Unintelligent Design

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UNINTELLIGENT
DESIGN
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UNINTELLIGENT
DESIGN
WHY GOD ISN’T AS SMART
AS SHE THINKS SHE IS
ROBYN WILLIAMS
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The lines from ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (p. 152) from Collected Poems by
Philip Larkin are reproduced courtesy of Faber and Faber. The lines
from ‘New Year Letter’ (p. 21) by W.H. Auden © 1941 are
reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
First published in 2006

Copyright © Robyn Williams 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution
(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Williams, Robyn, 1944– .
Unintelligent design : why God isn’t as smart as she thinks
she is.
ISBN 978 1 74114 923 4.
ISBN 1 74114 923 1.
1. Intelligent design (Teleology). 2. Religion and science.
3. Science - Philosophy. I. Title.
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CONTENTS
Contents
In the beginning 1
PART I
1 Proud ignorance 9
2 A cosmic coincidence? 22
3 Four revolutions 42
4 Vile bodies, or, does God ever get a bad back? 57
5 Original sin: trouble in the brain 74
6 Intelligent sex 88
7 From Dayton to Dover 103
8 ID in Australia 120
PART II
9 God’s only excuse 133
10 Williams versus God 151
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For Melvin Schmendrick . . .

you owe me!
And thanks to Richard Walsh (RW1)

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IN THE
BEGINNING
The believers in Cosmic Purpose make much of our
supposed intelligence but their writings make one
doubt it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions
of years to experiment in, I should not think Man
much to boast of as the final results of all my efforts.
Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science, 1935
This is a little book about ‘ID’, but it is more than that.

I had long regarded creationism and its belligerent
teenage cousin Intelligent Design as small if noisy players
on the fringe of public life, and thus not worthy of
serious consideration. It was also inappropriate, according
to a few more sombre scientific commentators, to give
ID what Margaret Thatcher used to call ‘the oxygen of
publicity’.
1
UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN
Thatcher was talking about terrorists, and ID is, in

a way, terrorism focused on public education. The means
are devious, the arguments deceitful and the conse-
quences profound. In 2005 and early 2006 it became
plain that the movement was planned, intense and on
course; it stemmed from the same neoconservative origins
as forces that have swayed politics in the United States
since President George W. Bush, an ID supporter, came
to office. So ID needs to be taken seriously as a possibly
malign presence in our times.
In truth, ID is a restatement of an old philosophical
line about complexity and worth reexamining as an idea.
Thomas Aquinas, someone who cherished science and
its deliberations, opined in the thirteenth century that
complicated systems invariably have designers. Nature is
complex and therefore, he felt, a designer was on the
cards. Benedict de Spinoza, in the seventeenth century,
believed in such a Creative Being but thought it
improbable that He had any direct interest in little old
us. In his view, God made a universe for some undisclosed
reason, found that people turned up as a result and
concluded: ‘So what? Mere collateral walk-ons. Noises
off ! Pshaw!’ Such views got Spinoza into trouble and
caused him to conclude: everyone who ‘strives to
comprehend natural things as a philosopher, in place of
admiring them as a stupid man, is at once regarded as
impious’.
2
IN THE BEGINNING
Then David Hume (1711–76) asked why we are so

excited by a universe that we find ourselves able to
understand. But we are products of the very stuff of that
universe, he retorts, so we would expect to be able to
work out what it is made of and how it operates. That
is simply an exercise in self-reference. Like finding that
a mathematical theorem tells you something about your
world when you have yourself defined its terms in
relation to your surroundings.
These three philosophers are among many who have
laid the groundwork for conjectures on our universe
and why it exists. So the second reason to bother about
ID is that it provides a wonderful excuse to take another
brief look at First Causes, in the light of the latest
discoveries in physics.
The third reason for this book is the science itself.
So much is out there for readers to enjoy that I find it
gobsmackingly outrageous that ID can be allowed to
pretend our state of knowledge is inadequate. Incomplete,
certainly, but expanding at a ferocious rate. Whether ID
is a case of proud ignorance or deliberate mendacity is
for you to decide. But in the 2005 US court decision
against the Dover school district in Pennsylvania, which
wanted to tell science students that Intelligent Design
existed as ‘an explanation of the origin of life that differs
from Darwin’s view’, the presiding judge was clear: it
was the latter.
3
Science is replete with delicious examples that scotch

ID’s claims. Take the proposition of irreducible
complexity. A mouse trap is useless unless all its parts
are aligned in a unique way. There are no halfway stages.
This is the standard ID argument and applies to
mechanical mousetraps from hardware stores, not the
Burmese mouse killer snoozing next to me, whose
halfway stages are well worked out.
Put it another way. You try to build an arch from
bricks. The two vertical columns can go up just so far
before the bricks on the curve begin to fall down. But
what if you immersed the structure in sand? The arch
would be supported until the end. Remove the sand
and, presto, it appears as if the arch was erected mirac-
ulously or put up by human engineering.
This happens in nature all the time. Take the arch
in your ear that carries sound. Once it was the unelab-
orated bone in a fish’s gill. That fish came to live close
to land about 370 million years ago, almost amphibi-
ously. It began to take in air from the atmosphere instead
of through water. The gill was therefore held open by
a more articulated bone, forming a tube. As the eons
passed, the fish found it could pick up sound via this
arrangement. Soon a second function was associated with
the humble gill-prop, and hearing on land was invented.
The hammer, anvil and stirrups, snug in your inner ear,
reside there as direct descendants of that ancient
adjustment.
4
IN THE BEGINNING
I come across similar stories dozens of times a week.

That one was published in the journal Nature in January
2006. Another story concerns the origins of DNA. How
could such an astonishingly complex molecule, containing
a computer program for the design of living things, just
appear de novo? Well, of course, it didn’t. Now the
evidence suggests viruses may have been responsible. We
already know that viruses reproduce by invading our
cells and their nuclei, taking over our DNA and forcing
it to make more viruses instead of the stuff from which
we are made. So go back a few steps. What if, two
billion or more years ago, you were a virus without
multicellular creatures to invade? How would you
reproduce? Why not build a template out of what’s
available, a kind of free-living Lego set based on RNA?
Eventually that smaller, humbler viral-RNA manufac-
turing device will become the DNA we know and
cherish and like to pass on to our lovers.
So the third reason for this book is really that it’s
another excuse to gossip about the science itself. The
science is endlessly fascinating. It is also rigorously tested.
Why buy a vehicle flogged by the Dodgy Brothers
when there’s one tested and retested by the best firm
in the business? Science may have its occasional
miscreants and liars, but they are quickly exposed and
expelled. Proud ignorance, on the other hand, like
Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, manages to duck,
5
weave, disappear and then reform in disguise. And like

him, it’s almost indestructible.
Science matters and religion matters, but they matter
in different ways. We need the best science we can get
to make our world safe. In the words of the late Carl
Sagan, ‘Science and religion may differ about how the
Earth was made, but we can agree that protecting it
merits our profound attention and loving care.’
ID may be a distraction. Its consequences, however,
may be to divert both science and religion from doing
the work so necessary in our difficult times. That’s been
the role of the proudly ignorant throughout the ages.
Robyn Williams
Gerroa, 16 April 2006
6
PART I
PROUD
IGNORANCE
Proud Ignorance
Science cannot solve the ultimate Mystery of Nature.

And that is because in the last analysis we ourselves
are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.
Max Planck
Sir, I am amazed at your faith in evolution. It far

outweighs my faith in creation. My faith requires only
one mechanism: God’s love. Yours requires three: that
something can come of nothing (the ‘Big Bang’), that
rocks can spontaneously spawn living things (life from
inorganic elements) and that genetic mutations can
turn a flatworm into an Einstein. You win; there is no
doubt that your faith far outweighs mine.
Stephen Brahm, California, letter to The Economist, January 2006
9
You look like a miracle. The odds against your existing

are 115 quadrillion to one.
Starting locally: when you were conceived there were
a couple of million other sperm that could have beaten
yours to your mother’s egg. Then there is the chanciness
of conception. Every minute 60 000 men ejaculate but
only 500 women conceive. Before that, there was the
fluke of your parents’ meeting. In my case they happened
to attend some tedious leftist meeting in London, and
a woman whose family came from deepest Poland began
an affair (they never married) with a Welsh tenor-miner-
rugby-player refugee from a once-green coal-blackened
valley.
Then there is ancient history. If only one entity in
the chain of living things going back three and a half
billion years from you to the primitive blob—the
hundreds of people; the thousands of hominids; the
countless mammals, lizards, amphibians, bony fish, horrid-
looking lamprey-like sucking parasites, spineless swimmers
and millions upon millions of microbes and archaic
lifelets—if only one of them had failed to reproduce
before being snuffed, you wouldn’t be here.
Consider the gigantic eruption of Toba, a volcano in
Sumatra, 74 000 years ago. It shut out the sun for six
years and caused the deaths of all but an estimated 2000
of our human forebears. Fewer people than today occupy
a city office block or a country village carried the future
of humanity.
10
PROUD IGNORANCE
Did I say 115 quadrillion to one? Call that 230

quadrillion to one. You must be special? Perhaps not.
My friend Melvin P. Schmendrick wouldn’t think so.
He can’t think so—he doesn’t exist. Except in my mind.
He is like Harvey the White Rabbit in the old James
Stewart movie, or the person who might occupy the
empty chair at the dining table. His was the sperm that
missed out, the parental encounter that was thwarted by
the sliding doors closing too soon. Melvin has several
trillion cousins—all those who might have been there
instead of you, there behind your eyes, being.
Yes, we are indeed fortunate to be here. But our
presence on Earth does not therefore imply some Grand
Plan, some hidden meaning, some divine purpose.
Melvin’s almost-sad absence simply gives resonance to
the old Irish refrain, ‘We’re here because we’re here,
because we’re here, because we’re here . . .’. But he isn’t!
Professor Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society
of London, presents the same argument about universes
(we’ll come to that), reflecting on the stunningly tight
physical limits within which our own universe, and our
solar system, are ‘arranged’. One smidgen of a difference
in the value of the force of gravity, and the life cycle
of stars like our sun would be changed catastrophically.
Catastrophically for us.
It is not surprising that many people look at this
fluky history and infer that it has been arranged or
designed: an argument by statistical incredulity—always
11
dangerous. Before the modern scientific revolution of

the past 400 years, God was held responsible for putting
us here, and for the ‘here’ itself, and what God made
had to be perfect. Gods, after all, are not ham-fisted as
we are, stumbling through clumsy, makeshift attempts
until we get it almost right. God is never a tinkerer.
Nor is God one of the Dodgy Brothers.
Trouble was that our interpretation of God’s
handiwork kept having to be adjusted as science revealed
more about nature. God, who’d always been assigned to
fill the gaps, found there were fewer and fewer gaps to
fill. He got crowded out. The Earth was not flat; the sun
and stars did not revolve around us; all living things were
not produced at the same time.
God had to be pushed back in time from what
appeared to be a more and more messy creative process
until He was back there in The Beginning, the only
corner left to stand in. As Pope John Paul II once
remarked to my friend, physicist Paul Davies, ‘You can
have what came after the Big Bang, I’ll take what came
before!’
Fair enough. In the late twentieth century there
developed a friendly agreement between science and
religion that their ‘estates’ were essentially separate and
that science could look after most of the ‘how’ questions,
while religion would handle the ‘why’. The late Stephen
Jay Gould wrote his penultimate book on that theme.
One system of explanation did not have to vanquish
12
PROUD IGNORANCE
the other. They could coexist in a society that respected

individual world views so long as they did not seek to
impose themselves on others. It was one of the delights
of a civilised society that those holding spiritual beliefs
of various kinds could engage with the scientifically
minded to discuss it all, at length, sometimes on air. It
is no coincidence that some of my closest and dearest
colleagues are in the religious department of the ABC.
We have lots in common: books, scholarship, argumen-
tativeness and the love of ideas (and wine).
So where did Intelligent Design spring from, like a
boil on a bum? Why is it in the courts, in the headlines,
making noise? Is it merely a stroppier version of the
usual debates, or something more insidious?
I want to suggest it is the latter, a politically sinister
movement whose intentions are not enlightenment but
rather conversion to a cause, and one that seeks to limit
intellectual freedom and gain recruits. It is an outrider
of a conservative movement having roots in both the
US and other centres of self-righteous atavism, and its
rejection of science is one of the most shocking mani-
festations of relativism in our postmodern age.
Is this the kind of strident accusation that is sometimes
seen coming from atheists such as Richard Dawkins?
Like him, am I guilty of jaundiced bellicosity about a
mere passing nuisance? When I discussed Intelligent
Design with religious broadcaster John Cleary on
Breakfast on ABC Radio National towards the end of
13
2005, he remarked that scientists should carry some of

the blame for the spread of ID because of the spleen
vented by Dawkins and his ilk. As though such spleen
were totally unjustified.
But I disagree. Go back to Richard Dawkins’s
magisterial book The Blind Watchmaker, first published
in 1986, and be amazed. It’s all there, carefully argued
and with every creationist chestnut—from perfect eyes
to fully formed wings and missing links—demolished
with evidence stacked to the sky. How dare anyone
bring out these tired, discredited, shop-soiled neo-
creationist wares and expect to be taken seriously?
Richard (a friend of mine) has every reason to be cross.
And to be accused, at the same time, of evangelical
atheism, as if there were some clandestine movement
with cadres hiding in dimly lit rooms plotting the
downfall of God, like some newly hatched lunge against
the monasteries, spreading the anti-Christ. To be accused
of such malfeasance is absurd. Atheists like me don’t
think about God at all—unless provoked. We think about
everything else that life’s rich burden thrusts at us. But
God doesn’t arise. Atheism, in this sense, isn’t an absence
of something. We are not lacking anything that matters
to us; we do not see believers possessing something we
covet. We have no feeling whatever of a mystical presence,
a hidden creative hand, or of some remote Being who
cares a jot for whether we live or die. We have a clearly
argued belief as to where an ethical code comes from
14
PROUD IGNORANCE
and why human beings need one to survive; we have

absolutely no feeling of emptiness in our lives because
God, for us, like Melvin Schmendrick, isn’t around.
What also makes us angry, apart from ID’s proud and
wilful ignorance of what science actually says, is that
our times are dominated by powerful men causing misery
‘in the name of God’ while insisting that theirs is the
only way. I have some passing knowledge of the character
of Jesus, of his doctrines of forgiveness, love and restraint.
The deeds of leaders such as Tony Blair and George W.
Bush, both loud proclaimers of piety, have as much
resemblance to these qualities as Little Dorritt does to
the Boston Strangler. Bush, as governor of Texas, executed
152 convicted criminals, some innocent, many mentally
ill or daft (10 per cent is the official figure), most after
years incarcerated on death row in cells smaller than the
average cupboard. Would Jesus pull the switch on the
electric chair or squeeze the hypodermic syringe
containing deadly poison? Would he really?
Richard Dawkins has also mused about Islamic
terrorists’ conviction that they will not face oblivion after
their short careers as living bombs but receive virgins,
proximity to the Prophet and various other rewards for
their acts of cruelty. (How female bombers are rewarded
has been the subject of much unsavoury speculation.) It
is a spectacularly nasty Get-Out-of-Jail card and Dawkins
has every right, once more, to be cross.
15
Intelligent Design is a morphed version of creationism,

rebranded after the latter’s collision with the American
Constitution and the Supreme Court in 1987. That is
when creationism was seen clearly and unambiguously
as a religious movement and therefore, as provided by
the First Amendment, forbidden from formal inclusion
in schools. The Founding Fathers, many of noncon-
formist stock, coming from the harsh lessons of an
institutionally sanctioned church in England, opted from
the start for a separation of religion from the state, and
so also from education. The religious right in America
has been trying to regain the classrooms ever since; ID
is their latest Trojan Turkey. Get into the science
curriculum and you win tacit credibility—although
Intelligent Design is as scientific as the tooth fairy or
Santa Claus.
Is all this a minor fuss at the back of the playground?
Is it an American drama with no significant import for
Australia? The answer is NO in both instances.
Science, however powerful, however much recognised
as humanity’s greatest achievement, is being jostled on
all fronts. About half of America’s immense population
believes that the creation story as told in the Bible
accounts for the origin of human beings. Sixty per cent
(according to findings published by the National Science
Foundation) believe in ESP; 30 per cent that UFOs are
space vehicles from other civilisations; 88 per cent in
alternative medicine; 40 per cent that astrology is scientific.
16
PROUD IGNORANCE
Michael Shermer, who writes for Scientific American,

estimates that a staggering 70 per cent do not
comprehend the scientific process.
Science is becoming more and more inconvenient
for many of our leaders with its warnings about bio-
diversity, climate and the impact we have on nature in
general. Science is at the same time being forced to
become more commercial and to compromise its inde-
pendence for the benefit of those special interests who
fund it. The attacks on its probity are becoming almost
bizarre.
Paul Johnson is a historian. He used to edit the left-
leaning magazine New Statesman but now writes regularly
for the conservative Spectator. He is a classic neocon and
inveighs whenever he can against ‘intellectuals’, whom
he sees as agents of Robespierre and the French
Revolution bent on tyranny and the establishment of
concentration camps.
On Darwin he writes: ‘The decisive culture war of
the 21st century is likely to be between the Darwinian
fundamentalists and those who believe in God and the
significance of human life. It will be prolonged and
bitter.’ This is Great Britain he is writing about, not
Louisiana or West Virginia—mild, tolerant Blighty, home
of Charles Darwin himself. He goes on:
Most observers today would put their money on the

Darwinians. They already control the universities of the
17
West, or at least their science departments, and persecute

with ferocity any who deviate from their narrow
orthodoxies. Such heretical scholars—whatever their
qualifications or the strength of their arguments—are
simply labelled ‘creationists’ and dismissed or barred
from academic posts. Intelligent Christians are lumped
with the Mad Mullahs or the Bible-Thumpers of the
Midwest, and are marginalised in the media and public
debate.
A final Johnsonian flourish, reminding one of the

fashion for Armageddon in some sections of Republican
America:‘I foresee a sorrowful process of events in which
the triumph of the Darwinians may ultimately lead to
the extinction of the human race. Evolution to
destruction, or self-destruction, is part of the Darwinian
concept, but if the theory itself should bring it about,
that indeed would be a singularity. Not inconceivable
though.’
Anti-intellectual by his own confession, Johnson is
accusing a major section of British (and Western) culture
of ambitions for the same kind of vicious thought control
that Joseph Stalin attempted in the Soviet Union. In
Australia this section is smeared as ‘elites’. Odd how the
word once implied high status; now it is intended to
denote the kind of self-elected, cosseted few who
parasitised the majority in the Soviet Union: the nomen-
18
PROUD IGNORANCE
klatura. According to their critics, elites include all those

from ‘sheltered workshops’ (that is, funded by the
taxpayer), such as universities, some schools and—
whoops!—the ABC; they apparently drink chardonnay
and chatter a lot. Their sometimes bleak prognostications
on growth are seen as undermining the vigour of the
nation’s economy and as being an impediment to progress.
In America the Republican Party, under the spell of
its shameless Machiavelli, Karl Rove, ensured its re-
election in 2004 by, for the first time effectively,
marshalling the religious right. This substantial chunk
of the voting public had hitherto neglected the ballot
box. Rove changed this and George W. Bush swept back
into power (having fiddled his way there on the first
try). A goodie bag of rightist favourites, including ID,
were accordingly displayed to tempt them during the
campaign.
In his troubling book The Republican War on Science,
journalist Chris Mooney shows how Bruce Chapman,
like Paul Johnson, has travelled the full distance from
liberal to neocon, from being the author in 1966 of The
Party That Lost Its Head, which warned Republicans that
they risked becoming (like British Conservatives) the
‘stupid’ party, to heading in 2005 the institute promoting
ID, the Discovery Institute. This is the base from which
ID’s boosters have launched their attempt to force an
entry into the public school system.
19
Of this campaign, Mooney writes:
That is where the true threat emerges. ID theorists and

other creationists don’t like what the overwhelming
body of science has to tell us about where human
beings come from. Their recourse? Trying to interfere
with the process by which children are supposed to
learn about the best scientific (as opposed to religious)
answers that we have to this most fundamental of
questions. No matter how many conservative Christian
scholars Bruce Chapman and the Discovery Institute
manage to get on their side, such interference represents
the epitome of anti-intellectualism.
In this little book I shall take a swift look at some

of the political terrain covered by ID in recent times
and revisit a few of the movement’s favourite biological
howlers. I cannot begin, however, to match the depth
of writers such as Dawkins, Gould and Sagan on science
or Mooney and others on politics. This will be more
of a primer than a text, its aim to send you in search
of the full opuses.
You and I may be unique, unlikely and have much
to wonder about in the mystery of our origins. But, as
many have said before, there is far, far more wonder and
delight in the nature that science reveals and the marvels
of intellectual insights by which this has been achieved
than in any Just So stories dreamed up by shamans.
20
PROUD IGNORANCE
As for intellectuals, or ‘elites’, W.H. Auden had it well

summed up last century in ‘New Year Letter’:
To the man in the street, who I’m sorry to say,

Is a keen observer of life,
The word ‘intellectual’ suggests straight away
A man who’s untrue to his wife.
21
A COSMIC
COINCIDENCE?
A Cosmic Coincidence?
Politics is for the present, but an equation is something

for eternity.
Albert Einstein, 1952
At first glance the cosmos looks as if it was prepared

specially for you and me by some heavenly bespoke
tailor. Everything about it is just right. If only one of
half a dozen key qualities of its constituents were different,
the suit wouldn’t even begin to fit: life like ours would
be impossible. Stars wouldn’t live long enough, everything
would swiftly become a black hole or, just as bad, matter
would be merely a thin mist. Then, more locally, if the
solar system were not just so and Earth not blessed with
unique qualities we would either freeze or fry—or both
on the same day! Finally, if the moon hadn’t taken its
22
A COSMIC COINCIDENCE?
place just in time, after nearly turning our planet to

rubble, we might be little more than bugs on an arid
Martian-type landscape.
How we scored the trillion-to-one trifecta, which
looks every inch like a miracle, is a story that has unfolded
in the past 50 years or so. It stars some of the best-
known names in science, most of them based in
Cambridge. This is not too much of a surprise, as Trinity
College alone, where Isaac Newton and Bertrand Russell
did their stuff and where a former Master (the Rev.
William Whewell) actually invented the term ‘scientist’,
has produced as many Nobel Prize winners as most of
the rest of Europe combined. But those who’ve
contributed to our knowledge of the cosmos were—
are—not remotely like a bunch of beaming boffins all
agreeing with each other and toasting their collective
successes in port at mutual admiration societies. They
fought, they made mad leaps of imagination and they
got some things horribly wrong.
But what did they discover? Now, in the first part
of the twenty-first century, is it possible for us to tell
whether this universe of ours is the ultimate in Intelligent
Design, crafted to the last decimal place to our
convenience—or whether it is simply the only one in
which anyone could ever have had the chance to ask
this question? Is this, in other words, the only universe
in which we could exist and begin to enquire about its
construction?
23
And then there is this final conundrum: Why did we

take such an inordinate amount of time to turn up? If
you stretch your arms really, really wide, as far as your
fingers will point, and imagine that that span is the
length of time life has been on Earth (3.5 billion years),
then our presence here is but the finest whisk of a file
across your fingernail, barely a sliver of cuticle. Yet the
age of the universe is four times greater than that span
of your arms. That’s one heck of a build-up!
Or are we an afterthought?
Or no thought at all?
The universe began 13.7 billion years ago.

