laws of physics. Physics is hard. I find myself struggling with popular books on physics like Brian Greene’s all the time, and, as we all know, Stephen Hawking’s first book is the best-selling least-read book of all time . But where I part company with Alex is where he dismisses the humanities as an illusion. On one level, he’s right. They are. But on another level, we live our lives as human beings and the humanities have an emotional effect on us. They can change the way we behave. We can weep when we hear symphonies, we get enormously moved when we read Tolstoy — or at least I do. That would be Anna Karenina , not War and Peace . He’s saying they’re an illusion. That doesn’t mean that something is false, it means it’s not what it seems to be. I don’t know exactly what he means when he says they’re “elaborations of an illusion.” That’s probably connected with his confusing discussion of thinking about things, and how we can’t really think about things. I won’t even get into that. But it’s raised the ire of a lot of non-scientists, to imply — and he may well believe this — that most of the humanities are of no consequence. He could have left that stuff out. The value of his book is in drawing out the consequences of naturalism, which generally I think he’s right about. It’s just that people don’t like it. People like to think they can make choices. They like to think that consciousness is something other than an illusion that comes from molecular interactions. Naturalism did away with that a long time ago. But it still hasn’t filtered down to the theologians. The Catholic theologian John Haught said that we can live with science, we can respect the findings of science, but that what religious people can’t abide is “the conviction that the universe and life is pointless.” And yet Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist and Nobel Prize winning physicist, has said that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. So there’s a real clash there between science and religion that cannot be overcome, even if you’re a science-friendly believer. Nearly all scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries were believers, but only because everyone was a believer then — or at least had to pretend that they were believers. And yes, as I said at the beginning, there are still a substantial number of religious scientists. But the more accomplished scientists tend to be atheistic. For example, only 7% of the members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences believe in God. As for Hawking specifically, it’s clear he used the word ‘God’ as a loose metaphor for the laws of physics. To quote him on this: “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.” That pretty much settles the issue. But believers still like to argue for comity between science and faith by citing famous scientists who are thought to have believed in God. Einstein, by the way, was almost certainly a nonbeliever as well. As I show in my book , he stated repeatedly and explicitly that he didn’t accept a personal God, and saw all religions as manmade."

"Theology is basically a warped form of philosophy. I’ll get in trouble for saying it, but it’s a fact. Theology is the kind of philosophy that’s applied to a non-existent object. So they use all the tools of philosophy. If you read sophisticated theology there’s even Bayesian analysis and mathematical logic in there. So it looks like philosophy but it all applies to a meaningless question involving a non-existent being. Philipse is a philosopher so he’s well equipped to deal with this. In particular, he goes after Richard Swinburne , who is probably the greatest living philosopher of religion and is a theist. “Theology is a warped form of philosophy.” Philipse looks at the so-called philosophical academic arguments for God and just rips them apart. He’s really smart, he knows the game and he applies the methods of philosophy to questions like the problem of evil. Why is there moral evil in the world? Why is there non-moral evil, like earthquakes and tsunamis? How do theologians answer this? Here are the answers and here’s what’s wrong with them. That’s one of the many things he does. He shows that religion is not only irrational but it’s incoherent. In the first part of the book he shows how people’s concept of God is so incoherent that he could basically stop the book right there and conclude there’s nothing to talk about. People can’t even define God. And to a large extent he’s right. I found the book hard slogging, as you probably did too, but, at the end, when the dust has settled, I don’t think any sophisticated defence of religious arguments remains credible. You have to realize what people like me — who are going after theology because of its scientific and logical problems — face. It’s always the same argument, which is, “You haven’t dealt with the most sophisticated forms of belief, the most sophisticated theology! You have to read Swinburne, you have to read Karen Armstrong, you have to read David Bentley Hart!” So, for the past two-and-a-half years, that’s what I did. And one of the most rarefied of all the sophisticated theologians is Swinburne, so if you can take his arguments apart then nothing much is really left standing. He’s the sine qua non of theologians. But Philipse also goes after others — Alvin Plantinga, who is one of America’s most respected religious philosophers. In a way I see Philipse as the spiritual — if I can use that word — heir of Walter Kaufmann, who was a philosopher at Princeton and wrote much more accessibly. He was an atheist philosopher, but he wrote several great books on why theology is a useless endeavor. I wanted to recommend one of those, but he was going after theology as a whole, and my brief was to talk about religion and science… These guys are not dumb, most of them. They are PhDs with smart brains. It’s just a shame that they apply all that brainpower to rationalizing their emotional commitments. They could have been scientists or archaeologists or even writers. Somebody that actually contributes something. To me, even a great novel is a much more worthwhile accomplishment than anything theological, because theology pretends it’s about reality whereas in novels you suspend disbelief from the very beginning. You get immersed in a world which you know is fictional but from which you can still get emotional satisfaction. With religion you’re immersed in a world which is supposed to be real."

