Simon Conway Morris: Is Dawkins Coherent?

This year, Simon Conway Morris (Wikipedia) was the speaker for the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

This year, the Gifford Lectures had the topic of Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation. Sadly I was unable to attend any of these lectures as they took place before I finished work.

On the 28th February, however, Conway Morris took time away from the lectures to present a half-hour mini lecture at lunchtime nearby, entitled Has Dawkins got it right? and I was able to attend this. With his verbal presentation, he offered a number of overhead slides which, in the great tradition of academia, was presented in the format of the hand-scrawled acetate, written (he claimed) the previous evening, and covered up by a sheet of foolscap[1].

At the talk, he compared the post-Darwinian phase of evolution to physics, and pointed out that while evolution is a theory that supports the evidence, we don’t yet have a “general theory of evolution”, and that evolution wasn’t quite the “universal acid” that Daniel C Dennett presented in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

He also talked about the fact that science’s inability to explain the origins of life was the most spectacular failure in living memory. I would agree, although perhaps not for the same reason as Conway Morris. I’ll talk both of these later on.

He then spoke briefly on evolutionary convergence, something which he called “the map of life” (but didn’t really expand on what he meant by this) and mentioned consciousness in passing.

For the conclusion of his presentation, subtitled Is Dawkins Coherent?, an evocative title, he claimed that no science escaped philosophy or ideology, including atheism.

During the presentation, Conway Morris mentioned several times that he had not actually read The God Delusion (although he did have on the overhead projection the quoted title of Terry Eagleton’s infamous review of the book in The London Review of Books, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching), nor had he seen Dawkins’ 2006 documentary Root of All Evil?, which he called “derisory”. In the case of the former, he joked that he hadn’t yet seen a copy for sale second-hand, which was why he hadn’t read it yet.

After his presentation, Conway Morris took a number of questions, and I took this opportunity to ask him if he felt justified in denouncing Dawkins’ tv show and book, considering that he hadn’t read or seen either of these.

In his reply, he made the argument that Dawkins’ position was well known, and echoed Eagleton’s review that Dawkins was frankly ignorant of philosophy, that he was trying to argue theology yet failing and that he was wholly justified in judging Dawkins’ work in this way. In fact, he seemed quite unapologetic about it.

I didn’t care to refute his argument there and then, as there wasn’t time and there were others waiting to ask questions, but I thought that this blog was a good place to do so, so I will.

The very first line in Eagleton’s review reads thus:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is a misrepresentation of the point of The God Delusion, and shows that not only have Eagleton and McGrath misunderstood it, but for some reason Conway Morris has decided to take the same stance without even reading the book.

In fact, Conway Morris appears to have based his entire talk, which culminated in the non sequitur conclusion, on the self-same review, of which he opined that it was great. He even went so far as to quote this exact sentence as part of his conclusion.

I have no idea as to what aspect of the review that Conway Morris saw as being ‘great’: perhaps it was the literary value of the review, or because it was written by a literary luminary such as Eagleton, or maybe it was the fact that Eagleton was (ef)fluent in his condemnation of Dawkins’ book which, while Eagleton appears to have read it, he didn’t seem to understand it. From the tone and content of Conway Morris’ talk, I suspect it was the latter.

In saying no science escaped philosophy or ideology, in which he includes atheism (which he considers monolithic) Conway Morris highlights a point that I will agree with: science doesn’t escape philosophy or ideology.

This is a new nuance to me, and one that I have had to mull over the past few days: I’m still nowhere near to a clear stance on or appreciation of the subtleties of it. I can see the obvious benefits of science leading a completely agnostic (small ‘a’) life-cycle, untarnished by the vagaries of politics and the influences of societal demands or commercial concerns. On the other hand I can also see that science, unfocused and undirected, may not necessary lead in the direction that helps us understand our world and universe any better. This is something that I’ll continue to contemplate, and I thank Conway Morris for highlighting it.

However, I will disagree with two things that he also says: that atheism is an ideology that influences science, and that it is monolithic, both of which show that he lacks a certain understanding on the stance of considered atheism (as opposed to, say, de facto atheism).

As several other commentators have mentioned, ad nauseam, atheism is a position that only makes sense considering the positive assertion of theism: a lack of believe in gods makes no sense on its own merits, if no gods have been asserted.

The simple statement of, for example, “I do not believe in the christian god” may be seen as monolithic, as long as one is considering the literal statement itself. This however, makes little sense in the traditional sense of being monolithic. If Conway Morris is thinking about a overarching ‘organisation’ or ‘body’ of atheists, then he’s completely onto a wrong ‘un, and I hope that I’m stating the obvious when I say that atheists come in all stripes of philosophy, ideology and political affiliations: monolithic it certainly isn’t. To say that atheism is an ideology that lead science is to claim an influence than atheism neither deserves nor implies.