One of the delights of my trade is that you can be
among the first to get answers to some of the really
fascinating questions. Answers are coming faster today
because there are more scientists working than at any
other time in history. They have powerful instruments
and even more powerful concepts.
Just before I became a science journalist, in 1972,
the great British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle was in a stand-
off fight with the authorities in Cambridge. At the time
Fred was probably the most famous living scientist in
the world. Yet he came from ‘umble stock’, from a
working-class family in Yorkshire, and retained that blunt,
plainspoken manner for which the region is famous (and
Cambridge less so). He was a novelist of distinction, had
some of his science fiction performed on BBC TV, gave
24
public lectures to packed houses and was in line for the

greatest prizes science has to offer—knighthoods, Nobel
Prizes, the lot.
His contributions to physics were an extraordinary
mixture of wild conjecture and inspired brilliance. He
and his friends Tommy Gold and Hermann Bondi had
underwritten the ‘steady-state’ theory of the universe,
proposing that the universe had always been there and
that it was capable of hatching a speck of matter regularly
from nothing. In fact it isn’t such a loopy notion when
you remember that Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2,
describes mathematically the relationship of energy to
matter—according to the steady-staters, the energy in
the nothingness actually condenses to something material.
This ‘continuous creation’ yielded, according to Hoyle
et al., about one particle (one atom of hydrogen) per
kilometre per year. Unfortunately the evidence was
against them, and you can see that evidence on television
when you are between channels. The buzz on the screen
is the set picking up what’s left of the echo of the Big
Bang all those 13.7 billion years ago.
How this was discovered is one of the great yarns of
twentieth-century science. Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson were taking measurements of microwave radiation
at the Bell Labs in New Jersey and kept getting inter-
ference. Was the apparatus askew? Had they got the
set-up wrong? Why was there always this faint noisy
interference coming through whatever they did? Could
25
pigeon poop on their instruments be causing the

nuisance? They cleaned them thoroughly. No good. Still
that buzz.
At this point the average boffin gives up, changes
career, opens a doner kebab shop or retires to Florida.
Penzias and Wilson, instead, said Aha! and realised what
the buzz really was: an echo of the Big Bang. It still
sends out a shimmer of about 4 Kelvin (4° Celsius above
absolute zero) and you can see it on your TV screen. There
it is between channels, flickering grey, black and white.
Actually it was Fred, irascible Yorkshire man that he
was, who dubbed that first explosion pejoratively the
Big Bang. It stuck. An explosive universe, the alternative
to Fred’s steady-state, had been proposed first, in the
1920s, by Alexander Friedman and then elaborated by
Eddington and Le Maitre. Its final flourish was given
by George Gamov, who explained its heat, and then
Alan Guth of MIT, who showed how the explosion
could have been in two stages, one of them ‘inflationary’.
At Cambridge the Bang was championed by Martin
Ryle. Ryle was a toff—and a leftie, something else to
irritate the no-nonsense free-enterprising northerner.
But Fred Hoyle was a theoretician, Ryle an instrument
man who actually looked at the sky. If the Bang was
the right theory, you would see stars and galaxies still
rushing away from each other as the universe expanded,
as Edwin Hubble had proposed.
26
And so they did. The ‘red shift’ was the clue, the
colour you would see if heavenly bodies were indeed
moving away. Ryle got the Nobel Prize, somewhat
controversially. Fred, notoriously, didn’t. As for the Big
Bang, it is now the received wisdom. The news from
Penzias and Wilson was surely the clincher.
It’s odd how scientific evidence turns up without
regard to anybody’s private convictions. Fred Hoyle was
a fierce critic of Darwinian evolution, yet he was offering
the world a picture of an eternal universe. Martin Ryle
was a political radical, yet he was presenting a cosmology
that would please both archbishops and popes. The
Catholic Church, in 1951, was delighted with the idea
of the Bang—however long ago it occurred, it seemed
to fit the Bible’s narrative of a beginning. They adopted
it with alacrity.
Fred came to Australia back in 1972 to look after
the construction and opening of what then promised
to be the foremost instrument of its kind in the world,
the Anglo Australian Telescope on Siding Spring
Mountain near Coonabarabran in northern New South
Wales. He gave no sign when I interviewed him of the
turmoil in Cambridge, which was bringing that most
brilliant stage of his career to a close.
My next interview was with Olin Eggen, then
professor of astronomy at the Australian National
University in Canberra, and in charge of the Australian
interests in the telescope. During our conversation he
27
said that one of the installation’s roles would be to look

back to the beginning of time and discover what it was
like back then—and at that point he became confused—
‘twenty million million years ago’.
He had mixed up American with British billions and
we got the age of the universe wrong by a factor of
ten. Eggen meant to say 20 000 million years ago. Only
one listener from one of the 32 countries we were
broadcasting to (we were participating in a worldwide
Commonwealth Day hook-up) noticed the error and
wrote in.
Well, it’s no longer that rough round number. In 2002
the stunningly successful satellite WMAP took pictures
of the distant edges of the universe and showed how
the great vista could be spooled back in time by 13 700
million years. WMAP stands for Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe, a tiny satellite which spent a year
scanning the sky and taking measurements of the radiation
Penzias and Wilson had stumbled across. It produced a
picture of the most ancient light yet seen: an oval blue-
green-yellow image with tiny regions of red—the
universe as it was near the beginning. Its composition
was bewildering: only 4 per cent stuff like atoms, 23 per
cent ‘dark matter’ and 73 per cent ‘dark energy’. So most
of the universe is made up of something nobody knew
about before 1997!
A further conclusion of WMAP: that the world will
28
expand forever and not just pull back into a ‘Big Crunch’,
a reversal of the Big Bang.
What Fred thought of this I cannot say. He is now
dead. I suspect he would have come up with some deft
evasion of the inevitable, maybe seizing on those
mysterious ‘dark’ ingredients as props for his sagging
theories. My last few interviews with him were, typically,
a mixture of triumph and mild farce. The triumph was
his revelation of where the elements come from. The
farce was his dalliance with ‘panspermia’ and fossil fakery,
a quixotic diversion inspired by his dismissal of Darwinian
orthodoxy. (He had once dismissed the idea that life had
evolved through natural selection as tantamount to saying
that a hurricane had torn through a junkyard and left
behind a Boeing 747.) Panspermia was his theory that
the influenza virus, and even HIV, might have descended
to Earth as germ clouds from space.
His work on the elements, on the other hand, one
of the great feats of the human intellect, showed that
they are ‘cooked’ in the immense heat of stars, with
hydrogen atoms, the lightest, fusing first to become
helium, with a molecular weight of two, and then on
to become carbon and the metals such as iron, with
heavier and heavier ones resulting. When the process
reaches its end stage the star explodes as a supernova,
flinging its mixture of elements to the depths of space.
Here they become asteroids, planets—and, in rare circum-
29
stances, us. It has been said many times, but the signif-
icance is sublime: ‘We are star stuff.’
For this work Fred should have got the Nobel Prize.
As my friend Robert Hanbury Brown, professor of
astronomy at the University of Sydney, once put it to
me: ‘Can you imagine anything more significant, more
astounding than working out where the elements, the
basic ingredients of matter, come from? Fred did it!’
This was a kind of evolution, if you please, though
not with any natural selection. It raises two tantalising
puzzles. First, why is there this tendency in matter toward
complexity? Second, why is there so very much of it
in the first place?
I’ll tackle the second problem first. If God’s intention
was to put man on Earth, made in his own image,
surrounded by parkland, creatures and, eventually, a
spouse, why make such a large planet? The Garden of
Eden could not have been much larger than Central
Park—enough to enable Adam and Eve to have an
amusing existence—so why all those big continents,
deserts and expanses of ice larger even than the whole
of Australia? And why a vast solar system with planets
enough to make our own look puny? And why a galaxy
within which distances are so huge that the sermon on
the mount travelling at the speed of light would barely
leave the neighbourhood and could reach the galaxy’s
boundary only after unimaginable eons. And then there
are the billions of stars other than our sun in the galaxy
30
and then . . . trillions of other galaxies extending as far as

one can imagine. And beyond that too. This is over-
engineering, surely, beyond even the wildest indulgences
of those well-known inflators of building estimates the
Dodgy Brothers!
Intelligent Design it isn’t. I argued this point with
another Cambridge astrophysicist, who also happens to
be a vicar: Professor Sir John Polkinghorn. John (he’s
quite informal) refused to accept that the grander universe
is a sign of God’s profligacy. It’s simply a consequence
of the basic physical design he chose. Opt for Singular-
ities, Big Bangs, inflationary expansions and that is what
you get. It takes an age to make a galaxy; you need vast
star systems to make atoms of carbon.
So why not go for a simpler model? If you want
only to go over the hill, why not choose a pushbike
instead of a Ferrari—a trillion Ferraris at that? This is
where even courteous friends have to concede that it’s
a mystery. Why didn’t God go for a faster physics or a
smaller precinct? He could have made up any rules or
scientific laws He fancied. Both theist and atheist must
agree that, at least in the mature universe—after the first
fraction of a second—that’s the physics we have. Big
Physics.
Just as the universe is overlarge for our human story,
and over aged—why wait ten billion years before getting
the whole Genesis yarn going?—so the arrangement for
the solar system is strangely convenient. Our planet seems
31
to be so well ‘designed’ for our presence—not any old

planet will do. Of those in our immediate neighbour-
hood most are too hot, others giant balls of gas, the rest
tiny, arid and in deep freeze. Most are bombarded by
cosmic missiles and would have their biomass obliterated
so often it could barely reach beyond the germ stage.
Of the 170 or so remote planets discovered in the last
ten years, none looks anything like home for people.
Only one so far discovered—20 000 light years away, in
Sagittarius—is small and rocky like Earth. Yet its surface
temperature is minus 200°C!
Earth, meanwhile, has a set of characteristics that
appear to be customised. Early on we were hit by a
colossal rock, which gouged a hole, fused with the flying
detritus and formed the moon. This sits at just the right
distance from us to create precisely the gravitational
force needed to stop our planet flipping out of its stable
rotation every few thousand years; its position is perfect
for providing tides to rinse our shorelines. As if this
were not enough, down range a bit sits ‘the goal keeper’,
Jupiter, diverting and catching most of the mighty
projectiles that would otherwise hammer us to custard.
Add to this what Jim Lovelock calls the Gaia Principle—
what looks like a feedback system maintaining our
atmospheric temperatures and gases within certain
comfortable limits—and we seem blessed. With all these
happy circumstances it’s little wonder that a few conclude
32
that Someone’s been setting up a Wendy House for us

and our friends.
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have elaborated a vision
of Earth behaving as if it were a living thing. The name
Gaia was suggested to Lovelock by his neighbour, the
novelist William Golding, and may have queered the
issue in some minds, making it seem romantic and
oddball. In fact it is a rigorous application of chemical
and physical relationships to explain how remarkably
stable our atmosphere remains, just as we require. It
doesn’t mean that the planet is an earth goddess, consid-
erately tuning things to suit us, but that the veneer of
plants and animals on land and in the oceans is linked
to the air in ways that affect it. Whether this ‘arrangement’
will survive global warming and climate change is
something Lovelock and many others doubt.
The same point emerges from Martin Rees’s book,
Just Six Numbers. These six are the crucial settings for
our world. Alter any one of them and it all collapses.
They are:
• The three dimensions in which we operate. Yes, it is

possible to have two—a flat place in which there are
no globes, only discs. Or even up to eleven dimensions,
which I cannot even begin to describe,
• N, the ratio of gravity to electromagnetism,
• epsilon, the ratio of mass lost to energy when hydrogen
fuses to helium in stars,
33
• omega, the total of dark matter,

• lambda, the cosmological constant, and
• Q, the scale of smoothness (versus lumpiness) in the
universe.
Fiddle with any of these values and you rearrange

everything: the age of the universe, how tightly atoms bind,
how long stars last and therefore what they make. Whether
you end up with nothing but custard or, instead, lumpy
bits that become suns, planets and galaxies, any other
combination and the world we know could not exist.
So how can we reconcile ourselves to this? Well,
according to ID, the answer is a kind of reverse
engineering. God calculated the universe He needed for
people and applied the necessary numbers.
There’s no doubt we are here as we are because of
those six numbers and the way the solar system is set
up. In other circumstances life, if it appeared, would be
different. Dream up any science fiction scenario you
fancy and you get something quite unlike us. Simon
Mitton and Freeman Dyson refer to The Black Cloud,
one of Fred Hoyle’s novels, in which the alien is dissipated
like a cloud and doesn’t even need ET’s humanoid
bisymmetry and bug eyes. It’s another example of my
old friend Melvin P. Schmendrick (who still doesn’t
exist): in other worlds we would be other living things.
Martin Rees cleverly side-steps the problem of a
world tailor-made for Homo sapiens by recourse to the
34
concept of a profligate tailor and many other universes.

We are not surprised, he says, on entering a clothing
megastore, to find a suit that fits comfortably. So it may
be that there are multiverses—other universes with
different kinds of physics, in which life would be unimag-
inably different. Except that it would still, on Darwinian
principles, have to be adapted to its surroundings.
I find this (sorry, Martin) a bit of a conjuring trick.
We have no knowledge of any universe but our own,
and that’s mind-boggling enough. That we emerge from
a particular set of physical limits—and by we I mean all
forms of organic life, from germs to Germans—is given.
Science can tell us how this may have happened. Not why.
Religion can have a go. But some of us don’t accept

that free kick and regard it as a move too far. Others
are more adventurous, which is their prerogative. Either
way, there is nothing in the cosmos to let us infer, willy
nilly, the hand of a Designer. We can infer only necessary
order. And limited order at that: our time here may be
limited indeed.
The idea that this world is somehow arranged for
our own benefit is sometimes called the theory of the
anthropic universe. It is one that another astrophysicist,
Frank Tipler, has written about (The Anthropic Cosmo-
logical Principle, with John Barrow*, in 1988) and taken
* Winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize
35
to its limits. In its most straightforward form the theory

shows the universe as having a few parts in which the
laws of physics as we know them apply and in which
it is possible for life to evolve. It takes a few billion years
for stars to boil up the ingredients as per Hoyle, then
to blow up and distribute them. And then a few more
billion for a solar system to congeal from them and for
the suitable planet to cool down. Add about three million
more years for life to reach a metazoan stage and Bingo!
you’re up to about the 13.7-billion-year mark we have
got to in the story so far.
That’s what I sometimes think of as the curate’s egg
version.You need only parts of the universe to be suitable
for life, and the rest can carry on in their own weird
way. The upmarket version of an anthropic universe is
one uniquely established on the basis of Martin Rees’s
six (and other) numbers.
To sum up: once the universe is given the physical
settings it possesses, then its size and age arise accordingly.
If God’s prime focus was to produce human beings, He
has certainly gone a very long way around. If He were
all-powerful and determined, He could have chosen one
of the infinite alternatives Rees has on offer. Maybe
God wasn’t fussed about time passing or materials wasted.
However, it does appear to be an almighty diversion.
Unless He happens to be awfully keen on astronomy,
that is.
36
Frank Tipler’s deliciously imaginative twist on all this

is to look at a world in the far distant future in which
it is possible to compute the quantum nature of virtually
everything, including you and me. Using the stupendous
energies available from shearing forces in galaxies (could
my local power provider hope to capture them when
it’s hard enough to run a national grid?) we could then
reassemble what we fancied. Want to be resurrected?
Physics one day, offers Tipler, could try.
Now you may object that this usurps God’s function.
But that may be how He does it anyway. Why should
He have only plain magic or bland miracles? Why not
a divine quantum physics?
There remains a curiosity I mentioned at the beginning

of this chapter: the tendency of matter to pursue
complexity. Simon Conway Morris (Cambridge again!)
has looked at this in his book Life’s Solution, in which
he proposes that there is a force intrinsic to our universe
which makes it almost inevitable that it should contain
humans—or at least human-like forms with intelligence
and consciousness. It is easy to be sympathetic to his
argument. Everywhere we look, from evolving elements
to expanding worlds and orderly solar systems, we see
the growth of complexity. It is as if it’s all leading
somewhere. Could it be leading to us? Are we the
ultimate evolutionary purpose? But Conway Morris is
37
too good a scientist (and not as reckless as Hoyle) to

wrap it all up and tie the bow.
He says: ‘. . . the complexity and beauty of “Life’s
Solution” can never cease to astound. None of it
presupposes, let alone proves, the existence of God, but
all is congruent. For some it will remain as the pointless
activity of the Blind Watchmaker, but others may prefer
to remove their dark glasses. The choice, of course, is
yours.’
Conway Morris chooses God. Fair enough. But he
doesn’t choose ID. One of the problems, though, with
this exuberant late-twentieth-century cosmic speculation,
built on a rich trove of modern physics, is that the
physicists have been infected by more than a little hubris.
Or perhaps it is that of their publishers.
Stephen Hawking, I am assured, did not mention the
deity in his first draft of the enormous best seller A Brief
History of Time, but his editors at Bantam Press encouraged
him to do so. The result was provocative indeed, and
may in part be a reason that creationism and ID gained
their recent momentum, maybe in reaction to, or maybe
to take advantage of, God’s latest good press.
Hawking wrote, invoking his since-abandoned idea
of a TOE—a Theory of Everything: ‘If we do discover
a complete theory, it should in time be understandable
in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists.
Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary
38
people, be able to take part in the discussion of the

question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If
we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate
triumph of human reason—for then we would know the
mind of God.’
Or not.
Fred Hoyle was a maverick. He was, indeed, a tragic

case. His brilliant contributions were diminished by a
willingness to flirt with the absurd. His example is both
a lesson and a warning.
The lesson is that science works best when it
encourages flights of the imagination but also the scepticism
of the doubtful. This tension is the classic underpinning
of the search for truth.
Fred’s best ideas were initially ignored. Only a few
clever colleagues took much notice of them. As a result,
he felt free also to come up with a few turkeys. While
he was ensconced in Cambridge he was open to the
mechanism which we like to call, inelegantly but appro-
priately, ‘the bullshit filter’ of science. This culls the
rubbish. While he was among his fellows, Fred was told
his steady-state cosmology did not add up and should
be shelved. It could have further relevance as new
findings were produced, but for now Big Banging
was better.
Later, as a kind of freelance, semi-detached thinker,
he came up with everything from cosmic germ clouds
39
through to famous fossils such as Archaeopteryx being

fakes. The same cauldron of brain power that sparked
brilliance also yielded dross. It sidestepped the rigour
that science demands.
Martin Rees, now at the pinnacle of the scientific
establishment as President of the Royal Society of London
and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, has every
sympathy with his old colleague. Rees, despite his
eminence, realises that institutions can also stifle originality.
Hoyle could have been kept happily attached to academe,
says Rees, without being encumbered with bureaucratic
responsibilities. That way would have given us the best
of his iconoclasm, but without the codswallop.
Is there a lesson to be learnt from his example for
Intelligent Design? No wild idea should be banned
from intellectual discourse. Giving it official consent,
albeit by proxy, is a different matter. All universities have
men and women with wild ideas. Not all of these people
are given general assent simply because they carry the
label ‘professor’. No school of public health has adopted
Fred’s version of the origin of plagues; they all preferred
vaccines and condoms to the celestial umbrellas he
advocated.
Some concepts are inimical to the truth and distort
it. ID is one of them. Debate whatever you wish, but
do not give it official sanction unless it has earned its
place in the hard-built edifice of knowledge.
40
Fred Hoyle was beaten up, or may even have fallen

down and injured himself, during one of his long walks
in his beloved countryside. He never really recovered.
Did he ever regret his flights of fancy? I never got a
chance to ask him that final, curly question.
41
FOUR
REVOLUTIONS
Four revolutions
To see the entire sequence of a human chromosome

for the first time is like seeing an ocean liner emerging
out of the fog, when all you’ve ever seen before are
rowboats.
Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome
Research Institute
1953 was a very good year. I was nine and living in