"He calls it Breaking the Spell for a reason. He thinks there is this sanctity about religion which prevents people from asking, ‘Where did it come from in the first place?’ It’s a human construct, after all, it wasn’t given to humanity by God. It couldn’t have been, because we have thousands of different religions. So even religious people recognize the human contribution to religion. At the beginning of the book, he says it could be real. We could be worshipping a real divine being. But we still want to know where this system of beliefs and practices and ceremonies came from — and it’s not off limits. That’s the importance to me of that book. Yes, and one of the reasons Dan is not as vilified as people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, is because he seems nicer. But his mask sort of slips in the second half of the book. He moves from saying, ‘Let’s study religion objectively as a human construct and there might be something behind it’ to ‘We’re studying it as a human construct and we know there’s nothing behind it.’ That’s OK with me, because I agree with him. I think at the time he wrote the book that might have been true. I don’t want to put words in his mouth but I know Dan pretty well and I’m pretty sure that he thinks religion is inimical to human society. Most of his activities now are spent showing how this is true. As a scientist what I should say is that we don’t know because it arose in the irrecoverable mists of time and we weren’t there. But I can give you my theories of what I find most appealing. First of all, a lot of religion is inherited, because you teach it to your kids. So it spreads that way and you can make a phylogeny, or family tree, for religions like you can for species. You can see them breaking off from each other over time and spreading, with some going extinct. Of course that doesn’t explain its hegemony, it has to appeal to some aspect of the human psyche or we wouldn’t have it. That’s where the question comes in. I don’t know the answer, I have to emphasize that. Dawkins and others have said that humans are evolved to be credulous. When we’re children, it’s much more adaptive for us to listen to our elders than to go out and learn for ourselves. Your parents can say, “Stay away from that lion there,” and if you believe that and listen to them, you’re a lot better off than if you go out and investigate what that lion is yourself. That kind of killing off of people who don’t listen to experience will select for a mindset or brain in which you are conditioned to believe those people that are older and wiser than you are. To me, that seems to play an important role in religion. It co-opts an evolved trait we have to pay attention to what our parents tell us. And, of course, your parents teach you religion. Religion also appeals to the communality of people, their desire to get together. It gives them a sense of security, of community — that may account for it, certainly some people say it does. Pascal Boyer’s theory is that we have an agent-detecting device. This is where Dennett begins his own explanation — that we are evolved to see agency in nature. If a leaf rustles, we’re better off thinking that there’s some animal out there, than saying, “Oh, it’s just the wind.” Because if you think there’s an animal out there, you’re much more likely to live than if you think it’s just the wind and it turns out to be an animal. So we have an agent-detecting device, we see agents wherever we live in nature, at least in our early infantile aspect of humanity. That somehow, in Dan’s account, turns into a theory of the supernatural. I’m not sure I agree with him. There are many, many of these theories and all of these things may play together. Another one is the belief in the afterlife. I don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die. If you give a promise that you’re going to live for eternity in good circumstances, that’s a powerful impetus to believe. Of course there are some religions, like the one I used to have as a Jew, that don’t believe in an afterlife, so that can’t be all of it. As a scientist all I can say is that the origin of religion is an interesting but unsolved question. Dan has opened it up to introspection but I don’t think we’re ever going to know the ultimate reason why humans are religious. That’s one of the motivations for his book. It purports to be a study of that, but the problem is he doesn’t answer this question. He says he’s going to try but then he winds up saying there’s all these theories and we just don’t know. That’s fine, because he’s right. We don’t know. But on that journey, there are other things about religion that you can learn about. Where do people get their beliefs from? That’s something that we can answer logically: They get them from their parents, from their milieu. Why is it in their interests to have these beliefs? These are questions that we can investigate in the here and now and we can answer them. And that has great import for society. Right now, one of our big pressing problems is Muslims who want to impose theocracies on western democracies and who turn violent if they see a cartoon of Mohammed. You can investigate why that is. I think you need to do that if you’re going to combat this kind of theocratic mentality, which I see as directly opposed not just to science, but to rationality and democracy. You need to understand where it comes from. That’s something that we can do. The refusal of western leaders to recognize that religion is behind a lot of this stuff — saying it’s due to political oppression, or disenfranchisement or it’s our fault ultimately — is a real block in trying to do anything about the problem, because we refuse to admit one of the obvious causes which is religious belief. There are analysts in sociology. The problem is if you go into Saudi Arabia and ask people what they believe, they’ll kill you. Look at the Pew study which studied the attitudes of Muslims around the world by asking them questions. Do you think Sharia law should be imposed? Do you favour stoning for adulterers? Do you favour the death penalty for apostates? The results, by the way, were very depressing because even in western countries a substantial fraction of Muslims favoured these oppressive practices. But the countries that weren’t surveyed were countries like Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because they weren’t even allowed to go in there and ask those questions. Even asking people what they believe is regarded as a form of dissing religion."

