Discussion Group Report

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones," says Richard Dawkins in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow. "Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly these unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."

Fling your arms expansively wide to represent the span of all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Many-celled invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. Everyone from the Sumerians, who were possibly the earliest civilized people, to the Beatles and Bill Clinton are blown away in the dust of one light stroke of a nail file.

"You must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortune. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before."

We are also, Dawkins points out, lucky in another way. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century, when its time comes, is "the present century." It seems that the present moves from the past to the future "like a tiny spotlight" inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. "The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead."

But you are in fact alive. Our planet is almost perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, there are deserts and slums and racking misery. But look at the competition. Compared with most planets, this is paradise, and parts of it are still paradise by any standards. Would a planet picked at random have these properties? The most optimistic calculation would put the chances it would at less than one in a million.

It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose conditions are right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, that other kind would have evolved here. Privileged, we are given the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do in the short time before they close forever.

This fact is the best answer to those "petty-minded Scrooges" who are always asking what is the use of science? It is said that Michael Faraday once answered one of them, "Sir, of what use is a new-born child?" He meant that a child may be of no use for the present but it has great potential for the future. Also, there must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending. For this we spend taxpayers' money on the arts and conserve rare space and beautiful buildings.

Great poets might have been even greater if they had celebrated science. The same spirit of wonder that moved them inspires scientists. Dawkins asks, "Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? Isn't it sad to go to your grave without wondering why you were born? Why are the startling discoveries and accomplishments of science so little appreciated and understood in modern life? Why are superstition and pseudoscience so widely believed in? Many consider science to be unpoetic and uninspiring of awe, reverence and wonder. They retreat into mysticism, being content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery we were not "meant" to understand. The scientist recognizes the mystery as profound but then works on it. But the "tingle of the spine" in the study of science has been hijacked by astrologers, clairvoyants, television psychics, and populist "dumbing-down" artists. One threat is hostility from academics sophisticated in fashionable disciplines. A voguish fad sees science as only one of many cultural myths, no more true nor valid than the myths of any other culture. And in the U.S. there is Kennewick Man, a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, dated to older than 9,000 years. Intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, anthropologists were preparing to do DNA tests when legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Even if Kennewick man is related to American Indians, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie within the same area 9,000 years later.

"Dumbing down" is a serious threat to scientific sensibility. Science Weeks and Science Fortnights betray an anxiety among scientists to be loved. "Funny hats and larky voices," says Dawkins, proclaim that science is fun, fun, fun. Whacky 'personalities' perform explosions and funky tricks...I worry that to promote science as all fun and larky and easy is to store up trouble for the future." Real science can be challenging; but like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle. Dawkins is not belittling hands-on demonstrations, but rather is "attacking the kind of populist whoring that defiles the wonder of science."