Vienna. The Queen was crowned, Everest was conquered
and—euphoria!—Stalin died. All this was in the
newspaper, the Volkstimme, which I read every day (even
at that age, I’m afraid).
What I didn’t read, or don’t recall, is mention of a
paper published in the journal Nature in April 1953 by
James Watson and Francis Crick on the structure of
42
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Perhaps, as with Fred

Hoyle’s stupendous insight into the formation of the
elements, no one outside a small group saw it for what
it was—the start of a revolution.
These breakthroughs seem to occur every fifty years.
The Origin of Species was published in 1859, but Darwin
could have got it done a few years earlier if he hadn’t
been so laggardly, or nervous. Gregor Mendel, in Austria,
did his genetic experiments with peas in the 1860s, but
his work was not properly discovered and made known
until 1901. DNA was revealed in 1953 and then, almost
fifty years later, in 2001 Francis Collins and Craig Ventor
announced the mapping of the human genome, the
complete sequence of our genetic code.
I was in the crowded room when they did so. Despite
the notorious rivalry between the two men and their
separate projects, one public, the other private, all was
courteous and cooperative. Both talked about the signif-
icance of knowing the complete human genetic code
and both insisted it was intended to be freely available
information. Some journalists sniggered. We’re like that.
But everybody knew they were at a turning point
in history. The journal Science (for Ventor) and the journal
Nature (for Collins) came out that day with the genome
sequence of our species and, what’s more, a fast, powerful
technique for cracking other genomes. Ventor’s cavalier
impatience with what he saw as the plodding nature of
the old-fashioned methods had enabled whiz kids to
43
find means to do the job in years less than anyone (apart

from Ventor) had dared hope.
After the press conference there were drinks. I found
myself standing next to a bemused Francis Collins. I
fetched him a red wine. ‘Some day!’ ‘Sure is!’ Such are
the profundities of key moments. I didn’t know then
that Collins is an ardent Christian. Craig Ventor,
meanwhile, was surrounded by backslappers. Of his faith
I am not aware. What I do know is that he is now on
a world tour in his splendid boat collecting rare creatures
from the sea so he can examine their DNA in the hope
of exploiting it for drugs.
That day in San Francisco it occurred to me that
now we had nearly all the pieces to the puzzle of life:
how species evolve (by means of natural selection); how
their characteristics are expressed (via their genes); how
the genes give rise to parts of the body and even
behaviour (by coding for proteins): and the timing of
all this, both through history (revealed by the rate of
change in DNA) and in organisms (through switches in
DNA itself ). This—without even mentioning fossils,
geological change or ecology—had to put the kibosh
on creationism and its weird cousins once and for all.
And it did. Which is why the clown whipped off
stage, changed his funny hat and silly nose, ran back in
a different costume and yodelled ‘ID!’ The enormous
edifice of evidence produced separately by different
branches of science all fitted together and told the same
44
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
compelling story of how we came to be. What course

was available to the naysayers other than to agree, in
part, and coopt it? The Book of Life, as the human
genome became known popularly, was a triumph of
‘design’, they declared. Like the flagellum, the eye or
the make-up of protein, this was a mechanism that could
not exist only in part. DNA was a manifestation of God’s
role as creative engineer.
I have already, in my introduction, given an inkling
of how structures may evolve gradually for one purpose,
but then get diverted for some other purpose entirely,
so that they appear to be specially manufactured.
Of course our genome is elegant and complex and,
like the rest of the natural world, impressively organised.
But produced in one hit by an Intelligent Designer?
Not at all.
DNA is, in fact, wonderfully ad hoc. It includes jumping
genes, as discovered by Nobel laureate Barbara
McClintock: segments of DNA that leap about in the
genetic sequence at different times. It has inclusions of
past visitors such as germs that left their fingerprints in
our very design. Our finely crafted DNA also consists
of no less than about 96 per cent plain junk. It is a
veritable work in progress.
But that is where the tension lies. On the one hand,
our DNA needs to remain stable so that instructions
can be read off as needed throughout our lives and so
the basic code of us can be passed intact to our children.
45
On the other hand, we may sometimes need to shuffle

the deck, include some rare mutations, so that we can
adapt suitably to a challenging environment. Some of
the toughest challenges come invisibly, from diseases.
Killer plagues are usually parasites in new forms. It
is not in their interest to murder their host (ultimately,
us). Gradually we become accustomed to strains of germs,
as Spanish soldiers were to European flus and poxes,
while the native Americans they conquered were not.
Some viruses and bacteria have a genome, a kind of
genetic bar code, that can be seen sitting like an ancient
spoor right there within the human genome. It is also
now possible to work out how this happened. Viruses
invade our cell nuclei, where the DNA resides, and take
it over. They change the code to their own so that we
actually are forced to make more of them. It is like a
scene from the movie Alien.
Other visitors who came to stay, other microbes, are the

mitochondria and, in plants, the chloroplasts—vital
engines of energy and biochemical processes without
which larger plants and animals could not exist. They
have their own DNA systems, which can be read
separately. Our bodies are made up of former parasites!
This picture of human life is far from the static,
statuesque finished product depicted by ID, as if God
had made something in His own image, dusted His
hands in fulfilment and taken a long weekend. We are,
46
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
instead, major organic intersections—our bodies comprise

trillions of cells, containing lodgers past and present;
there are double that number of bugs coming and going
in our moist inter-cell spaces; and then there is our
genetic code, which is like a computer at a traffic control
centre during the holiday rush.
At this stage of the argument, as with the creation
of matter, ID agrees to be pushed back in time to a
point when the Creator set the whole game rolling,
rather than bothering to interfere beyond the whistle at
the start. But how far back do you need to go?
Can we say that DNA works only as a full structure?
No, there are smaller-scale versions. Can we say that
DNA is the only code shown to reproduce itself in a
way that life requires in order to sustain itself ? No, there
are plenty of descriptions of simpler reproductive matter,
going as far back as certain clays. For the past forty
years, scientists such as Graham Cairns-Smith have
proposed inorganic crystals based on silicates as the pre-
decessors to DNA in their ability to reproduce inherent
information. The mud itself had a memory which came
before organic coding. There was a mud map before
the computer code. And before even that?
Paul Davies has even come up with a model that
goes beyond the crystalline earth to quantum systems
themselves. Somehow the smallest units of matter became
able to reproduce themselves and pass on information.
‘If life is formed by trial and error,’ Davies writes, ‘speed
47
is the key. This suggests life may have emerged from the
quantum realm directly, without the need for chemical
complexity.’ All you require, he says, is a quantum
replicator and a process for cloning bits of information.
You get variation in the system from the uncertainty,
which is an inescapable part of the nanoworld, the world
of atoms and molecules.
So how did life arise? ‘We gain a clue from modern
computers,’ Davies writes. ‘Quantum systems may be
fast, but they are very fragile. Computers routinely transfer
important data for safekeeping from speedy yet vulnerable
microchips to slow and bulky hard disks or CDs. Perhaps
quantum life began using large organic molecules for
more stable data storage. At some stage these complex
molecules took on a life of their own, trading speed for
robustness and versatility. The way then lay open for
hardy chemical life to go forth and inherit the Earth.’
Maybe also to inherit the heavens. There is plenty
of organic material out there. Fred Hoyle noted that
meteorites, such as the Murchison, carry whiffy substances
(you can actually smell the stuff ), and scores of organic
molecules have been registered out there, not least by
Australia’s own emeritus professor of chemistry from
Monash University, Ron Brown. One can forgive Fred
Hoyle for his panspermia theory: he was half right.
Indeed, Paul Davies has said that life likely existed on
Mars earlier than on Earth and that one of several lumps
of Mars actually found here (he used to carry a bit
48
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
around in his pocket) may even have ‘seeded’ this planet

with germs in much the way Hoyle suggested.
So where does all this leave God’s role in the tale?
Below the quark and beyond the Blue Planet? There
are fewer and fewer gaps for Him to be God of.
What happens when we move in the other direction,
towards complexity, where the products of evolution
such as us, our relatives (as seen by Darwinians) and
trophy creatures like big mammals seem to be top of
the tree? We all by now know—it’s become a cliché—
that we share over 98 per cent of our genes with chimps,
50 per cent with bananas and quite a few with pond
scum. This statement doesn’t do as much for me as it
does for others. Most data in the genome is required
just to run the body, whichever body it happens to be.
Cars, student bangers or flash limos, all have wheels,
axles and boxy bodies; they use petrol, oil and water.
The remaining 2 per cent is a veneer. Which is where
quality or bodginess resides. Although the 2 per cent or
less separating us from chimpanzees seems little, it amounts
to enough to put one creature in the jungle threatened
with extinction and the other in Wall Street trying to
take over the solar system.
Nonetheless, the argument is light years on from the
famous debate in which the Bishop of Oxford sneeringly
inquired of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s champion, whether
it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that
he had descended from a monkey. Last year I stood in
49
the very space where it happened, in the higher floor

space of the Natural History Museum, opposite Keble
College in Oxford. It is now an airy storage area. What
if they had known then, I mused, how great is the
overlap between our primate genomes and how straight-
forward it is to chart the contrasts and obtain accurate
timing about when we diverted paths from a common
ancestor. Now it is believed that we are even closer to
chimpanzees than they are to other apes such as
orangutans, which branched off the primate family tree
around eight million years ago.
Would that knowledge, combined with what Daniel
Dennett calls ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’, namely natural
selection, have silenced the bishop? I doubt it. Simon
Conway Morris lists six characteristics of evolution that,
for him, point to a creation: simplicity, a way to navigate
through a vast number of possibilities, the swift
elimination of misfits, the inherent nature of life,
convergence, and the ‘inevitability of the emergence of
sentience’—or us. Evolution is God’s mechanism for
making people (in his own image), in his view.
Stephen Jay Gould had a different take. He said that
the movie of evolution would not look the same if it
were rerun with a different start. If dinosaurs had not
been wiped out and mammals had not emerged on a
vacated world stage, then intelligent creatures might have
looked like big lizards. A green Jesus with scales or
feathers (birds evolved from dinosaurs) is a bit of a
50
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
challenge but workable. What Gould denies is the

inevitability of our form of life being present. Not every
niche need be filled. Other eras had other solutions and
humans, compared to beetles and bacteria, aren’t a big
deal. Gould could see an alternative modern world devoid
of us. But Conway Morris says we are overwhelmingly
likely. He writes:
. . . the constraints of evolution and the ubiquity of

convergence make the emergence of something like
ourselves a near-inevitability. Contrary to received
wisdom and the prevailing ethos of despair, the
contingencies of biological history will make no long-
term difference to the outcome. Yet the existence of
life itself on the Earth appears to be surrounded with
improbabilities. To reiterate: life may be a universal
principle, but we can still be alone. Whether or not
this is literally true may never be established, and, as
many of us have argued, it is far more prudent to assume
that we are unique, and to act accordingly.
That is the big whammy of the ‘inevitability’ argument.

If it must happen here, it will also happen on Planet
Zog. And there must be billions of planet Zogs. Are
they all to have their virgin births, apostles, crucifixions
and second comings? Gould’s views don’t embrace such
possible overlaps. He says it is a matter of faith, and up
to you to choose. Turn God into the Grand Physicist
51
or Biologist and you court embarrassment. Yet Conway

Morris counters:
Such attitudes fly in the face of traditional wisdoms,

and in part explain the existing antagonisms between
scientific practices and religious sensibilities. Mutual
misunderstandings, fuelled by naivety and ignorance,
can only lead to warfare. Although science may emerge
triumphant, it will be a pyrrhic victory, the conquered
kingdom will lie in ruins, strewn across a plain of infinite
melancholy.
What is the meaning of life, he seems to imply, in

such an empty, indifferent world? If God isn’t in the
genes, maybe in the molecules themselves, what can be
the point of it all?
I find this a daft question. The point is what we
make of it. The relish of everyday things, from food and
drink to the enjoyment of companionship and our natural
surroundings—we all have our own enormous list—
hardly needs the endorsement of an invisible deity to
have meaning, let alone a payoff in a distant heaven.
More on that later.
The real tension between Gould’s indifferent universe
and Conway Morris’s intrinsic purposefulness is what
would happen if we discovered ourselves not to be
unique. If God turns out to have set the machine rolling,
producing both ourselves and ET (or lots of them), then
52
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
the whole Grand Design Theory collapses. Fortunately

this idea is open to scientific investigation, and I look
forward to the evidence being turned up, though it may
take a while.
If the molecules could just as easily have skipped
producing people, as Gould insisted, then that’s it. We
are here by good fortune. On the other hand, if we
arise inevitably from the nature of matter, then so does
intelligent life elsewhere.
No wonder it is better to resort to mystery, as most
theologians prefer to do, and say God is a matter of
faith. The more God becomes dragooned into serving
as Chief Biochemist or Molecular Engineer, the more
embarrassments pop up in His ‘role’. He seems either
slapdash or confused, compromised or simply vague.
Most of all He is unnecessary.
The point we have reached now is one of the greatest
intellectual achievements of all time—a point where the
pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together with
exquisite precision. Is the story complete? Far from it.
Surprises abound. Why so few genes—not 100 000, as
once was presumed, but 30 000 or so? How do these
interact in a cascade of development and timing? What
does the junk DNA do, if anything? Is it part of the
timing mechanism or standby software? Or leftovers,
like belly buttons, men’s nipples or appendices? Why do
some useful characteristics turn up paired with harmful
ones? Is the genome a precise script of our lives—able
53
to tell us when we’ll live, die, go mad, get senile? If it

can reveal so much, how can we keep it private?
James Watson, who signed the famous Nature paper
in 1953 as a very young man and who later became an
instigator of the Human Genome Project, has been
outspoken about what happens next. Many a time I
have seen him in front of audiences, often in strange
postures, warning against eugenics, recalling, how well-
intentioned or evil men have sought to exploit biological
knowledge in the interests of better breeding. Watson
is an eccentric fellow. He grimaces in what turns out
to be a smile, wrinkles his nose like a cornered gerbil
and regularly addresses whole sections of his speech to
his shoes. Once at Balliol College, Oxford, I watched
him whisper to the floor in front of a hall full of perplexed
postgraduates.
Only when he started talking about girls did he perk
up and raise his chin. He had been wandering along
the river that morning and been suddenly reminded of
a young woman he hadn’t thought of for 40 years.
‘Where had that memory been lurking for all that time?
Which chemical store or frozen circuit had held her
image so long?’ He dropped his head and proceeded to
murmur away once more.
He also shared his thoughts on prudence in Australia,
when I introduced him at a keynote address he gave at
the University of New South Wales. Despite having
known me for years, and despite occasional correction,
54
FOUR REVOLUTIONS
he insisted on calling me ‘Roger’ all evening. His brain

this time had clearly been rogered by some association
and I was reminded once more how uncertain and
fallible even our greatest minds often can be. Watson’s
ideas on sociology and politics are quite different in
quality from those he holds on biology, and many of
his friends would worry if Jim were put in charge of a
country. He needs, and I’m sure he realises this, to have
his general opinions tempered by input from all sides:
sociologists, historians, economists (inevitably), artists and
philosophers—and plenty of folk who are not expert at
all, except in the conduct of their own lives.
I have addressed Francis Crick only once. He was at
the Oxford Union talking to a packed house—students
actually did hang from the rafters—about the conse-
quences of his DNA research and his later preoccupation
with the brain. My question to him was prompted by
Professor Derek Denton, founding director of the Florey
Institute in Melbourne. Derek had written a book on
consciousness and wanted to know whether this essential
human quality had sprung de novo from our uniquely
large and complex brain or whether it arose in gradual
stages, evolved through the animal kingdom, much as a
dim light becomes bright. I put this as a question at the
end of the evening.
Crick was clear: the latter. Animals are conscious,
despite Descartes’ view to the contrary. Although it is
never possible to know some of a creature’s mind, or
55
even another person’s, one can do tests which offer

pretty convincing indirect evidence. Animals can be
shown to exhibit intention, planning, theory of mind, even
humour. All are characteristic of conscious thinking. Their
DNA programs lead to sets of proteins. These in turn
lead to brain growth, followed by the establishment and
then the refinement of circuits. Learning is the removal
of circuits you don’t need. It happens in frogs, dogs and
monkeys. The same happens in us. The progression is
manifest.
Another embarrassment: preprogrammed matter gives
us not only, potentially, ET but creatures with supposedly
‘unique’ human qualities as well. Is Fido or Charlie the
Chimp also made in God’s image?
Isn’t it safer, after all, to follow Gould and simply
keep the ‘estates’ of science and religion separate? No
scientist can ever tell us why the universe came to be.
No theologian can compete with the greatest scientists
to explain how the universe developed to be as it is
today. There is enough to worry about in thinking
through the consequences of the scientific revolution
without having non sequiturs thrown into the process.
56
VILE BODIES, OR,