On to the Dawkins-hosted tv show Root of All Evil?: Conway Morris claimed that Dawkins was being derisory in arguing that religion is the root of all evil. However, he is obviously unaware of two things: firstly, that Dawkins wasn’t actually responsible for the choice of title — that was decided by Channel 4, who wanted an evocative and controversial title, unsurprising for a media company. Secondly, Dawkins actually disliked the title, and sought to change it, as the claim that religion was the root of all evil was patently ridiculous. While Dawkins readily admits that he considers religion dangerous, the claim that he said that it was the root of all evil is both absurd and a misrepresentation.

Conway Morris also mentioned several times, unapologetically at each, that he hadn’t yet read The God Delusion. He had, however, read Eagleton’s review, and many of the points he made in his conclusion had an obvious source in that review. I consider this a clear example of intellectual dishonesty: Conway Morris, while joking about the fact that he hasn’t read the book, is doing something that no honest accuser can do: he ignored primary sources and based his arguments merely on here-say. While he acknowledged this in his answer to me, he maintained that he was justified.

Apparently, he considers holding the contents of The God Delusion up as bad arguments can be done merely from having heard Dawkins talking on religion at other opportunities, from Eagleton’s review and from the tv show. This is also fallacious.

Conway Morris even went so far as to claim that Dawkins’ 747 argument was poor, seemingly unaware that the 747 argument was originated by Fred Hoyle in his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe when talking about abiogenesis, not evolution. I think that Conway Morris must have been confused by this: Dawkins refutes this argument as an attitude of evolution in The God Delusion, and doesn’t support it.

In his conclusion, Conway Morris shows that he has done not one jot of the research that would normally be expected of anyone hoping to successfully posit a considered argument. In fact, in attempting to answer the question “Is Dawkins Coherent?”, he’s merely proven that his own argument is incoherent, and thence inconclusive.

Now I will address two of his other claims: that we do not yet have a comprehensive general theory of evolution, and that science has not addressed the question of how life arose being the most spectacular failure in living memory.

While these seem like separate issues, I would argue that the two can be considered as two symptoms of the same problem, although I will consider them from Conway Morris’ position first.

First, we do not have a general theory of evolution, unlike Dennett’s concept of a universal acid. This isn’t to say that, for example, Conway Morris accepts concepts like “social darwinism”, but that science does not yet have a theory for biology in the same way that physics has the general theory of relativity.

We must remember, though, that physics as a purely scientific endeavour is much older and far more mature than biology is, with some fundamental aspects of physics being understood even in ancient Greece (even if some of the finer details were wrong). Biology, on the other hand, came to the fore as a science only in the 18th century, although it did have some input from the classical era in the related fields of medicine and natural history. In coming up with a coherent general theory, Einstein was working with the cumulative knowledge of several thousand years of empirical research and mathematics, yet biological understanding is barely 300 years old.

Secondly, how life arose: In Conway Morris’ universe, this is simply an example of science’s dramatic failure to address a most fundamental question, and therefore is most likely a question that can’t ever be addressed by science. I strongly disagree.

The difficulty here can also be compared to physics — we see examples of physics every single day of our lives, a physics that has not changed, even if our understanding of it has. Physics is observable, repeatable, and a large amount of it we can create experiments to confirm results. The origins of life, however, only had to have happened once (although we don’t know how many times it happened) which our current level of understanding science considers to have taken place about 3 thousand million years ago. But we don’t know the circumstances of those initial origins, we don’t have a clear idea of the environment at the time was like, or what went into the mix, or what came out. At the moment, on the question of the origins of life, we’re flying blind and making stabs in the dark.

However, I will argue a separate problem that beleaguers both of these issues, and that problem is religious in nature.

Both evolution and the question of abiogenesis are constantly fraught with attacks by elements of the religious bloc, who seek to keep ideas of not only human, but all of life’s, origins and development purely within the domain of their god concept and being “answered” by the dogma of their religions.

These elements, most notably the likes of The Discovery Institute, have created a situation whereby a proportion of scientists involved in these areas of research are resigned to having to defend known scientific principles and presenting the evidence to support them, rather than going ahead and performing innovative research and study into these areas to discover more about them, and about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

These attacks are leading (or perhaps have led) to the state whereby science has to slow down or even go into reverse, it has to go back over things that are already known, it has to prove and re-prove itself, over and over, with no guarantee that even when it does, it won’t have to do so again and again as the scientifically inexperienced are ever drawn and deceived by the lies and misinformation of “simple answers” provided by proponents of the dogmatic religions.

Even with the “liberally” religious, like Conway Morris, accepting the ideas of evolution and a very old universe, there is enough misinformation and a subsequently misinformed public to make it difficult for science to truly take the time to investigate what we are and where we came from with the comprehensive research and study that these questions deserve.

[1] Actually, it was more likely to have been a standard piece of A4 paper, but foolscap is, by far, more poetic.

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