"He wanted to model it on the European system, which by that time had become secular. Universities were originally, in the Middle Ages, religious institutions. Dickson White and Cornell agreed that they were going to make this university secular because only by insulating universities from the influence of religion could there be free inquiry. And he’s absolutely right about that. They put a clause in the statement of the founding of Cornell — which was given a grant by the state of New York — that there would be no test for religious belief for professors. You could be an atheist and still be a professor. That really caused a lot of problems, to the extent that they almost refused to let the university be set up. Some people even said you should be required to be a preacher in order to become a professor. Dickson White stood his ground and won, with the result that Cornell is a purely secular institution. It’s one of the few really high-class American universities that doesn’t have a school of theology. “Accepting faith as a means to ascertain truth has invidious social consequences.” Dickson White was a believer, by the way. He says he’s a Christian and that by writing this book, he is furthering religion. In his view, it was the dogmatism of religion that was inimical to science, not religion per se. People misunderstand what he was trying to do. His purpose was not to impugn religion, but to show that it’s the dogmatism of religion that prevents social progress and here’s examples of that dogmatism. And then the book became too long…he spent 30 years on it… More or less. He covers almost everything: anesthesia, lightning rods, vaccinations and he winds up with Biblical scholarship, showing that at every step of the way, representatives of the church were opposed to this stuff. We can talk about some of the criticisms of this book. It’s in really bad odour amongst philosophers and historians of science because it takes such a strong stance, but also because they perceive errors in it. He also argues that attributing mental illness to demonic possession inhibited science. That’s a whiggish view of the history of science because back then we didn’t have any science. What else could we do, except use our knowledge the best we could, to explain why people were behaving oddly? It was only when science began to develop that religion could impede it. It’s not clear to me whether the Church itself actually impeded the development of science, or was neutral. Some people say Catholicism actually helped science. I don’t know the answer because we can’t rerun the tape of history. What is clear — and I think this is the point that White makes that people miss — is that once science got going, once people wanted to study naturalistic explanations for phenomena, many representatives of the Church fought it, and impeded that effort. But he does get stuff wrong. There is evolution stuff he gets wrong. Yes, as long as the religion is not what he calls “dogmatic religion.” He would take the Stephen J Gould attitude that non-dogmatic religion is religion that doesn’t make any statements about reality. Gould said that in his 1999 book, Rocks of Ages , and people loved that book. Here’s a famous atheist coming out and saying, “There’s a proper sphere for religion and there’s a proper sphere for science and they don’t overlap. Isn’t that great? We can all be friends.” I think that’s White’s attitude as well, the idea of these ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. The problem is it only works if you have a view of religion as something that does not make dogmatic statements about reality, and unfortunately most religions aren’t like that. Creationism is one example of how religions regularly violate their supposed stricture to stay out of science because they make statements about how life began, about when it began, etc. That’s a pretty strong statement if I say yes to that. Let me put it this way. I would prefer a world in which people base their beliefs on facts rather than faith (which is why I called my book that) and do not make dogmatic statements about reality based on no evidence, little evidence, or even counter-evidence. That world is the one that is instantiated in the Netherlands, in Denmark and in Sweden and the results are great. Most people in those countries are atheists and yet these countries are some of the most moral and pleasant places to live in the world. They take care of old people, they take care of sick people, they don’t demonize sexuality or smoking marijuana. They’re deeply empathic societies, and I’d like the United States to be like them. If people had a form of religion that did not make statements about reality…and there are some religions like that: that worship nature, pantheism, or maybe Confucianism or some forms of Buddhism. You can call them religions, but there’s no God, there’s no belief in heaven or hell — though some Buddhists believe in rebirth which is not right. Religions that are non-religious I don’t mind so much."