DOES GOD EVER
GET A BAD BACK?
Vile bodies, or, does God ever get a bad back?
The proposed intelligent designer was in some exercises

hardly an honours student—indeed hardly a pass
student.
Professor Derek Denton
One of the most delicious parts of Richard Dawkins’s

book The Blind Watchmaker is where he takes on the
Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, author of The
Probability of God.
Dawkins refers to the bishop’s case as the Argument
from Personal Incredulity. He refers to the very reverend
gentleman’s faint understanding of polar bears and their
coats, as illustrated by the following passage from
57
Montefiore’s book: ‘As for camouflage, this is not always

easily explicable on neo-Darwinian premises. If polar
bears are dominant in the Arctic, then there would seem
to have been no need for them to evolve a white-
coloured form of camouflage.’
Dawkins translates this astonishing paragraph like this:
‘I personally, off the top of my head sitting in my study,
never having visited the Arctic, never having seen a polar
bear in the wild, and having been educated in classical
literature and theology, have not so far managed to think
of a reason why polar bears might benefit from being
white.’
Predators need to surprise their prey. This is obvious
to some. But the point about science is that even the
obvious needs to be tested, exhaustively, just in case.
Then we can be confident about what we think we
know about bears. Bishops, and lay folk too, may like
to take the trouble as well to see what science has come
up with.
Anatomy is a well-established branch of science,
though some surprising omissions persisted until very
recently (as we shall see in a later chapter, it was not
until late in the twentieth century that the nerve supply
to the clitoris was revealed—with enormous conse-
quences for our understanding of female sexuality).
Meticulous dissection by doctors such as Galen and
Vesalius and Harvey, or artists like Leonardo and George
Stubbs, showed the body as a piece of engineering.
58
VILE BODIES, OR, DOES GOD EVER GET A BAD BACK?
Most bodies last well—they are, after all, the product

of 3.5 billion years of tinkering—but flaws abound. This
is not to insult nature, only to acknowledge she had to
work with the material to hand.
Need to fashion a larynx or a hearing system? Why
not fiddle with some of those gill arches fishes have in
over-abundance? Both can be shown to have evolved
from the simple supporting scaffolding a fish has in its
gills. Need a lung or two, for breathing on land? Why
not expand that swim bladder fish use to adjust their
buoyancy? Want to take to the air? How about stretching
some skin between those fingers or extending the scales
you have on your skin or exoskeleton for temperature
control?
Slight modifications of what’s already there, executed
through tiny mutations, can be selected for if they give
the slightest advantage. This means that the creature
possessing a finer flandgwick (don’t look that up; I
invented it as a mini-organ of the future) might do
slightly better in life and therefore have more kids, thus
passing on more flandgwick genes. Not a perfect system,
but it’s tough out there and we can’t yet order state-of-
the-art new organs from Wal Mart 2100.
So what would you expect if you gave your own
body a once-over for quality control? If God was really
on your case, I think you might quite reasonably expect
perfection. As it is, there’s much to be cross about. If an
Intelligent Designer is responsible for your poor body,
59
then he’s also the one who thought up the British railway
system and Internet spam.
Take guts. The plan in mammals was to have a table-
like arrangement: four legs set at each corner, with the
belly horizontal to the ground. The digestive system—
long for herbivores, shorter for meat eaters—is then
slung from the spine. Works well. But then our ancestors,
for some daft reason best known to themselves, decided
to stand up. Horrors: the peritoneum, the bag of
membrane containing our guts and reproductive organs
is now hanging from a vertical broomstick, with pressures
at the lower end, where there are too many exits and
entrances and they are compromised by gravity. Result:
piles, hernias, prolapses and squashed babies.
Take the female pelvic girdle, which needs to be
narrow enough for walking and to excite the admiration
of men, but wide enough to allow a baby’s melon-sized
head through. A system for inducing pliability via
hormones is the compromise, and it works quite well,
but it also fails rather often. Fistulas, caused by rips
during childbirth, lead to leaks from the bowel into the
vagina. They may last for years. Not nice.
Professor Derek Denton, founding director of the
Florey Institute in Melbourne, also cites the sinuses as
another reason for complaining to the manufacturer:
‘The big maxillary sinuses or cavities are behind the
cheeks on either side of the face. They have the drainage
60
hole in their top, which is not much of an idea in terms

of using gravity to assist drainage of fluid.’
How many people do we all know who are forever
bemoaning their stuffed sinuses? Denton quotes Gray’s
Anatomy as an impeccable source: ‘Suppuration in the
paranasal sinuses is frequent. Pus running down from
the frontal sinus or the anterior ethmoidal sinuses is
directed by the hiatus semilunaris into the opening of
the maxillary sinus.’ An extra reservoir for gunge, in
other words.‘The normal opening of the maxillary sinus
is high above its floor and is poorly placed for natural
drainage.’
Why did Denton cite Gray at length in The Age?
Why, to wag his finger at Brendan Nelson, the former
Minister for Education and Science, who had been
quoted as saying, ‘Intelligent design should be taught in
schools alongside evolution, if that is the wish of parents.’
Denton’s implication is that Nelson, a doctor and former
head of the Australian Medical Association, would realise
that Professor Henry Gray condemns any likelihood of
a designer on almost every page of his classic reference
work. ‘The proposed intelligent designer was in some
exercises hardly an honours student—indeed, hardly a
pass student,’ says Denton.
Then there are bad backs. You and I are supposed
to have been created in the image of God, so I presume
He’s got one. I hope He is a little better at looking
after His than the vast number of us mortals happen
61
to be. When mine is really bad it takes me twenty

minutes to get out of bed, so severe are the muscle
spasms. According to different accounts, we originally
stood up: to peer over the tall grass, as meercats do; or
to be able to wade through streams; or, the latest theory,
to provide a smaller target for huge predatory eagles
hunting for our ancestors. I suspect God did not have
to go through the standing-up process and so has a
back designed for upright living (God is hardly on all
fours, though he may be airborne, in which case I hand
in my brief ). But the fact remains that nearly all backs
could make an instant claim on the warranty, if there
were one. If He were responsible for back design, you’ll
have to concede it wasn’t one of His best moments
and must have been a deadline rush job at the end of
the Six Days. It could be that backs are ready-made
later to have wings attached for the next phase of our
lives, but I doubt that. Our chests would have to be
three times thicker, with muscles to power flight and,
Jordan and Dolly Parton excepted, that won’t work.
Backs can’t be an example of ID. They must, like Sir
Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister, be a triumph of
compromise.
The process of adjustment and compromise is seen
throughout the natural world. One of my favourite
examples is the koala, whose pouch opens downwards.
Why would any sensible engineer dream of designing
Blinky Bill’s mum’s pouch this way when the sweet creature
62
spends most of her life up a tree? Was God intending the

babies to fall out and crash to the forest floor?
Well, no. The simple answer is that koalas evolved
from wombat-like marsupials, which burrowed their way
through the earth, flinging great paws fulls of soil
backwards like an excavator digging out a tunnel. Had
this ancestor’s pouch pointed forwards, its babies would
have had eyes and teeth permanently filled with grit.
So backwards it was and, when one day the creature
moved up a tree, perhaps to exploit a fresh food source,
the ‘design’ came with it, too complicated to change.
Yet in a few squillion years’ time adjustments may be
forthcoming, if they are important enough. I suspect
koala pouches may well stay as they are: as humans do
with piles and hernias, koalas simply put up with the
inconveniences and get on with life.
What about the scary monsters? God made them too!

Or was it the devil? Here I defer to my friend and
colleague Dr Paul Willis, palaeontologist and coiner of
the term Trojan Turkey, in reference to ID. The designer,
he says, ‘must have been a sadistic bastard, preferring to
design the icumenid wasps with an intricate
interdependence on their prey that requires them to
parasitise a grub or spider so that their young can eat
them alive from the inside out’.
Paul continues:
63
The Designer, He, she, it or they, must also have had

perverse oedipal tendencies, judging from the design
of the button beetle, where the mother copulates with
her sons before eating them.
That’s beautifully balanced by other beetles where
the newly hatched males insert their heads back into
mummy’s reproductive aperture and devour her from
the inside out.
It must take a devoted misogynist to design the
Australian seaweed fly, who beats up his girlfriends before
raping them. And then there are the dubious ethics of
a designer who put together the female preying mantis,
who has to snack on the head of her partner during
copulation . . . It doesn’t sound very Christian to me.
But this is all so much bug-collecting, plumbing and

baggage handling, I hear you protest. What about ‘perfect’
organs such as the eye? Or the wing, which cannot,
surely, be much use unless fully formed and ready to
take to the air?
In fact, it was clergyman William Paley’s story of a
watchmaker which inspired Richard Dawkins’s book
title and is often quoted as the main argument for a
celestial designer. Even Darwin, in his day, addressed this
conundrum. He wrote in The Origin of Species: ‘If it
could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed
which could not possibly have been formed by numerous,
64
successive, slight modifications, my theory would

absolutely break down.’
So are eyes perfect? Well, not according to the
evidence of the glasses on my nose as I write, nor the
immense range of eyes in the animal kingdom, nor the
ghastly set up of our eye structure compared to, say, that
of the octopus. This is superbly demonstrated, again, in
Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker and I recommend that
anyone still favouring Argument from Personal Incredulity
should look at those sections of his book. The detail is
overwhelming—and fun. Descriptions of light-sensitive
cells pointing the wrong way, of optic nerves barging
right through pivotal areas and causing blind spots, of
components going bung—the indictment of this ‘divine
perfection in design’ is extraordinary. Any thorough-
going examination of our optical system shows
compromise, adjustment, re-routing and patching up. It
is like when you buy an old house and every electrician
and plumber you call in shakes his head over the bodgie
jobs done by his predecessor: ‘Ooooooh dear, I can see
what he tried to do there. Hopeless. Had to cover it up
with plaster. Lucky we found it, mate, or you’d have
been in trouble. Must have been a retarded amateur.
One less brain cell and he’d have been a Brussels sprout!
’Fraid it’s going to cost.’ Eyes are excellent, and I insist
on keeping mine, but let’s not get carried away: we have
a case for compensation.
65
Take Andrew Walker’s recent books on the role of

light-sensitive cells in causing the evolutionary explosion
two billion years ago. From a world where life was not
much more than clusters of single cells or parts thereof,
where the greatest attainment in the accretion of slight
modifications was not much more than pond scum,
simple eyes gave some living things huge advantages.
They could perceive (see is too grandiose a term for
those first little devices reacting to not much other than
light or shade) things to eat and other things to avoid.
From this, says Walker, came the Cambrian proliferation
of species 540 million years ago. Because they were now
able to exploit many more places to live, millions more
animals evolved over this key period in organic history.
Seeing was the key breakthrough. It is a sensationally
better alternative to not seeing at all. The eye, in its
various forms, thereafter evolved separately at least forty
times. In squid, octopuses, insects, worms, snails—the
creator must have been extremely busy.
The same can be said of wings. Beetle wings; fly
wings, like thinly veined leaves; paired wings owned by
shimmering dragonflies; mere prongs that whirr like
helicopter blades; extended-skin wings, owned by tree
gliders that haven’t bothered to invest in full-scale flying
kit; bat wings, held thin between enormously extended
fingers and of immense scale in the flying fox; bird
wings, with feathers that are narrow for darting or wide
and broad for high-gliding eagles or vultures; vestigial
66
wings in ostriches or emus, flapping as semaphores; or

wings as steering oars in penguins—can there be any
limit to the infinite variety of these invaluable extensions?
So what about the unforgiving limits of flight? Surely
a wing either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you hit
the deck and bung go your offspring—and your failed
lift-off design. Can we accept a wing on a plane that’s
not tried and tested in the factory before being allowed
to take off with us aboard?
Birds, for one, did not start off as living aeroplanes.
Their forebears had feathers for temperature control,
just as mammals have hair. The archaeopteryx had teeth
and feathers. It was one version of a dinosaur-like creature
tending towards being bird-like. It is likely such reptilian
aviators either ran off hillsides or cliffs, as young albatrosses
do today, or ran like heck into winds lifting them upwards
and away. As usual with likely alternatives, it’s probable
that both ways were exploited by the first flyers.
The first aeronauts were gliders. Ancestral birds did
it in the open; ancestral mammals from tree to tree.
They can still be seen to be doing it. Engineers have
tested countless models to see what could have been
achieved with primitive flight systems. The variety of
possibilities is deeply satisfying. Except to creationists
talking terminal twaddle.
The same can be said of flagella, proposed as another
‘perfect’ instrument unable to perform its function half-
formed. They are the little outboard motors on unicellular
67
beasties, and they also line body surfaces to move fluids

or even pick up vibrations. The ID argument is that
they, like the mousetrap, are made just so: an engineered
marvel of tightly bound proteins. The same could be
said of muscle fibres, which pull across each other in
precisely ratcheted ways, equally hard to picture other
than in their completed, functioning state. But something
like a halfway flagellum has been identified—except that
it isn’t functioning in the same way. It is a bundle of
proteins doing something else. When a flagellum-like
organelle appears from the genetic mix, natural selection
keeps it in the armoury. The ten billion failed flagella,
with no clear use, end up in the trash can of biological
history. Can there be any limit to the number of whip-
like instruments down there among the protozoa and
ciliated cells? Anybody want to fight a patent case?
Time and again in the anatomy of microbes and
multicells, of amoebae and armadillos, you see smaller,
simpler structures that elsewhere are elaborated as large
and complicated ones. You can run them through a
computer program, as Richard Dawkins has done, to
watch slight protrusions become fins, fins become arms,
arms become wings and, if the bounding lizard wants
to go under again and hide in the earth, arms drop off
and become stumps once more.
I saw Richard in the early stages of this experiment,
with what looked like dozens of stick creatures on his
computer screen. He had begun by doodling, writing
68
constraints into an evolution-simulation program and

seeing where it led. The chapter in The Blind Watchmaker
shows what happened.
When I wrote the program, I never thought it would

evolve anything more than a variety of tree-like shapes.
I had hoped for weeping willows, cedars of Lebanon,
Lombardy poplars, seaweeds, perhaps deer antlers.
Nothing in my biologist’s intuition, nothing in my 20
years’ experience of programming computers, and
nothing in my wildest dreams, prepared me for what
actually emerged on the screen. I can’t remember when
exactly in the sequence it first began to dawn on me
that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect
was possible.
But it was. The difference with Dawkins’s program

is he starts long before the objects are remotely like
living things. As he makes them evolve, he sees them
turn into biomorphs. Some of them look stunningly
like winged insects! In such a short time, too.
Then there is the regional franchise. It’s as if McBody
had been licensed out to the seven continents and the
locals asked to come up with their own versions. You
can see evolution in action just by looking at the map.
In Europe you had one version of mammalian mice,
rats, badgers, deer, wolves, lions, cattle; in Australia you
had marsupial versions, each with roughly the same
69
template for everything other than the kit for repro-

duction. No surprise, really: there are limited ways of
solving the problems of moving around, eating, digesting
food and keeping warm. Earning your living on land
gives you just a few options, and McBodies have exploited
them all along parallel lines. Natural selection has
fashioned similar bodies from quite different original
designs. And, in case you see ID moving in and claiming
those originals for itself: those too (proto-mammals) can
be shown to have come from other ancestors with lizard-
like organisations.
Lots of these changes and adjustments remain as
ghostly messages in the genetic program. One of Stephen
Jay Gould’s most memorable essays is ‘Hens’ Teeth and
Horses’ Toes’ (also the title of the book containing the
piece). He tells how biologists have been able to tickle
the DNA program of both species and so recapture
characteristics suppressed during the evolution of sharp
beaks in chickens and hooves in horses. Fossil evidence
shows that their ancestors carried teeth and toes, and
when the tickling is done there they are again.
Tails in people, plus vestigial gills—there’s a lot lurking
in our make-up that take us back to the jungle, even
the pond. Fiddle with some human DNA and I wouldn’t
be surprised to see elements of Freddie the Frog. Maybe
the fairy story about the princess has some truth in it
after all.
70
Halitosis, farting, vaginal discharge, reflux, snoring,

rheumatism, warts, smelly armpits, varicose veins,
menopause, brewer’s droop . . . these are not the marks
of a designer at the top of his game. They are the
trademarks of a natural process giving us only as much
as we need to stay alive.
Meanwhile, down among the juices, where Derek
Denton and his colleagues have done as much as anyone
to show how the body both runs itself and fights off
invaders, there is again displayed both brilliant success
and abject failure. After all: we die. But not just yet.
Assailed everywhere, outside and inside—by revolting
nasties wanting to use us for living space and dinner;
by others wanting to take over our genetic program and
make it their own; by yet others entering by mistake
through nostrils or eyelids—it is astounding that we
don’t implode or explode within days of being born.
Our immune system, resembling as it does a team of
unicellular pond dwellers, performs a largely excellent
job of meeting, greeting and eliminating the beasties
who would do us down.
‘Largely’ implies imperfection. It is a constant battle.
Nobel laureate Peter Doherty, from the University of
Melbourne, sums it up like this. ‘Everything we know
in biology agrees with Darwin’s theory of evolution in
a broad sense, and the theory is tested probably 1000
times a day in various laboratories without anyone going
out to test it. They [the American-funded movement
71
to foist Intelligent Design teaching onto science teachers

in Australia] really want a science teacher, who may well
be atheistic anyway, introducing the concept of God
into science. It’s a ridiculous idea and has no place in
science teaching.’
Peter Doherty is an immunologist who, with Ralph
Zinkernagel, demonstrated how those amoeba-like cells
we grow to serve as our defence forces are informed
about an invasion. His uncompromising rejection raises
the question this entire chapter poses: Are scientists too
damned sure of themselves? Is the condemnation of the
poor old Bishop of Birmingham unfair? Should we be
allowed to believe that God made eyes, that wings
appeared ready-made and that sinuses have a greater
purpose, which we are yet to discover?
Is truth, in other words, relative?
Well you can, if you want, believe what you like.
Not much I can do—or Derek Denton or Richard
Dawkins can do—to stop you. Nor is that what we
would want to do. How can you force recognition of
the facts of human anatomy upon reluctant minds? But
that is a different thing altogether from saying, first, that
science is wrong. And, second, that an alternative version,
incapable of being put to any scientific test, is equally
worthy of its place anywhere, particularly in the classroom.
Science is certainly capable of self-deception, and the
anatomical idiocies of Galen, who was inspired by much
the same sophistry as ID-ers (he dissected only animals,
72
not people), showed exactly what is possible in that

regard. But science is, if anything, the best bullshit filter
ever invented. Mendacity will have its day, but in science
it won’t last long.
Self-deception has a proud tradition, as does the
Argument from Personal Incredulity. Both are prime
ingredients of Proud Ignorance, and ignorance is just
about the worst quality on which to base a system of
education.
73
ORIGINAL SIN:
TROUBLE IN
THE BRAIN
Original Sin
An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter

more than people. If people get in the way of ideas
they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in
concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals,
individuals are not interesting and do not matter.
Paul Johnson, The Spectator, September 2005
People are capable of the most hideous cruelty. Imagine

the worst and it’s been done. And it’s happening now.
Rwanda, Cambodia, Beslan, Culloden, the Somme,
Bosnia, Birkenau, the systematic murder of the Inca
populations by the Spanish, Britain’s slave trade, America’s
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ORIGINAL SIN
Nazi-style elimination of millions of native people, the

Japanese torture and killing of Chinese by the hundreds
of thousands—and much of this was done with relish.
Put aside the nutters. Forget serial killer Fred West
and the Belgian child torturers. Much of the misery has
been perpetrated by ordinary folk—plumbers, green-
grocers and nurses who became, in a matter of a few
days, marauding monsters. Every study of human bestiality
has shown that nearly all of us, in specific circumstances,
can turn from mild suburban citizen into Hannibal
Lecter.
That’s wrong. I withdraw the term bestiality. Beasts
do not expend energy on being cruel for fun. As the
saying goes, ‘Nature is not cruel, she is indifferent.’ It is
not sensible for animals to waste enormous amounts of
energy—and being a top predator is an exhausting job—
on ghoulish self-indulgence.
We do it all the time. Slowly, excruciatingly, in front
of family, arbitrarily. Norfolk Island, Port Arthur, Baghdad,
Kosovo, Warsaw.
If I were God the creator, responsible for all this, I’d
keep quiet about my role. Intelligent Design?
Don’t be obscene.
There are many levels at which one can account for
human vileness. History, sociology, psychology and
ethology: each provides an account of why we needed
to experiment with all the different possibilities of living
together in various societies. The ways in which human
75
minds adapted is fascinating in itself. Some societies were

pleasant enough and rubbed along nicely, although the
details, such as Margaret Mead’s picture postcard of sexy
Samoa, are yet to be agreed upon. Others were ghastly,
especially if you were an Aztec maiden set to have your
heart carved out to appease the sun god, or a slave
bound in perpetuity to an otherwise urbane, philosoph-
ical gentleman in ancient Greece or in Thomas Jefferson’s
household.
Evolutionary psychologists (and some are hard to take
on an empty stomach) may offer the case that conflict
is creative and that isolated societies decline. As happened
in Tasmania before the Europeans, the technology
becomes more primitive and the people languish without
invasion, rape and pillage to renew the innovative stock.
I may or may not agree with that. The point is that
the human brain, whatever the justifications of history,
resembles the creation of the devil rather than of a God.
That it is capable of good is beside the point. ID is like
a computer program with a built-in virus. ID is a baby
born with syphilis. ID is an insult to the intelligence.
ID is an insult to God.
D.Z. Phillips, in The Problem of Evil and the Problem
of God, writes,‘Here is a clear instance where a theodicy,
in the very language it employs, actually adds to the
evil it seeks to justify.’ Theodicy is the philosophical
contortion that seeks to justify child sacrifice or the
Holocaust or juvenile cancer as a route to a higher
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ORIGINAL SIN
order of good in society. It is the kind of Panglossian

outrage that Voltaire pilloried so elegantly in Candide.
The children in the school at Beslan, and their teachers,
may have died for many reasons we can try to explain,
including the effects of incessant war in Chechnya, but
surely not to justify one of God’s mysteriously
convoluted plans for a greater good.
‘Alternatively,’ writes Professor Simon Oliver in the
Times Literary Supplement, ‘some have proposed that
suffering is compensated for in heaven while allowing
us to develop mature characters on earth.’ He answers
this suggestion, as does Phillips, with scathing examples:
‘What kind of theology, philosophy or morality would
we be articulating if we were able to “justify” cancer in
a child?’ In Victorian times child mortality was so high
as to rival death rates in war. How were these benighted
infants in their millions, most not even toddlers, justifying
some divine grand plan, with its reward in the after-
life? Intelligent design?
A kinder description of humanity’s lot dispenses
straightaway with any teleological grand plan. We began
as hominids surrounded by a hostile environment, as
most creatures are, and had to make the most of it.
Hunting food and defending your cave required certain
swift responses—seen less often in polite society in 2006.
As our population grew with the invention of farming
and towns 10 000 years ago, new pressures were forced
on the brain that had already existed in the skull of the
77
species Homo sapiens for some 200 000 years. But just
look at the distance from us to that flowering of ‘civil-
isation’. Join hands with your parents and grandparents
and so on back through the millennia and what do you
get? I make it barely 400 generations standing in a long
line hand-in-hand; some say it is fewer. We really are so
new! (Our newness could also explain why a few malfunc-
tions of our brains persist: 1 per cent of us have epilepsy
or schizophrenia; 10 per cent succumb to depression and
1 in 4 over the age of eighty are demented.)
No wonder we behave like brutes. Saying it’s all in
the design does not help. The challenge is to make the
design work, flawed as it is. Theology can help, though
not if it’s of the authoritarian, unarguable kind that ID
and its proponents represent. Christian morality is a
thought experiment with some understanding of our
violent past. At its best, it offers a pacifistic, forgiving,
inclusive approach to living with your neighbours, in
stark contrast to the God-help-the-hindmost rape-and-
pillage version of yesteryear.
Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, also sees
a role for ‘God’. But in his case it is a Genome Organising
Device. He elegantly hedges his bets, as any high-born
Etonian might be expected to do. He begins by
wondering why altruism would have a place at all in a
harsh environment where a sentimental hesitation could
get you eaten or where brutes seem to rule. But nature
is far subtler than a Rambo movie.
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ORIGINAL SIN
Take what I’ll call the Inverse Genghis Khan factor,

or the non-dominance of the alpha male. Throughout
history the Khans of the world have ridden through
villages burning yurts to the screams of helpless long-
haired damsels. The males were captured, used as slaves
or skewered. Genghis Khan himself had 500 wives and
concubines as well as unimpeded access to any girl he
fancied from Mongolia to the Urals. Hence about 12 per
cent of the population of his empire, about 1 in every
200 men alive today, according to Geoffrey Carr of The
Economist, have DNA on their Y chromosome dating
back to Khan and his confreres.
So why do there remain gentler types like you and
me, fair reader, who prefer poetry to pillage and woo
damsels with promises of Tuscany, fine art and stroking?
The answer, according to Cambridge zoologist Tim
Clutton-Brock, is (and you must forgive this genuinely
technical term) the Sneaky Fucker Strategy.
The puzzle was why certain deer, apparently
dominated by a huge Father of All Bambis (not!), didn’t
within three or four generations have only Schwarzen-
egger stags and no wimps in their number. Clutton-Brock
went into the field to investigate. What he noticed was
that, while the big stags were rampaging on the moun-
tainside, attacking each other with all the force and
to-the-death commitment of King Kong versus the Tyran-
nosaurus rex in Peter Jackson’s movie, down in the valley
the unescorted female deer were being thoroughly seen
79
to by the less muscle-bound, Jude Law type lads. Rule

by the mightiest is not built in.
I was touched, incidentally, to hear a story from the
now sadly departed evolutionary biologist John Maynard
Smith about a time when his colleagues in Germany were
to host an international conference.A session was scheduled
to discuss the story of the stags and its wider implica-
tions. The Brits had a confab and discussed the problem:
‘We can’t possibly call it what we normally do—the
Germans and others either won’t understand or will be
offended.’ So a brief competition was held to come up
with an alternative name. I can just imagine the discussion
that ensued as most of the group who, like Smith, were
wonderfully well-spoken, polite Etonians, self-consciously
tossed around some thoroughly awkward euphemisms.
Eventually a limping compromise was agreed upon:
something like Alternative Deceptive Reproductive
Strategies. This was duly put into the program. But later
the German organiser phoned up the Brits. ‘What is
this . . . Alternative Something Strategies Whatever . . . we
don’t understand,’ came the perplexed inquiry, echoing
down the conference phone from Berlin.
Maynard Smith and Clutton-Brock explained. Then
they explained some more. Finally, from Germany, a
shout of recognition: ‘Aha! You mean Sneaky
Fucker! . . . Why didn’t you say so?!’
This tale illustrates several things, not least the cordiality
between folk who sixty years ago were mortal enemies
80
ORIGINAL SIN
and bombing the bejesus out of each other. First, that

nature hedges its bets and stores reserve supplies of
variation. When times change, it may well be the slim
thinkers who are better adapted than the rugged rulers.
Second, aggression and competition may be the way the
nineteenth century saw nature (red in tooth and claw,
according to Lord Tennyson); it is not the version seen
by twenty-first century biologists such as Lynn Margolis
and Clutton-Brock, who point to much greater subtlety
and interdependence. Why waste energy and resources
fighting to survive if more cooperative means can do
the job? Rape and pillage take effort. They are also risky.
Which brings us back to Matt Ridley’s GOD
(Genome Organising Device). Is kindness (altruism) in
any way built into the biological system? The answer is
yes, and we see it all around us. Families care. Friends
help. Ducks divert our attention and put themselves in
jeopardy to protect their ducklings. I saw this latter
phenomenon on my summer holidays, by a lake near
Mallacoota in Victoria. As we walked along a waterside
path, a duck with tiny ducklings scooted from the bushes
out into the open, the ducklings motoring as fast as
their minuscule legs could manage. At the same time
the drake leapt into the air flapping noisily, landing just
a few steps ahead of us, then did so again. And again.
When we were safely away from the exposed brood, he
disappeared. The broken-wing deception of a cornered
mother duck is also well known as a diversion to save
81
the family. She will scurry across the water dragging the
limp wing behind her, feigning injury. She is inviting
you to pursue her instead of the vulnerable brood.
The late Bill Hamilton of Oxford actually produced
a formula to describe all this. The closer you are,
genetically, to someone at risk, the more likely you are
to try to help them. This can be quantified in terms of
the improved chances you have of passing on or
protecting your genes. The closer you are to the relative
who needs your assistance (and the more likely you are
to have matching genomes), the more likely you are to
put yourself on the line to help them. A daughter or
son in trouble, and you don’t hesitate. A third cousin
twice removed—and you hover by the raging torrent.
Hamilton’s numbers seem to add up. It just so happens
that he was the mentor who inspired Richard Dawkins
to write The Selfish Gene thirty years ago. He was a
hero to many and died, long before his time, on a quest
to Africa to look at the chimpanzees, who can be sweet
and forbearing within their families but are sometimes
rampaging killers with strangers. Hamilton caught malaria
and died within weeks. His last ever expedition was to
seek out the origins of kindness—and thuggery.
Formulae for tender loving care may seem mechanical.
But they are one way of accounting for how we came
to be as we are. Other ways, I’ve already suggested, come
through history, sociology, politics and so on. But what
the biology of love and hate does not show is a clearly
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ORIGINAL SIN
perceptible design offered by the Great Boatman as he

pushed our craft away from the biblical shore back in
the beginning. What we have, instead, is a turmoil of
adjustment. Not a march upwards and onwards to
perfection—as in one of those slick illustrations that start
with monkeys on their knees, lead on to hominids half-
upright and finish with a bloke in a suit standing erect
and phoning his broker—but a fitting end to contingency,
to existing circumstances.
Human brains were once well suited to survival in
a forest with extremes of hot and cold, wet and dry,
plenty of enemies and barely enough to eat. People lived
in small groups and, in a lifetime of barely thirty years,
knew a few dozen people. I suspect that there was
leadership by elders, but everyone had to get on with
everyone else. Professor Robin Dunbar, of the University
of Liverpool, argues that we have a ‘natural’ capacity to
‘know’ about 150 others really well. The rest are seen
as interlopers or worse. He claims he can predict the
size of our preferred ‘village’ by looking at our brains.
The bigger and thicker your cerebral cortex, the more
people in your tribe. Lemurs are solitary, baboons less
so. Some biologists, such as Lesley Rogers of the
University of New England in Armidale, dispute this,
pointing to the orangutan, which has plenty of cortex
but few friends. Whatever the demographics, it’s clear
that population explosions 10 000 years ago, when humans
began to settle in cities, weren’t in the master plan for
83
our brain, designed or not. As I shall discuss later, the

problem, as Richard Wrangham sees it, of ‘demonic
males’ is one we are still dealing with.
How to cope? Why, with the rest of our intellectual
armoury. You have some of it, for better or worse, in
front of you at the moment. A book. The Greek philoso-
phers and playwrights were tackling questions of self and
identity, crime and forgiveness 4000 years ago. We have
been at it ever since. How do we know this? Through
what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype,
the title of the second of his books, after The Selfish
Gene.* This rather technical term refers to the way humans
can store and accumulate their thinking beyond their
bodies—in paintings, music, books and now in computers.
I am liberated completely, if I choose, from the ‘design’
that fitted the first humans to the forest and cave. As
someone who began reading voraciously from the age
of five and has done so for hours every day ever since,
I cannot imagine what my brain would be like without
that influence. Add other products of the ‘extended
phenotype’, such as photos, telly and movies, and we
have an entirely different creature who can transcend the
brutish unintelligence, or original sin, of his design.
It is not surprising, then, that the atavists wanting to
* Now, in 2006, he says it was an unfortunate, if striking title. It

could easily have been The Cooperative Gene, without any
misleading implication, but the publishers were insistent.
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ORIGINAL SIN
interfere with this new freedom are attacking the very

places where promise lies: the museums, libraries and
schools. Evolution as a topic has been expunged from
many biology textbooks in America. Publishers in
populous states have bowed to pressure from creation-
ists for fear of having their products banned from schools.
Museums from Ithaca to Denver, Iowa and New York
City have had their staff bailed up by believers arguing
against Darwinism. Dr Warren D. Allmon was quoted
in The New York Times commenting on the stream of
visitors objecting to the displays on evolution. Noting
that 54 per cent of Americans do not believe that human
beings evolved from earlier species, he said, ‘Just telling
them they are wrong is not going to be effective.’ Dr
Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor from the
Museum of Earth in Ithaca, New York, agrees: ‘It is no
wonder that many biologists will simply refuse to debate
creationists or IDers . . . people who for whatever reason
are here to trap you, to bludgeon you.’ Even the
Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, has been attacked
in an attempt to change its references to evolution.
Dr David Millikan, a priest who is a former head of
Religion at the ABC, summed up the situation neatly:
The advocacy of ID is not as innocent as it seems. It’s

the latest battle in the war against the ‘evils of
Darwinism’, one that has been fought ferociously in
the US for more than a century. There, evangelical and
85
fundamentalist Christianity have never truly forgotten—

and certainly never forgiven—the way they were
humiliated by the theory of evolution. Having failed
to dismantle it, they’re spruiking ID in an attempt to
destabilize it.
The Reverend Millikan ends with a chilling reminder

of the scale of the attempt to metaphorically burn the
library, much as Caesar burnt the great collection of
books in Alexandria in 48 BC. ‘Polls indicate that 47%
of Americans accept the literal account of creation in
the book of Genesis. George W. Bush holds this view
too. For Christians of this hue, ID is just the latest
offensive weapon.’
Book burning was a notorious practice of the Nazis.
Whether you call culture an extended phenotype or the
store of human knowledge and creativity, its destruction
amounts to humanity’s shooting itself in the head. It is
the way back to the cave, or at least to the twilight zone
of the Taliban or the early Christian zealots (who set
fire both to Bibles translated into English and to the
scholars who dared translate them). It is the last resort
of those who will ban music and literature and learning,
all the expressions of a free human spirit.
This has been the recourse of anti-intellectual bullies
throughout history. Knowledge is power, so you ban it.
Hermann Goering liked to boast, ‘When I hear the
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ORIGINAL SIN
word culture I reach for my Browning [gun].’ And we

know precisely what he meant and why philistinism is
so vital to the despot and the thug. ID is part of that
long tradition of hankering for darkness.
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INTELLIGENT
SEX
Intelligent sex
Human genitalia were obviously designed by the local

council. Only they would think about putting the piss-
house in the middle of the playground.
‘Sir, why did Mary have to be a virgin?’

Bunny Austin would close his eyes in silent
desperation, put his fingertips together under his chin
and try to formulate an answer. Time passed.
‘And, Sir, did anyone check?’
We were dreadful boys, always in pursuit of weak
quarry, and Bunny, who looked like a querulous rabbit,
was too decent a schoolmaster and too kind a man to
fob us off with a rebuke. Instead we got his considered
reply to every tricksy question, every mischievous set-
up. Divinity and prayers were not occasions you could
88
INTELLIGENT SEX
duck unless you belonged to another faith. ‘No faith’

didn’t compute. So I, and one or two other smart-arsed
atheists, were made to attend, like it or not. We took
our revenge in subversion.
‘But, Sir!’ after a tortuous answer affirming the God-
given glories of sexual intercourse (snigger!) and agreeing
that, while Jesus was the Son of Man and therefore
deserving of a normal fertilisation, gestation and
parturition, he had to be spared icky associations . . . for
reasons which remain a mystery . . . God works in
mysterious ways. ‘But, Sir, isn’t “virgin” just a mistrans-
lation of a term meaning “young woman”?’
As he struggled, I gave him the scholarly source of
this howitzer and watched him slowly implode in jowly
stutterings until his opening and closing mouth resembled
that of a cod expiring on the fishmonger’s slab.
‘Was Jesus fully a man?’ Silence. ‘I mean, did he have
erections and wet dreams?’ By now you could hear
embarrassed shuffling at the back of the class, where the
terminally uninterested were playing cards. Surely Bunny’d
capitulate and reject this gratuitous plonker. But, no, off
he’d go again in perplexed torment, doing his didactic
duty to the end.
Bunny Austin wasn’t anything like the great tennis
players whose nickname he knew he carried. No returns
were lobbed across the net demanding, ‘Why do you
ask, Williams?’ or ‘What’s your interpretation of the
answer from the reading you’ve done?’
89
I never did find out if there were any reliable

comebacks to those age-old schoolboy needlings. Sex
in much of the Bible reflects the male insecurities of
ancient times, and indeed up to the present day. Men
were terrified by female sexuality, so it had to be kept
under control.
There were three reasons. First, it was clear that
women are capable of far more sustained enjoyment
than the ephemeral pleasure that’s men’s lot. Dissection
of the clitoris, completed only a few years ago in
Melbourne (one other thorough investigation and
description of its elaborate and extensive nerve supply,
in the nineteenth century, was forgotten or suppressed),
shows that the organ is equipped for extensive stimulation
and response. That this was recognised in the ancient
world is well documented, not least by the Victorian
traveller Sir Richard Burton, whose writings on exotic
sexuality so shocked his wife that she turned his life’s
work into a pyre. Not only were men disconcerted by
their partner’s powers of orgasm and appetite for more,
but they became immediately aware of both their likely
inability to satisfy that desire and the very great probability
that their mates would be only too pleased to step into
the breach.
This was brought home to me dramatically in 1966
in Quetta, Pakistan, where I was travelling with my new
wife. Quetta is the Sandhurst or Duntroon of that Islamic
country, and we were hailed in the high street on our
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INTELLIGENT SEX
arrival as hitchhikers by a swaggering commanding officer

whose pseudo-British aplomb put David Niven or James
Fox in the shade. We were promptly offered rooms in
the barracks (Brits were status symbols back then) and
straightaway given a rather puzzling lecture about how
safe we would be under the soldiers’ care. While they
fully recognised that white women were always ‘gasping
for it’, they intended to fulfil their Islamic duty and
accept us as guests and give us unquestioning hospitality
and ‘protection’.
This was kicked off by a cocktail party at sundown.
I can’t remember what we drank, but I do recall being
manoeuvred into an antechamber by ‘chaps’ in cravats
and Sam Brownes to discuss world affairs. Meanwhile,
in another room, Pamela was being shown a revolver
by a couple of officers and being told to come across.
They were in no doubt about her desires—they had
seen enough Hollywood movies to know that women
like her were constantly on heat. The only way Pamela
escaped was by agreeing with what they said but claiming
she had a shocking dose of suppurating gonorrhoea.
The chaps backed off. Until next time.
The second, related reason why men can become
bothered by female sexuality is its apparent disjuncture
from their own. Why should their levels of satisfaction
and subtleties of timing be so awry? Girls can be sexy
as young teenagers; boys at the same age are dorks. Men
hit their peak of randiness at eighteen, before most of
91
them have even got started. Women become more and

more switched on as they mature, even to forty or fifty
years of age and beyond—just when men turn away,
drooping. Men become hydraulically challenged in middle
age. What was the designer thinking of ? Was He
determined to make sexual unions impossible to maintain?
Did he foresee the invention of Viagra and serial divorce?
The third reason is money and the Church. The
wealth of Rome threatened to be dissipated if the
offspring of married priests could inherit from them.
Answer: celibacy. This of course has been a practice in
other religions as well so the holy estate is kept intact.
Somehow in all this sexual angst, women are kept
hovering somewhere between the roles of ‘damned
whores and God’s police’. For strict Catholics, sex is
only for procreation; contraception is therefore forbidden.
The immediate past president of the Royal Society of
London, in his valedictory speech late in 2005, was
moved to say that the late Pope John Paul II was
responsible for more deaths than Hitler, having resisted
the free distribution of condoms in the time of AIDS.
‘He did more to spread AIDS across Africa than the
trucking industry and prostitution combined’, announced
the New Statesman in a cover story in April 2005, when
the Pope died.
These are extraordinary lengths to which to take a
doctrine. Similarly, how can modern human beings in
their millions in North Africa accept the mutilation of
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INTELLIGENT SEX
young girls’ genitals with rusty razors, broken glass or

kitchen knives? Is female sexual pleasure so revolting to
men in beards that they are prepared to see their women
forced to put up with a lifetime of pain and humiliation?
Control takes many ugly forms. If the Intelligent Design
of woman enabled her to have fun, why is so much
energy expended, in the name of God, to stop her?
Why, for that matter, was the design itself so perilous?
The upright woman needs her hips to be narrow enough
so she can walk without having the gait of a drunken
sailor doing the pasa doble. Yet the passage of a baby
with a large cranium—notwithstanding the skull’s
flexibility, with its unfused joints allowing the head to
shrink slightly during birth—requires a wide canal. As
a result a hormone, relaxin, is secreted which makes the
pelvis pliable. If the secretion is insufficient, side effects
such as permanent spasticity in the child can occur. This
is easily explicable as the collateral effect of our having
evolved from hominids who walked on all fours; it makes
nonsense of ID.
In the words of Loretta Marron, a science graduate
and businesswoman writing in the skeptic: we meet Barbie,
our idealised woman, at the age of 12.
For the next 35 years, when not pregnant, she will have
spent a total of up to six years wearing hygiene products.
She will also have spent an additional four years with
pre-menstrual tension, when she will experience mood
93
swings, while bracing herself white-knuckled and

doubled over during agonizing and debilitating stomach
cramps, accompanied by daily unrelenting migraines,
just to name a few of her regular monthly symptoms.
Then she’s pregnant! ‘Barbie has spent the first three

months or more of her pregnancy with daily episodes
of putting her head inside the nearest toilet bowl, looking
at regurgitating the ice cream and pickled onions of her
previous meal, or lying on the bed staring at her swollen
legs and enlarged DD-sized breasts.’
So much for Barbie. But what about Ken? That
master of anatomy Leonardo da Vinci put it best 500
years ago in his lament for the penis:
It has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes

displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may
desire it to be stimulated it remains obstinate and follows
its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own
without permission or any thought of its owner. Whether
one is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often
the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is
awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be
in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the
man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature
often has a life and intelligence separate from that of
the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed
of giving it a name or showing it; that which he seeks
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INTELLIGENT SEX
to cover and hide he ought to expose solemnly like a

priest at mass.
Pointing Percy at the Pontificate! What can he mean?

But implicit is his final plea: If only there were Intelligent
Design then the owner, rather than the organ itself, could
be in control. Who takes responsibility for the ID in this
particular case? Could it be that Beelzebub snuk in?
Which brings us to homosexuals. For once, here I’m
prepared to accept that this is an example of God’s
inspired creative engineering. Gays have contributed
fabulously to civilised society and it would be appalling
to consider a world without the contributions of Alan
Turing, Leonardo da Vinci, Noel Coward, James Baldwin,
Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Dusty Springfield, Elton
John, T.E. Lawrence, Irving Berlin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky,
Franz Schubert, k.d. lang, Ivor Novello, Stephen Fry,
Plato, Gertrude Stein, Australian Greens Senator Bob
Brown and many, many more. How clever of the designer
to allow this latitude in the design. (In His own Image?)
Finding an evolutionary reason for the persistence of
homosexuals in the human population is certainly a
challenge. No selfish genes at work there, I’d wager.
Homosexual behaviour has been observed in monkeys
and apes, and interpreted as learning play to prepare
them for their lives as adults. It persists among them
mostly in grown-up females!
95
Another suggestion is that gayness is somehow linked

to genes involved with creativity of some kind. I wonder
what form this would have taken in the ancient forest.
Fred and Wilma Flintstone are not exactly flamboyant.
Or pink.
There are many explanations of homosexuality along
the lines that the human genome has preserved maximum
flexibility (remember those Sneaky Fuckers?), and one
of the variants included is gayness. But I will now firmly
opt for the ID alternative, insist it was God’s inspired
choice and demand, accordingly, that popes, archbishops
and ayatollahs immediately relax prohibitions which
range from silly to deadly.
One further possible explanation remains for the sexual

differences between men and women. It stems not from
orthodox religion but from the modern, screwball kind;
Scientology, for example, was started essentially as a bet
by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who said he
could invent a religion from scratch. He proposed a fall
from grace on some distant planet, followed by
banishment to a lower state on Earth. The challenge of
Scientology is to regain enlightenment using so-called
‘E-meters’. This convoluted codswallop is accepted by
glitterati from Tom Cruise to John Travolta (even our
own dear Kate Ceberano), and shows that you don’t
have to be subtle to haul in the suckers.
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INTELLIGENT SEX
The only difference between this kind of cosmic

folderol and some of the more established religions, with
their miracles and afterlives, is age. Science and
commonsense have removed most of the wilder phan-
tasmagoria of the ancient beliefs and led them into more
sober, contemplative fields of moral quandary and textual
probing. But this doesn’t inhibit Raelians and Davidians
and the other salvationists at the unending religious
smorgasbord.
Some twenty years ago, long before John Gray made
his squillions from Men Are from Mars, Women Are from
Venus, I broadcast a Science Show offering a solution to
some of the conundrums listed above. Why a virgin?
How come homosexuality? Why the loathing by men
of women’s sexual appetite? My scenario went like this:
Men do come from Mars, where they spent the
millennia playing games and hugging and horsing about—
all those things we accept as authentic male behaviour,
from stadium football to ancient Greek Olympic
tournaments. Even rugby union has come out, as anyone
watching today’s more cuddlesome games will know.
Martian men were not distracted by the subtler contem-
plations of adult life, but they did have strong aesthetic
sensibilities, which enabled them to make the most of
the violent purple sunsets and unending rocky red vistas.
Without women, though, how could they possibly
procreate? Eternal life was not possible in these idyllic
circumstances, though they did live quite a long time,
97
given the lower force of gravity on Mars. The answer:

resurrection. As one man crumbled either of age or of
a groin injury sustained in play, so, after a short while,
he was able to come to life again as a much younger
man and resume his games.
Meanwhile, on Venus, the girls were in their own
special world. They could converse on the finer points
of female interaction, made infinitely more fascinating
by the absence of men. Feng shui was made necessary by
the constant rearrangement of the Venusian landscape
through eruption and earthquake; as well, there were
the more physical delights of remedial massage and
clothes designed to please themselves.
Reproduction, as should be obvious, was by virgin
birth. Parthenogenesis was the means: an egg would split
to form a blastula and the rest followed in the usual way.
When men and women came to Earth (as is described
in holy books), they were at first meant only to hang
about in loose proximity to each other. Sex was thought
both unlikely and somehow repellent. In fact, according
to my reading of what happened, as with other partheno-
genetic species such as Western Australian locusts,
intercourse became productive only because of some
persistent ancient resonance, possibly from a common
ancestor. So sex, as we know, did ultimately become
established. At first, though, I proposed, this was not so.
Which was why virgin births became so significant 2000
years ago, and before that. The children of such events
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INTELLIGENT SEX
were, of course, female. No Y chromosome is transmitted

in what becomes a virgin birth. This meant that Jesus
was a woman. No wonder her teachings and general
conduct were so civilised.
In time the male and female genomes were able to
interact, but there was a constant percentage of offspring
who preferred the same sex. And the misalliance of Mars
and Venus was never resolved. Men continue to hark
back to the eternal cosmic changing room and never
lose their fear of vagina dentata. Women remain the second
sex and try to find a role somewhere between Jezebel
and Mother Teresa, without feeling much like either.
I broadcast all this in 1983. I thought listeners would
be impressed at how much it explained, from ‘testos-
terone poisoning’ to the overwhelming confusion
experienced by most men on meeting gorgeous girls,
to ‘codpiece attachment’ and the instinct of men in
football scrums to bind securely by hanging on to the
jockstrap of the bloke in front. No such luck.
Worse still, I simply had no inkling that, if I simply
granted myself a doctorate from a Bible college in
America and produced a book called Men Are from Mars,
Women Are from Venus, I could have retired with several
fortunes to a castle in Cap D’Antibes. Never mind!
Why waste time with sex at all? In nature, I mean. Apart

from the unpredictability and sheer messiness of
relationships, you have costly competition among males,
99
STDs, all those cumbersome genitalia. Would it not be

far simpler to go in for something like parthenogenesis
or some other variation of the fission beloved of amoebae
we learn about at school? Don’t date, have arguments,
make up, catch the clap, take a cure, get pregnant, miscarry,
succeed at last . . . Just split.
Splitting is favoured as a method of reproduction by
billions of smaller creatures—microbes and other germs.
Trouble is, it doesn’t yield much variation—only that
which comes via mutation. Most mutation is damaging
and disappears: you die. Even small changes in, say, one
of the chemical bases of a DNA strand can make a huge
difference. The favourite example is of the one-letter
difference between FISH and FIST: Not the same thing!
Incidentally, the suggestion that evolution is a random
process is one of the monstrous distortions perpetrated
by ID and creationism. Nothing of the kind. Mutation
may be random, but natural selection is supremely focused.
Grow a fish on the end of your arm and you’ll die because
that’s not what you need to adapt to your environment
(unless you live in a very peculiar world). A fist on the
end of your arm fits. So you live. Not random at all!
Sex mixes the cards you do possess. If a new hazard
arises, you will have a different genome from your parents
and your siblings. One of you is more likely to survive.
The new hazard is most likely to be a killer disease.
Imagine bird flu suddenly starts being transferred among
people. Many will die. But, as with the catastrophic Black
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INTELLIGENT SEX
Death plague in the fourteenth century, when Florence

and other cities lost up to 80 per cent of their populations,
some people will be resistant. Their card shuffle is kind.
Natural selection allows this group to live on and continue
the species. If we were a parthenogenetically produced
monoculture, it would be curtains all round.
Sex pays. It keeps us one step ahead of the next
plague. It also gives us cultural variety—and this is where
gays may come in again. It may not be that God planned
their value to the community, but their presence has
been an undoubted benefit.
We humans have two sets of genes. Other living
things may have more. Only one set need be expressed.
We keep the others in reserve; cards are kept up our
evolutionary sleeve.
This, incidentally, is also the argument for free speech
and for universities maintaining all manner of opinions
within their faculties. If you cram all your professor-
ships with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries or hardline
market reactionaries and then Stalin proves to be a rogue
or Gordon Gecko loses the plot, you have nowhere to
go. Keep a comprehensive range from left to right and
you are giving society the hinterland it needs to cope
with the future. Maybe we learned this from sex and
genes. (That does not mean ID belongs in the science
curriculum; elsewhere, maybe.)
As for carnal congress itself, scientists have had lots
to say—some of it interesting, some of it silly. The
101
bottom line (ahem!) is that we do not have to be slaves

either to our primate past or to our recent couple of
hundred thousand years in caves and the woods.
Yes, as Desmond Morris has told us at length and
with helpful naughty pictures, ladies are able and even
willing to have intercourse at any time in the monthly
cycle, and that is probably a way to entice a mating pair
to bond for however long it takes to bring up Wayne
or Dahria. And, yes, Roger Short is wise to point out
that humans have the largest testicles of male primates,
and that this is connected to promiscuity. But you don’t
have to be promiscuous or live like the Folks on the
Hill. Our biological heritage offers a very wide range
of possibilities for sexual conduct and recent history has
allowed some of us—straight, gay, swingers, congre-
gational hedonists, not-interesteds—just to be ourselves
unless we’re hurting someone. No harm!
As with brains that can have us become anything we
choose—from Dr Mengele and Rosa Klebb to Albert
Schweitzer and Mary Robinson—so our sexual legacy
is almost unlimited. This is not necessarily a good thing
(as the male spider would say after it is devoured by his
recent lover), but it is the way it happens to be. Think
of a sexual variant—and I won’t bore you with a list—
and it’s in the personal ads: we do it.
If that’s a sign of Intelligent Design, then I’m intrigued.
It tells me much more about God than I expected.
102
FROM DAYTON
TO DOVER
From Dayton to Dover
Jenny is too wonderful, preparing and drinking her

tea and doing everything by word of command. She
is painfully and disagreeably human.
Queen Victoria, on visiting the second-ever orangutan
at London Zoo in 1842
In 2001 I reviewed two books by great-great grandsons

of Charles Darwin. One, Annie’s Box (with a different
title in the US!), by Randal Keynes, told of the brief,
charming life of Annie Darwin, her father’s favourite
child, and of her sad death at the age of 10. Darwin
was inconsolable. His faith in God collapsed. He could
see no grand purpose in the casual extinction of such
a sweet spirit.
Another part of that book described Darwin’s aston-
ishment when he looked into the face of the first great
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ape brought to London Zoo. There in her eyes he saw

reflected a human forebear, a subtle mind, a hidden depth.
‘Let man visit Ourang-out-ang in domestication,’
wrote Darwin, ‘hear the expressive whine; see its intel-
ligence when spoken to, as if it understood every word
said; see its affection to those it knew; see its passion
and rage, sulkiness and very actions of despair; let him
look at the savage . . . and then let him dare to boast of
his proud pre-eminence.’
Then he added, ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself
a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More
humble and I believe true to consider him created from
animals.’ (From Charles Darwin’s notebooks, around 1839)
Both Annie and the ape changed him forever.
The second book, by Matthew Chapman, was called
Trials of the Monkey. Unlike Keynes, Chapman is not a
learned professor but an occasionally wired Hollywood
scriptwriter. He was once married to film star Victoria
Tennant. A wise career move following a substance-induced
wipeout was to go on the road and write a gonzo book
about visiting Dayton, Tennessee, where his ancestor’s
evolutionary teachings were put on trial in 1925.
I loved the book, and recommend it. Trials began as
a way to explore Chapman’s personal heritage, both
from his own immediate family and from Darwinism.
The Scopes ‘monkey trial’ was actually a set-up. It didn’t
have to be in Dayton—the town was chosen as a
convenient battleground, and Scopes himself was a
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FROM DAYTON TO DOVER
volunteer. The trial was lost in the first instance—

notwithstanding national attention, tropical heat and
legendary lawyers—but the verdict was overturned on
a technicality.
Chapman—the groovy smoothie from NY, NY—
expected to be put off by the trailer trash he was to
encounter on the road. This did not happen, quite. Nor
did the creationists he met down in li’l ole Tennessee
repulse him. The young folk attached to the Creationist
Institute he found open and friendly; the PhD in palaeon-
tology who ran the institute, incredibly enough, had
been taught at Harvard by none other than Stephen Jay
Gould. But the most memorable discovery for me, at
least, was when he found out why the trial took place
in Dayton. The town is heartbreakingly impoverished.
The old saying about being born ‘on the wrong side of
the tracks’ comes from there. On the other side of the
railway tracks is a place so bleak, writes Chapman, that
it has the highest suicide rate in all of the United States.
No wonder the bells and whistles of Promised Lands
made such an impact here.
He goes beyond the local manifestations of poverty
to ask a broader, devastating question about the nation
itself. ‘Why is America, a country where 98% of the
people believe in God and over 50% believe in the literal
existence of angels, why is this so holy a place infested
with serial killers, rapists, paedophiles—often men of the
105
cloth—drug addicts, gangs, cults, and madmen? Why, in

short, isn’t Christianity having the advertised effect?’
Eighty years after Scopes it is Dover, Pennsylvania,
that has become notorious—as a battleground over ID.
Before retracing the political steps taken in the past
nearly twenty years, it is useful to give a brief summary
of the differences between creationism and ID.
The Scopes trial was about the Bible and challenges
to the literal interpretation of Genesis. Creationists seemed
to be saying that Earth is young—about 10 000 years
or so—and that life, all life, is 6000 years old. It was
made by God in one week, all at the same time. Fossils
were produced by the flood.
Creationism was dealt two near-fatal blows in the
1980s. First, the sheer weight of scientific evidence I
have mentioned earlier, not least its coherence, made
creationism look silly. Second, the US Supreme Court
ruled in 1987 that creationism is a version of recognis-
able religious doctrine and therefore, under the
Constitution, excluded from being taught in schools.
(Australia has similar laws but allows religious schools
to be funded without considering them therefore to be
‘established’.) Even though creationists had tagged the
word ‘science’ after their name, this was not enough to
sneak them into the classroom.
After 1987 there was a rapid rethink of the ‘entrist’
strategy: ID came to be. Its case is that there are parts
of the natural world so complex and engineered with
106
such precision that only a very smart intelligence, not

blundering selection, could account for them. Examples
given were the phenomenal complexity of the cell itself
and instruments such as the flagellum. The identity of
the designer is only hinted at. Guess who?
ID does allow for evolution to do a bit of the tedious
lifting work once the clever stuff, like the cell, has been
set up, and so it gets the best of both worlds. A fine
summary of all this appeared in The New Yorker in May
2005, written by biology professor H. Allen Orr, of
Rochester University, New York.
He names the two best-known proponents of ID,
both of whom have reasonably respectable scientific
credentials. One is Professor Michael J. Behe, a biochemist
at Lehigh University, author of Darwin’s Black Box. The
other is Professor William A. Dembski, a mathematician
at the Center for Science and Theology at Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary.
Dembski offers a kind of watchmaker argument; he
wants us to recognise that certain phenomena could not
possibly have turned up without having been designed
to meet their specific purposes. In Carl Sagan’s novel
Contact, messages from outer space did not quite turn
out to be the Holy Grail, but were concealed within a
commonplace mathematical calculation, the endless
elaboration of the value of pi. Let us say, for one moment,
that there really was such a code and that it provided
instructions on how to build a time machine or how
107
to travel beyond our galaxy. In those circumstances, it

would be as clear as all the words in Contact itself that
some extraterrestrial intelligence did actually exist. This
would be like the proverbial monkeys with typewriters
really coming up with the works of Shakespeare—so
unlikely that we would have to accept some interven-
tion by an Other. Dembski sees the structures of the cell
as such ‘messages’, written by an intelligence rather than
by nature. Too many items of incredible sophistication
come together with so much accuracy, he argues, that
it is impossible to see them accumulating incrementally.
Orr disagrees. It is common, he says, to have several
similar proteins produced in a cell which may then
change slightly and acquire different functions. Their
exquisite unity may have been preceded by a different
role, equally beguiling. Orr refers to one of Behe’s
favourite examples, the mechanical mousetrap, which
cannot function with just one of its parts missing. But
imagine a car produced in the 1990s. It works well by
most criteria. Then comes the new century and manu-
facturing standards change. ‘We add new parts like
global-positioning systems to cars not because they’re
necessary but because they’re nice. But no one would
be surprised if, in fifty years, computers that rely on
GPS actually drove our cars. At that point GPS would
no longer be an option, it would be an essential piece
of automotive technology.’
108
Orr stresses that Darwinian evolution also expects

many adaptations to be simplifications. In 2006 I broadcast
an interview with an Oxford zoologist who studies cave
fish. These creatures no longer need eyes. But their DNA
still codes for them and, accordingly, they have them
when they are very young but grow flaps of skin across
them as they mature. It costs energy to run eyes, so
better to close them off, simplify the system, if you don’t
need them. The point is that the eyes persist like so
much debris, as do men’s nipples, appendices and much
else in people.
Both Behe and Dembski have been soundly
demolished by experts in their fields. They have even
been attacked by their supporters, one of whom called
Dembski’s use of one key theorem ‘fatally informal and
imprecise’. Orr sums it up this way: ‘As the years pass,
Intelligent Design looks less and less like science and
more and more like an extended exercise in polemics.’
This has not stopped the good citizens of Dover. On
18 October 2004 the Dover Area School Board of
directors, by a vote of 6-3, passed a resolution requiring
ID to be placed on the curriculum. The exact statement
read: ‘Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in
Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution
including, but not limited to, Intelligent Design. Note:
Origins of Life is not taught.’
The directors may have had a majority, but this was
not good enough for the parents. Several of them were
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outraged that science had been so compromised and

took the matter to court. Kitzmiller et al v. Dover Area
School District has become one of the most significant
clashes between fundamentalism and Darwin since
Scopes.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, also in late 2005, the state
board of education voted 6-4 to ‘adopt science standards
that cast doubt on evolution’ (Science, 18 November
2005). This followed an attempt in 1999 by several board
members to remove both evolution and the Big Bang
from curricula.
Before looking in detail at the judge’s remarkable
Memorandum Opinion in the Dover case, it is worth
asking why all this hit headlines around the world in
this early part of the twenty-first century. Is it a skirmish
on the fringe of received knowledge or is it part of a
darker, well-organised plan to subvert science itself ?
Enter the Wedge Strategy, a document that appeared
as an apparent leak on the Internet in 1999. It seemed
to emanate from the Discovery Institute in Seattle and
was a timetable for attack. It is worth quoting from the
notorious master plan.
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science

and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of
materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together
leading scholars from the natural sciences and those
from the humanities and social sciences, the Center
110
explores how new developments in biology, physics and

cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific
materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly
theistic understanding of nature. The Center awards
fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and
briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after
materialism.
By materialism the document’s authors do not mean

consumer culture and democracy via credit card. This
is no assault on capitalism and the American way of life.
They simply mean ungodly. That they have a goal that
is far from trivial or even ecumenical is shown in their
last few words, ‘opportunities for life after materialism’.
This is borne out by the timetable.
Under the Five Year Strategic Plan Summary they
say: ‘If we view the predominant materialistic science as
a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a
“wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk
when applied at its weakest points.’ So the ‘thin end of
the wedge’, as they put it, included Phillip Johnson’s
critique Darwinism on Trial (1991) and then Michael
Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box.
Under Phase I (of the Strategic Plan): ‘A lesson we
have learned from the history of science is that it is
unnecessary to outnumber the opposing establishment.
Scientific revolutions are usually staged by an initially
small and relatively young group of scientists who are
111
not blinded by the prevailing prejudices and who are

able to do creative work at the pressure points, that is,
on those critical issues upon which whole systems of
thought hinge.’
Phase II:‘We seek to cultivate and convince influential
individuals in print and broadcast media, as well as think
tank leaders, scientists and academics, congressional staff,
talk show hosts, college and seminary presidents and
faculty, future talent and potential academic allies.’
Phase III: ‘Once our research and writing have had
time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception
of design theory, we will move toward direct confron-
tation with advocates of materialistic science . . .’
This brings us to the present when, by their own
criteria, the Wedgers are doing very well. Attention is
theirs—in the press, the scientific journals and among
educators. That there is a mixed report from the courts
is just a small setback when you consider the long-term
strategy. The Wedge is clear:
Governing Goals: ‘To defeat materialism and its
destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. To replace
materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding
that nature and human beings are created by God.’ (Note:
Not coexist or offer equal counsel; the words used are defeat
and replace. These are not half measures.)
Five-Year Goals:‘To see the beginning of the influence
of design theory in spheres other than natural science.’
112
Twenty-Year Goals:‘To see Intelligent Design theory

as the dominant perspective in science. To see design
theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and
political life.’
This statement is so extraordinary that one needs to
ask straightaway whether the Wedge is one of those feral
flights of the imagination one finds on the Net, dreamed
up by some drooling green-haired freak in a shed
somewhere, bent on world domination.
Nothing of the kind. Enter Chris Mooney. He is a
journalist based in Washington whose book The Republican
War on Science was published in mid 2005. In it he shows
how two liberally inclined ex-Harvard roommates had
combined in 1966 to warn of the Republican Party’s
anti-intellectual decline. Their ‘polemic’, The Party That
Lost Its Head, was a tour de force of analysis and debunking;
its main message was that conservatives had to win back
the thinkers and not be buried by redneck prejudice.
One of the authors was Bruce Chapman. He
continued as an enlightened political instigator, according
to Mooney, throughout the 1970s, even running as a
leftist candidate for the post of governor in Washington
state in 1980. But then came the Reagan era and
Chapman, like so many on the left cited in this tale,
suddenly ‘chucked a U-ey’, as we say in Oz. He became
a ‘neocon’. By 2003 he was declaring evolution to be
a ‘theory in crisis’. Today Chapman is at the helm of
the Discovery Institute, which began as a branch of the
113
Hudson Institute of Indianapolis but now has leadership

and funding from conservative Christian organisations
and an agenda to match.
In 2002 Mooney was writing a piece about the
Discovery Institute for American Prospect and needed
confirmation or otherwise of the Wedge’s provenance.
He says, ‘In an interview for my story, however,
Discovery’s Stephen C. Meyer, a pro-life religious conser-
vative who directs the Center for Science and Culture,
admitted ownership of the Wedge Document for the
first time, telling me that it “was stolen from our offices
and placed on the Web without permission”.’
So, back to Dover, where the good citizens were
awaiting the opinion from District Court Judge John
E. Jones III in the case of Tammy Kitzmiller and friends
versus the school. His ruling was stunning: in favour of
the eleven parents who were suing the school board.
ID, taught in biology classes, would be unconstitutional,
he wrote, because it is a religious idea advancing ‘a
particular version of Christianity’.
It is worth examining some of the details of his
opinion. On the morphing of ID from creationism:‘The
weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted,
that the systemic change from “creation” to “Intelligent
Design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme
Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling
evidence strongly supports Plaintiff ’s assertion that ID
is creationism re-labeled.’
114
In what way does this matter breach the US Consti-

tution, which forbids the state establishment of religion
and therefore its teaching in schools? Judge Jones quoted
the Supreme Court’s ruling: ‘School sponsorship of a
religious message is impermissible because it sends the
ancillary message to members of the audience who are
nonadherents “that they are outsiders, not full members
of the political community, and an accompanying message
to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of
the political community”.’
Judge Jones then referred to the Wedge document,
clearly satisfied that it is a sound source of the ID agenda.
This is significant.
Then the judge moved to the question of ID as
science. He found:‘After a searching review of the record,
we find that while ID arguments may be true [as a
supernatural explanation], a proposition on which the
Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that
ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is
sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science.’
‘They are,’ he continued:
1. ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science

by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; 2.
the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID,
employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism
that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and 3. ID’s
negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the
115
science community . . . It is additionally important to

note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific
community, it has not generated peer-reviewed
publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and
research.
Judge Jones further noted that ID was trying, by

sleight of hand, to change the ground rules of science
itself: ‘defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his
broad definition of science, which encompasses ID, would
also embrace astrology.’
Astrology!
He also took on ID’s favourite examples—the
flagellum, blood-clotting cascades and the immune
system—and cited evidence that showed how they could
indeed have been elaborations of simpler elements with,
possibly, different functions. ‘We therefore find that
Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has
been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has
been rejected by the community at large.’
In examining Pandas and People, the ID alternative
primer recommended by the Discovery Institute in the
Wedge document, Judge Jones found that ‘Pandas misrep-
resents the “dominant form of understanding
relationships” between organisms, namely the tree of life,
represented by classification determined via the method
of cladistics.’ The book also misrepresents how organs
may have common origins (‘homology’), and ways in
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which structures may be adapted for different functions

(fingers become bats’ wings or horses’ hooves, etc.).
At the end of his exhaustive 139-page opinion the
judge showed how the case was more than a row about
epistemology and the American Constitution. It was
about bullying and it was about lies. He quoted the
testimony of Joel Leib, whose family has lived in Dover
for generations.
‘Well, it’s driven a wedge where there hasn’t been a
wedge before,’ said Leib. ‘People are afraid to talk to
people for fear, and that’s happened to me. They’re afraid
to talk to me because I’m on the wrong side of the
fence.’
The school board (the ID defendants), wrote Judge
Jones,‘unceasingly attempted to distance themselves from
their own actions and statements, which culminated in
repetitious, untruthful testimony . . . It is ironic that several of
these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their
religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to
cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind
the ID policy.’ My italics.
And finally, resoundingly, emphatically: ‘The breath-
taking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when
considered against the factual backdrop which has now
been fully revealed through this trial. The students,
parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District
deserve better than to be dragged into this legal
117
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary

and personal resources.’
So what about the future for ID in America after
such an indictment? Can it recover? Undoubtedly. This
is a force with enormous resources and backing, from
the US president downwards. Adherents are not put off
by evidence, which they regard as so much anti-Christian
propaganda. As Eugenie Scott, a friend of mine who
runs the American National Center for Science
Education, remarked:‘I predict that another school board
down the line will try to bring ID into the curriculum
as Dover did, and they’ll be a lot smarter about concealing
their religious intent.’
And from Professor H. Allen Orr: ‘Biologists aren’t
alarmed by ID’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because
they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism;
they’re alarmed because ID is junk science. Meanwhile,
more than 80% of Americans say that God either created
human beings in their present form or guided their
development. As a succession of ID proponents appeared
before the Kansas Board of Education . . . it was possible
to wonder whether the movement’s scientific coherence
was beside the point. ID has come this far by faith.’
Yes, I’m aware that this quotation gives yet another
figure for the proportion of the US population denying
Darwin. The point is that none is below 47 per cent.
This in the richest and most educated nation on Earth.
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If you add to this vast ocean of American ignorance

all those in the rest of the world who have hardly any
education at all, plus the burgeoning numbers from parts
of the planet where other kinds of fundamentalism reject
modern science, then we really do have a problem. And
that problem may extend to Australia.
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ID IN
AUSTRALIA
ID in Australia
If somebody votes for a party you don’t agree with,

you’re free to argue about it as much as you like. But
if somebody says, ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a
Saturday’, you have to say ‘I respect that’.
Douglas Adams
I am hoping that this will be a short chapter. That is

because I have found Australia to be an open-minded
country in which it is possible to have stimulating
discussions between scientists and members of religious
faiths (sometimes embodied in the same person) without
descending to either the rancour or mendacity described
by Judge Jones in his Dover judgment.
Furthermore, I am aware how much the Australian
scientific establishment, through its academies, is willing
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ID IN AUSTRALIA
to engage with opinions on ethics and the political

implications of research, often with religious leaders.
This has been an important dialogue. As the journal
Nature commentated in an editorial:‘Science, allied with
business, is encroaching on religion’s turf by unleashing
technologies that raise profound questions about human
nature. Religious thinkers are right to raise concerns,
and scientists shouldn’t just charge ahead without listening
to them.’
The trouble is that science in Australia has been
struggling. It has been short of funds, depleted of students
and worrying about pressures to increase its contacts
with commercial interests. As a result, in its attempts to
be noticed, Australian science has sometimes sounded
strident or defensive. To interest potential investors it
has to be as direct and shameless as Mae West in a
sailors’ bar during shore leave, and in trying to convince
the public it has a future, science sometimes sounds like
a fairground tout promising miracles by next Tuesday.
We can all think of examples: stem cells will cure
Alzheimer’s disease soon, when the likelihood is within
twenty years if we’re lucky. Or nuclear power will solve
greenhouse problems at a stroke, when in fact the costs
could be colossal. At the same time, as Nature points
out: ‘Victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit
goal of modern medical science. And immortality has
long been the realm of religion.’
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Into this antipodean uncertainty landed both the

endorsement of ID by George W. Bush and a DVD,
funded by US interests, promoting ID. Our own then
Minister for Education and Science, Brendan Nelson,
appeared to echo the American president. He was caught
on the hop, according to this account by Professor Mike
Archer, Dean of Science at the University of New South
Wales, who wrote in Australian Science:‘The minister was
very humanly led astray by some slick marketing for ID.
Once he became aware that this was gobbledygook and
creationism in a tuxedo, he shut the door on suggesting
that it could have a place in science classes.’
That may be. But in a second chance to clarify, the
minister was quoted as saying, ‘It’s up to the parents.’
Trouble is, ID is already being taught in about 100
schools within science classes. They include Christian
community schools, and Seventh Day Adventist and a
few Anglican schools. Unlike in America, the state can
fund religious schools here. A reader in law at the
Australian National University, Dr John Williams,
remarked, ‘It would be a leap of faith to think the
Australian constitution would stand in the way of a
curriculum that included such things as ID’ (Sydney
Morning Herald, December 2005). In New South Wales
the Minister for Education, Carmel Tebbutt, ruled out
teaching ID in the state’s public schools because it
isn’t science.
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ID IN AUSTRALIA
At one of our oldest private schools, The King’s

School in Parramatta, the head supports ID being taught
in his science classes; across Australia the Christian Parent
Controlled Schools group, with 85 schools educating
22 500 students, implicitly endorsed ID as well. So,
speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, did
Cardinal George Pell.‘We don’t want a simple, dogmatic
teaching of evolution,’ he said, ‘we would want teachers
to talk about the enormous, significant problems in the
evolutionary history. It’s there to be replaced or
improved—there are many things it doesn’t explain.’
In response to these looming threats, a coalition
claiming to represent 70 000 Australian scientists sent an
open letter to the press expressing their concern. They
condemned any move to bring ID anywhere near the
science curriculum. It was penned by Dr Mike Archer:
As Australian scientists we are gravely concerned that

ID might be taught in any school as a valid scientific
alternative to evolution. While science is a work in
progress, a vast and growing body of factual knowledge
supports the hypothesis that biological complexity is
the result of natural processes of evolution.
Proponents of ID assert that some living structures
are so complex that they are explicable only by the
agency of an imagined and unspecified ‘intelligent
designer’. They are free to believe and profess whatever
they like. But not being able to imagine or explain
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how something happened other than by making a leap

of faith to supernatural intervention is no basis for any
science: that is a theological or philosophical notion.
For a theory to be considered scientific it must be
testable—either directly or indirectly—by experiment
or observation. The results of such tests should be able
to be reproduced by others as a check on their accuracy
(and, importantly, if repeated testing falsifies the theory
it should be rejected rather than taught as part of the
accumulating body of scientific understanding). Finally,
a scientific theory should explain more than what is
already known: it should be able to predict outcomes
in novel situations. Evolution meets all of these criteria
but ID meets none of them: it is not science.
We therefore urge all Australian governments and
educators not to permit the teaching or promulgation
of ID as science. To do so would make a mockery of
Australian science teaching and throw open the door
of science classes to similarly unscientific world views—
be they astrology, spoon-bending, flat-earth cosmology
or alien abductions—and crowd out the teaching of
real science.
Is there a problem in Australia? At first glance the

answer is No! Science and technology are well respected
throughout Australian society and we are proud of our
international reputation. The most recent Nobel Prize
winners, Professors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall
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from Perth, were feted across the land and given a

standing ovation in Federal Parliament, not least by the
prime minister, John Howard. I was there, and no one
could doubt his delight in their achievements. Howard
has also been prudent in the extent to which he allows
his ministers’ religious beliefs to influence policy. Stem-
cell research has received orange lights and abortion laws
have not been changed drastically under his government.
But these are febrile times. Australia, as indeed the
global community, faces several hot issues that demand
action before scientists can provide definitive input: climate
change, bird flu, nuclear power, weapons technology,AIDS
and mental health treatment, and many more besides. As
our relationship with the US becomes closer and those
with our Asian neighbours more uneasy, it is likely that
compromises based on ideology and not terribly far from
religious fundamentalism will be forced upon us.
If this seems a stretch, then it is worth looking at a
list offered by renowned science writer Boyce Rensberger,
of MIT. Reviewing Chris Mooney’s The Republican War
on Science in Scientific American, he writes that the right
wing’s ‘assault on science’ under Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan pales in comparison to that of the
current Bush administration, which in four years has:
• rejected the scientific consensus on global warming
and suppressed an EPA report supporting that
consensus;
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• stacked numerous advisory committees with industry

representatives and members of the religious right;
• begun deploying a missile defence system without
evidence that it can work;
• banned funding for embryonic stem-cell research
except on 60 cell lines claimed to be already in
existence, most of which turned out not to be;
• forced the National Cancer Institute to say that
abortion may cause breast cancer, a claim refuted by
good studies; and
• ordered the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to remove information about condom use
and efficacy from their website.
Rensberger ends by claiming that Thomas Jefferson

would be appalled at this record of ‘opposition to freedom
and science’. The editors of Scientific American in a previous
issue in 2005 likened George W. Bush’s record in this
regard as reminiscent of that of Stalin’s chief scientific
apologist, Trofim Lysenko.
For Australia, at such a time, caution would seem to
be advisable. We also risk spooking a population already
uncertain about the benefits of scientific advances and,
indeed, the probity of some scientists. A success for ID
in infiltrating schools would be yet one more victory
for relativism—the conviction that we ‘consume’
knowledge like customers in a supermarket. We are
encouraged no longer to make the effort to think our
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ID IN AUSTRALIA
way through issues but, instead, to insist on our right

to choose according to fashion or the requirements of
our tribal allegiance. Welcome to the marketplace of
ideas. Jefferson must be thrashing in his grave.
As we debate these concerns, it may do us good to
consider where we have come from as believers in this
and that over the last century. Australia is a secular society,
perhaps, but many of its laws and institutions were formed
through the influence of churches. This may, in the
main, be a good thing. But surely we are mature enough,
and informed enough, to face up to some of the really
big questions of faith. How much traditional belief has
clearly been scotched by scientific knowledge? Do we
really need to carry so much of the detritus of yesteryear?
Even Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, in
his 2005 Boyer Lectures for the ABC described himself
as ‘not a religious man’, implying that he did not require
the traditional embroidery of religiosity—unquestioning
belief in the entire job lot of doctrine—to adhere to
Jesus and his teachings.
Once the old shibboleths are jettisoned, the division
of what’s left seems plain enough. Science provides the
story of how the universe and the living world came
to be as they are, but not why they are here at all.
Religion provides conjecture about where the universe
came from and what its purpose may be. Some people
happily imbibe from both streams. I don’t, as I shall
explain in the next chapter.
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Perhaps it is all best summed up in ‘Dover Beach’,*

a poem Matthew Arnold wrote in 1867, just eight years
after Darwin published The Origin of Species:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Arnold’s despair at the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar’ of faith in God in a world which seemed so beautiful
and new but was really devoid of joy, love and light left
him feeling marooned. He saw us languishing ‘on a
darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night’.
But that is not how the majority of Australians I
have met see their new secular existence. Darwin has
immeasurably enhanced our perception of nature. So
has the understanding, through evolutionary ideas, of
how we must cherish and look after the biodiversity
still surviving.
It should be an extraordinarily exciting time for us,
not least in a part of the world that affords special insights
* A poignant echo of the Dover trial?
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ID IN AUSTRALIA
into the whole marvellous process, from the origin of

marsupials to the vastness of reefs and ocean life and the
relationship of this biggest island in the world with
Gondwana. Why despair—unless you are so embedded
in a rigid world view that any shift from it is a shattering
wrench; unless you find yourself so at odds with the facts
before your eyes that self-delusion is your only recourse?
The great Peter Medawar—joint Nobel laureate with
our own Macfarlane Burnet—was once called upon to
review Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, one
of the most famous expositions of an anthropic universe,
in which purpose becomes a kind of vitalism culminating
in the emergence of humans. Here is Medawar in his
withering critique of the Jesuit palaeontologist’s book:‘It
cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping
and flailing around for sense . . . the greater part of it is
nonsense, tricked out by a variety of tedious metaphys-
ical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty
only on the ground that before deceiving others he has
taken great pains to deceive himself.’
Poor Teilhard. But it is a perfect description of ID.
What are you left with after this separation from
God? A life according to the new catechisms of science?
Not at all. Science doesn’t have catechisms. But you
can be inspired by the knowledge it offers. And you
can add that to knowledge and wisdom culled from
other sources—even theology, if you want—to enjoy an
incredibly fulfilling life.
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PART II
GOD’S ONLY
EXCUSE
God’s Only Excuse
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can

induce you to commit atrocities.
Voltaire
‘He’s Party, I’m sure.’ My mother was reading the

newspaper and drinking her tenth cup of tea of the
morning. Tea was made by dripping hot water from the
kettle onto leaves in a strainer. The kettle was always
almost boiling, quietly grumbling on the stove, making
little bangs over a minuscule flame. The parsimonious
habits of wartime austerity persisted despite our newly
found comfort.
She pointed at the picture of a Hollywood star; it
may have been John Garfield. ‘He’s been Party for ages.’
133
I didn’t think it odd then (I was far too young) that

‘Party’ should have a capital P and no definite article.
Garfield wasn’t just ‘in the party’—meaning the
Communist Party. He was Party: One of Us.
My father concurred. He and my mother were not
often in agreement, even on the wetness of water or
the nature of pink. But knowing who was Party was of
the essence.
I was eight. We were living in Vienna not long after
the War (another capital-letter word). It was the city of
Harry Lime, occupying forces and strange tides of
allegiance. We were working class but living in a swank
apartment near the famous Prater, a glorious park with
the Big Wheel and a spectacular fun fair from which
vast stretches of woodland and horse-chestnut avenues
reached as far as the Old Danube, and with two servants,
Gertrude and Trudi, to do our bidding.
Vienna was a city seething with officials from newly
placed international organisations. It rivalled Geneva. My
parents were in the World Federation of Trade Unions.
I knew little about it then and had heard nothing since
until, strangely, I came across a mention of it in John le
Carré’s novel Absolute Friends. The WFTU was headquar-
tered in a palace in the centre of Vienna. It’s remarkable
how well Party People took to palaces. The staircases were
marble and the chandeliers enormous but being Party, it
turned out, wasn’t a sufficient qualification.
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
My parents often did a bit of a triage on their

comrades. I didn’t understand the subtlety of these
judgments.
Drinkwater, for example, was definitely Party, but not
up to speed. Once at a cocktail do in one of the vast
reception areas where archdukes had cavorted, Drinkwater
languidly asked me to fetch him a canape. ‘You took
your time, boy,’ he remarked on my return, lounging in
his couch. I replied: ‘My father says you’re too slow to
catch a cold.’
It just came out. He stared at me. His companions
froze. My mother, nearby, began a qualifying sentence
but gave up, for once at a loss. There’s a quality of
silence, former Labor Party president Barry Jones once
told me, that you learn to recognise.
At home I wasn’t punished, much to my amazement.
No beating. The moment was allowed to pass. But I
became lastingly confused. How could someone be one
of us, Party, yet still on the outer, not really one of us
at all? Would I ever cope with the intricacies of being
grown up?
And why were Us important? What about Them?
As I got older I met people I liked who turned out to
be Them. Sometimes I was made to drop them. This
was a pity, because they were often more fun than Us.
Party people were the opposite of what they sounded
like. No bells and whistles, silly hats or tangos. Instead,
grim-faced, they were always making references to
135
‘discipline’ and ‘struggle’, like Presbyterians at a wake. I

would picture struggle as a Houdini-like figure wriggling
in a straitjacket and forever failing to escape. Not the
wellspring of social spontaneity, this Party. Even with its
newfound comforts.
I wasn’t very good at being Us. One afternoon I was
taken to a Young Pioneer group whose members met
in some dark rooms in the basement of a large apartment
building along the Danube Canal. The Pioneers were
correct-line scouts, campers with agitprop, nurseries for
Party. Vast portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin
loomed over our small heads. The youth in charge talked
for hours about what seemed to be rules and procedures.
I was, from the start, bad at rules, worse at catechism.
Especially when it was handed down in the presence
of frowning men with beards (OK, Stalin had only a
moustache, but it sat like a wild animal under his nose).
I never went back.
How did my parents, decent people of considerable
culture, a Welsh miner and an East London linguist,
become ensnared as actors in a le Carré landscape with
its codes, certainties and exclusions? The answer is simple:
75 years ago in Europe you chose: you were either for
the fascists or against them. There was no in between.
Only fools or drunks or the terminally bewildered
allowed themselves to sidestep history.
My parents also saw themselves and their friends as
idealists. Unlike fascists, they did not wish to rid the
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
world of a race of humans. Subhumans. They were

nothing like the Nazis about whom Martin Amis (whose
father Kingsley was also Party in the 1940s) agonises in
Koba the Dread. Why do we not see supporters of Stalin
as so obviously evil and culpable as the supporters of
Hitler? he asks. The numbers Stalin killed were as big.
Bigger. At that time it was because the left, the ordinary
socialists, saw Us as the grassroots, what my father called
the body politic. Us was not the men in suits (like
Drinkwater) nor the moustachioed generalissimos with
their Cro-Magnon brows and festoons of medallions
that would make Idi Amin look modest.
My father’s heroes were, ultimately, the miners and
their families he had grown up with in South Wales
and with whom he’d toiled underground from the age
of 14. They were the enslaved gold miners of South
Africa whom he went to help, quixotically, in the 1950s,
along with the likes of Nelson Mandela. His heroes were
not the square-shouldered tyrants reviewing parades of
tanks in Red Square. They were the hollow-eyed, near-
starved workers without work who somehow kept their
communities alive and for whom the word ‘struggle’
was more than a comrade’s slogan. Before he died, when
I was 18, I saw my father hunched in front of a BBC
documentary about Stalin. He was whispering something
repeatedly. I crept closer and heard the words, ‘You
ruthless bastard!’
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Were Us different from Them? That is a judgment

for history. What is just as significant is how close they
could have been to merging. The ingredients were there.
Harsh social circumstances, the call for absolute discipline
to face a common enemy, an elaborate ideology, a dogma,
men with beards (or moustaches) laying down the law.
‘Communism is just fascism with a human face,’ wrote
Susan Sontag. Under such circumstances, ultimately, you
can make people do anything.
Anything. That’s the incubus of mankind. Beslan,
Auschwitz, Port Arthur, Culloden, Rwanda, My Lai—
no outrage is beyond us. And we can do evil casually,
almost without feeling. With banality.
The big question is whether this is an intrinsic quality
or whether we first need to be pushed to extremes. Do
we behave despicably in ordinary times because we’re
bored, stupid or just intrinsically nasty? Or does it take
crisis to make us evil? Watching the news in the past
year it has been easy to assume the first, that we are, as
Harvard professor Richard Wrangham argues, demonic.
Evolutionary science seems to give some credibility
to this view, but not quite. It takes a lot of energy and
resources to be vicious. Peacefulness costs less. We may
need to belong, but must this mean that we have to
despise those who don’t?
A strong commitment to family and friends is
obviously vital. Otherwise babies would perish and
communities crumble. Even in extremis we persevere
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
altruistically in the cause of Us. Anthropologist Colin

Turnbull’s contrary example of the Ik tribe of Uganda,
who in the 1970s allowed their children to waste away
in time of famine, has been vigorously disputed. Most
of us go to enormous lengths to care for our own.
Similarly, we seem to be enraptured by landscape. Our
country. Where we belong. Harvard biologist Ed Wilson
calls this biophilia. It makes sense to assume we have a
strong feeling for who we are and where we come from.
The trouble arises when populations become larger
and wealth accumulates. We need more social glue. By
then we can afford priests and shamans to provide it for
us. Religion is apparently universal among human beings.
Its purpose may be to console us for loss and disaster
and prepare us for the inevitability of death. Above all,
it gives us a badge, a totem, a definition of Us. It is a
unifier. It is also a powerful means of control.
But religion doesn’t necessarily come with an ethical
code. Jared Diamond writes of many tribal people, such
as those in Papua New Guinea, whose robust religious
paraphernalia provides not a whit of Thou Shalt Not.
We do not need magic or messiahs to help us live
decently, to provide a code for living. David Sloane
Wilson, author of Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion
and the Nature of Society, sums up the binding role of
belief: ‘Something as elaborate—as time-, energy-, and
thought-consuming—as religion would not exist if it
didn’t have secular utility. Religions exist primarily for
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people to achieve together what they cannot achieve

alone. The mechanisms that enable religious groups to
function as adaptive units include the very beliefs and
practices that make religion appear enigmatic to so many
people who stand outside them.’
Religions, in such circumstances, are adaptive. Even
the scouring, the ritual asceticism, the sacrifice are, para-
doxically, reinforcers. Suffering seems a much more likely
qualifier for belonging than sweet self-indulgence. Some
religions do offer promiscuous sex and sensual massage
as part of the deal, but they tend not to last as long as
those religions demanding celibacy, flagellation and silence.
They keep us under control.
Another part of the deal is that the leader, in tandem
with his priest, has a special line to the deity. Diamond
poses the essential question succinctly: ‘But how does
the chief get the peasants to tolerate what is basically
the theft of their food by classes of social parasites?’ His
answer:
The solution devised by every known chiefdom and

early state society—from ancient Egypt to Polynesian
Hawaii to the Inca Empire—was to proclaim an
organised religion with the following tenets: the chief
or king is related to the gods; he or she can intercede
with the gods on behalf of the peasants (e.g. to send
rain or ensure a good harvest). In return for those
services, the peasants should feed the chief and his
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
priests and tax collectors. Standardised rituals, carried

out at standardised temples, serve to teach these religious
tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief
and his lackeys.
Should the peasants become restless, Diamond might

have added, we can stir up some loathing of those folk
over the mountain who may look like us but worship
Goz instead of Zog. Non-Party. Them. Nothing like an
external enemy to pacify the populace.
All this was clearly adaptive, in the main, because
human societies survived and grew and are now covering
the planet. The creative role of conflict is crucial. More
on that later.
But religions differ from most human systems of ideas
in that they are absolute. Few gods can be sent back,
except in ancient Greece, because they’ve got it wrong.
Gods Know. It is we who get things wrong by misin-
terpreting God’s intentions. Or Stalin’s. The failure is
always ours. Even a sophisticated god, such as the
Christian one, cannot be blamed for Auschwitz (and all
those other geographical horrors listed above) because
it’s up to us. We are free to choose concentration camps.
And to murder children in Beslan. Or to blow up a
school bus shouting ‘God is great!’
Religion flourishes as democracy fades. Religion is
in the ascendant in America today. When policies fail,
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God is invoked. He also threatens to overwhelm politics

in Africa and Asia.
Back to Wrangham’s Demonic Males, a book about
killer chimpanzees. Are they really wired to attack,
mutilate and kill outsiders? Pictures of this being done
by our closest relatives are as compelling as they are
disturbing. Why torture a stranger and his brothers in
this way? Is it just how the chimps are? How we are?
Is there a biological original sin in our genes that makes
us turn into Stalin, Pol Pot or their faithful servants?
Jane Goodall and other ethologists, while recognising
the vicious treatment of those outsiders, point to the
chaotic and deprived state of the habitats where this is
done. Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where she
famously studied wild chimpanzees, is being logged and
poached. The forest home is disappearing. Chimp society
is being subjected to the same upheavals as Rwandan
and Bosnian human society was—and is. Under such
circumstances Us-and-Them differences can easily
become the basis for genocide.
The really interesting question is whether the contrary
applies: will stable, flourishing societies be less vulnerable?
There are a few clues. Wars between secular democracies
are unknown. Democracies require that we regularly
hand over power to governments, on the basis, of course,
that they will regularly give it back. Democracies, even
American ones, also try to keep religion in the cloister.
And they welcome outsiders (‘Give me your tired, your
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the

wretched refuse of your teeming shore’ . . . )—though
not as often as they might. Healthy societies, like forests,
benefit from biodiversity.
To give a contemporary example from my own
experience: when, in 1996, the Howard government
looked at the ABC, it saw an institution it didn’t like.
It was, in the words of one Tory, ‘our enemies talking
to our friends’.
A somewhat unsubtle way of tackling this difficulty
was to appoint a chum of the prime minister, Donald
McDonald, as chairman of the corporation. And then,
in 2000, to appoint another member of the Party, Jonathan
Shier (he was once a leader of the Young Liberals in
Victoria, but claimed his membership had lapsed by
then), as managing director. His riding instructions from
the PM’s office, I’m told by a senior Liberal Party
member, were to ‘change the culture at the ABC’.
Now this is perfectly normal power politics, and
unsurprising after 13 years on the sidelines during which
the conservatives became understandably cross about a
number of ABC activities. It is what Shier did to change
‘the culture’ that some of us found shocking.
He sacked the ABC senior managers. All of them.
He committed executive cleansing. He then set out to
do the same with middle management. Stalin’s friend
Lavrenti Beria would have been proud. The aim,
remember, was not to replace a poor leadership with a
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better one. It was to transform the culture of an

institution.
Did it work? Not at all. The culture didn’t change,
it simply became more impoverished and resentful. The
mission to change Them (ABC pinkoes) into Us (right-
minded professionals) failed for the same reason that the
British failed to quash the Irish rebels and the Americans
are failing in Iraq. You cannot impose a culture from
above. Not for long.
How do you change a corporate culture? At the ABC
you could do so by hiring bright kids. This is cheaper
(Shier wasted $37 million in his cavalier adventure) and
far more insidious. Advertise jobs for young Australians,
appoint the best, and they will (unless you bind and gag
them) trash old-fashioned ideas and biases before you
can say the word ‘elite’. It’s human biodiversity. But
replace one lot of suits with another lot and what are
you left with? Suits!
‘Hire the best people you can find and let them do
what they want.’ That wasn’t the New Age rant of a
pony-tailed management guru from Byron Bay. That
was Bill Gates.
Organised religion relies on authority in the same
way Jonathan Shier relied on correct-line suits. It takes
a top-down approach. But religion is also an enormously
sophisticated psychological exercise, as anthropologist
Robin Dunbar points out in his book The Human Story.
It works at the fifth, highest level of cognition, of
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
intention. After an ability to recognise ourselves, others

and others playing tricks on us, all within the capacities
of clever animals such as apes and dogs, we humans add
our own unique bit of brain power: we can imagine
gods; other worlds. (This may also explain how we can
take the other-worldly nature of modern motivational
management, like Shier’s, seriously.) This capacity for
spiritual belief has served us well in history as a unifying
force—though at considerable cost.
As I mentioned before, Dunbar asserts that the natural
size of Us, of one person’s intimate community, is 150.
Beyond that number we find it hard to cope socially.
Your 150 may include several at the end of interconti-
nental phone lines or email, but they are your
‘village’—the number of close associates your brain is
equipped to deal with.
Larger populations require a means of social cohesion
beyond the capacities we were born with. This could
be the shared experience of television, music, literature,
fashion—Richard Dawkins’s ‘extended phenotype’. This
is extrasomatic inheritance—it evolves outside our bodies.
Religion, with its initially homely forest gods and limited
kit, also evolved. Randy gods with whimsical or capricious
habits became one mysterious, all-powerful God.
Anachronisms of faith were quietly abandoned as they
became more embarrassing and manifestly absurd. Most
modern priests would have been burned as heretics only
a few hundred years ago. Religious infrastructure also
145
evolved, sometimes to disastrous levels, as in Easter Island

and Central America. And Rome.
Church unified our separate societies. Sometimes too
well. In hard times the infidels, those not recognised as
Party, had to go. Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, cleansings
were required.
Let me ask the question in a purely evolutionary way,
as Wrangham might, about demonic males wearing
surplices. Could institutional religion have outlived its
usefulness? Are the men in beards too disruptive? (I am
not against beards, nor religion, in certain circumstances.
Beards belong in trad jazz bands, real ale pubs and
anywhere with anoraks. Religion, as practised personally
and without an inclination to rule the world, is fine,
too.) I do believe the answer is yes in both instances.
Religion has become catastrophically divisive. It
magnifies the divide between Us and Them in the same
way Party did. It demands credulousness and obedience.
It is the unforgiving force, with its visions of Armageddon,
that drove Ronald Reagan against the Evil Empire. It
is the force, allied with an apocalyptic, fundamentalist
view of history, that drives his successor, George W.
Bush, against an ‘axis of evil’. It is the fanatical force
that makes the Islamic army in Iraq condemn the ‘farce
of democracy and elections’ by calling polling booths
‘centres of atheism’.
I wonder whether my father, who died more than
40 years ago, would have recognised these new
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
antagonisms. He spent his last years muttering against

the Stalinists yet loyally, vainly, trying to sell their
mouthpiece Soviet Weekly on freezing London street
corners. The cold and humiliation killed him.
My last row with him, before his six-foot miner’s
frame collapsed and his George Orwell features eroded
forever, was about the bomb. Back then, I was marching
in those first anti-nuclear protests alongside jolly bearded
jazzmen and gaunt, friendly vicars, frisky girls-who-
would and young men who couldn’t believe their luck.
The all-inclusive melting pot of the sixties was just
beginning.
My father seemed to approve of my sudden adolescent
politicisation. After all, red flags were plainly seen among
the crow’s-foot peace symbols and the odd Christian
cross. But there was a catch. The Soviet bomb, he insisted,
was necessary. So was its relentless testing. It was Our
bomb, not Theirs, and therefore all right.
He argued like a barrack-room lawyer. Like a
contorted priest. That was another good Party word:
argue. Never give an inch. No sophistry is too blatant—
when repeated forever.
Our last physical fight wasn’t about politics but about
family. I tried to stop him beating my small brother. My
father, Gwynfor Williams, born in 1905, was raised in
the shadow of the Welsh Chapel with its unforgiving
morality and harsh discipline. His atheism did not erase
its Dickensian mores. Gwyn used fists or sticks to keep
147
us in line. It was for our own good. The tyrant’s discipline

usually is.
He hit my brother. I told him to stop. He turned on
me, now a fit rugby-playing youth of some stature. What
do you do as a self-styled pacifist disarmer when a self-
righteous demonic Party pugilist starts throwing punches?
I lifted my arms above my head and allowed him to
pummel my flexed abdomen until he gave up, exhausted.
He never attacked us again.
Gwyn didn’t give up the promised (Party) land. He
argued on his death bed, physically shrunken and stick-
like, for ‘the people’s democracies’. He didn’t return,
even when in agony, to the comforts of the Chapel of
his youth. But I did see him sometimes, at ceremonies
where believers prayed, courteously mouthing the Lord’s
Prayer.‘It’s an affirmation of a just, equal society, a socialist
tomorrow,’ he’d say, as if the prayer were a version of
the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
‘Kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in Heaven’ was,
in real life, translated by Soviet diktat into the Five-Year
Plans. They didn’t work. They are now in the ash can
of history.
As for God, He is becoming the last refuge of the
fanatic. Poor God. He was meant to keep us cosy. Is it
time He shaved off His beard?
Yes! For two reasons. The first is innovation.
Throughout history the main mother of invention has
been not a five-year plan but disaster and war. Conflict
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GOD’S ONLY EXCUSE
and catastrophe. The War, as my parents called it, was

the seedbed of the modern world: it gave us antibiotics,
rockets to the moon, computing, satellites, radar and
radio astronomy. Disasters, such as the Black Death, led
to printing, modern science and the Renaissance. Human
conflict, in a startling way, was creative. In between,
nothing much happened.
Now that we cover the Earth as a species, we cannot
possibly rely on such a disruptive mechanism for creativity
any longer. The costs are too gigantic. We must find
another driver of innovation. If it is not to be us against
them it will have to be something to unite us with our
neighbours, the rest of humankind. While Wrangham
points to the demonic nature of some animals in some
conditions, others, such as Professor Lynn Margulis, show
that many living creatures also survive by cooperation.
Margulis’s and Jim Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, you’ll
recall, sees our planet as a kind of living organism,
responding in a unified way to circumstance. They are
adamant that altruism is not the last refuge of sentiment
but a strong force in nature.
Which brings me to the second reason. We now
know that God did not unleash the 2004 tsunamis
because he was upset. They were unleashed by geology.
Nor did God go blind at Auschwitz, Beslan or on Boxing
Day 2004. He wasn’t there. As Sartre said, quoting
Stendhal: ‘God’s only excuse is—He doesn’t exist.’ Now,
at last, we are unified by a contemplation of horror and
149
loss. Differences between them and us become ultimately

trivial in the wider context we modern humans, alone,
can recognise. Mere veneer. The badges of ideology and
dogma fade as we contemplate sheer, enormous needs
of humanity. That is the future. The alternative is
catastrophe.
Perhaps, once you dispense with Party, that’s what
my poor parents were on about after all.
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10
WILLIAMS
VERSUS GOD
Williams versus God
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever

dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper
and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine
adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their
prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive
this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of
evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the
oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
Robert A. Heinlein
My secondary school in London was a pleasant brick

building with wide green playing grounds all about it,
nearly genteel, nearly scholarly, with a few public successes
including some rugby stars and David Davies, the SAS
hero of humble stock who nearly beat David Cameron
151
to become leader of the Tory Party. It was called Tooting

Bec Grammar School, sounding like the chimera of a
rural Chinese collective farm and an abbey for mad
monks in northern France. It was, in fact, an average
grammar school with above-average pretensions.
The masters treated the boys reasonably well, given
the times. The 1950s were the beginnings of a new
enlightenment—but not yet. As Philip Larkin noted
wistfully in ‘Annus Mirabalis’:‘Sexual intercourse began/In
1963 (which was rather) late for me.’ Non-violence as
a formal requirement was also a long way off, and canings
were common, delivered by both teachers and older
boys. They were not remotely sadistic rituals, no foaming
Gradgrinds inflicting running welts, but unpleasant
enough. Several masters ruled by fear.
Having seen them intimidate boys on a regular basis,
it was therefore a revelation for me to see them humbly
genuflect in church or in assembly. Most conspicuous
was the headmaster, Colonel W.H. Hore, a kind of West
Country Prince Philip in manner and persuasion. He
bobbed up and down with the best of them as I looked
on in incredulity. Can he be serious? Is he really bending
his knee to a higher power? Can he really believe his
prayers (what in heaven can he be asking for?) will reach
the Almighty and then (!) make him change His mind?
Thoughts like this helped me cope with the tedium.
Then it occurred to me. I thought I saw what was
really going on here as the sons of lower-middle-class
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
gentlefolk bowed in the thrall of the unremarkable church

we attended in Trinity Road, just around the corner
from Balham Tube Station (‘Gateway to the South’, Peter
Sellers called it in an infamous skit). They seemed to
yield to its sepulchral mood as if it were indeed a monastic
retreat closer to Rome than to the Northern Line.
The Colonel and the teachers, I surmised, were
showing us who was boss. Lines of command. They
couldn’t really be talking to Him or actually feeling some
transcendent contact—they were too smart, surely, for
that. This was the cane by other means.
I looked across at their closed eyes and moving lips
and thought, ‘Come off it, you can’t be serious.’ I always
meant to ask them up front, when we were off at a
rugby match; on such occasions both they and we
smoked, a kind of tacit acknowledgment that we had
become sufficiently senior and nearly mates.
I never did, of course. I can’t recall even nowadays
confronting a friend and asking whether what they do
is old habit or really meant. Decorum forbids it.
One of the books that has sat longest on my shelf
is Adams Versus God, in which my colleague and friend
Phillip Adams documents his own long-running dispute
with the deity. He and I agree on many things but have
different personal histories. Phillip had holy cloth in the
family, and it rubbed him cruelly. I had no such dark
spirits, though my father’s tussles with Joe Stalin may
have amounted to the same thing.
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God, as I indicated in Chapter One, really didn’t appear

on my youthful horizon. I do remember, at the age of
about five or six, telling my mother that, with so many
people in the world—hundreds!—one of them might well
be Jesus. She nodded without comment. It was the
demographic approach to conversion, the closest I got.
When I was four, and alone in the park, I heard what
turned out to be my first moving encounter with classical
music. Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves was
playing from a loudspeaker hanging from the steeple of
the church on Turnham Green, West London. I was so
affected that I wandered in wearing my short trousers,
followed by Whiskers the dog, up the aisle to where
the vicar was sitting, somewhere among the pews. I
asked him to put the record on again. He did. I’ve been
fond of vicars ever since.
When I began science broadcasting, I was ecumenical
to a fault. Some of the first editions of The Science Show
sounded like New Age seminars from deepest Nimbin
or Glastonbury. I was influenced by Malcolm Long (later
deputy managing director of the ABC and head of SBS)
and Peter Fry (who invented Lateline, the predecessor
of Late Night Live on ABC Radio National). Their series
Beyond the Mechanical Mind had explored the limits of
science, its uncertainty, the powers of the establishment
and how hard it really is to shift paradigms without
waiting interminably for the deaths of eminent academ-
icians, as they do in Japan and China.
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
We put on the critics of science, from Ivan Illich to

R.D. Laing, and philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend
and Thomas Kuhn. I also tried to give some air time
to those with alternative points of view, often spiritual
ones. After a while it struck me how very little these
latter had to say.
I remember a smooth-talking fellow who looked like
a cut-price proctologist and claimed to do ‘past lives
therapy’. He said he could make a person go into a trance
and revisit one of the many lives he or she had experienced
before their present sojourn on Earth. This fellow, from
Moss Vale, turned up for our interview with his lady.
She was endlessly accommodating and agreed without
blinking to show me one of her previous incarnations.
We went to the studio. I began to record. I nodded
to Mr Smoothie, who touched the woman’s elbow and—
Bingo!—she was off. Ask her anything you like, I was
urged.
‘Where are you?’
‘I am on the planet X [did she call it Zog?].’
‘And what do you do there?’
‘I’m in charge of a big space station.’
‘What is it like?’
‘Big!’
‘Go on!’ I was getting restless.
‘Very big.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not really.’
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All my questioning produced little more than

pabulum. It was a profoundly unedifying experience.
Even a three-hour intercontinental live investigation of
ESP for another program produced hardly more than
fluff; particularly memorable was the completely off-
beam mind reading performed by a world-famous
clairvoyant, who got my history so wrong I shamefully
agreed with one or two of her top-of-the-head punts
just to keep the program mildly diverting.
From that date on I didn’t bother with Other Worlds.
They offered such little reward compared with real
evidence about real nature, and they usually ended up
as insults to the intelligence.
What was surprising to me was how much scientists
took notice of oddball religious opinion. Some did so
with tongues firmly in cheeks. One example was Arthur
C. Clarke (of 2001, A Space Odyssey), who wrote The
Menace of Creationism and proclaimed it a Soviet conspiracy
perpetrated by the KGB to deprive the West of oil
supplies: ‘I’m working on a theory that the attempt to
persuade Americans that the world is 6000 years old is
actually a diabolical Russian plot, because some KGB
genius realizes that “creationism” will ultimately destroy
the US oil and mining interests.’ If fossil fuels aren’t
really fossilised, he went on, bang goes the industry—
when they realise this, American energy supplies will
stop dead.
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
Clarke proceeded to further mischief:‘The next move

is to get Congress to pass a law making pi = 3, as is
clearly stated in Kings 7:23 and II Chronicles 4:2. Then
Detroit will be forced to manufacture cars with elliptical
wheels. You can take it from there . . .’
Humour has often been the reaction of scientists to
sustained assaults on their work. I suspect they can’t
believe someone will blithely sweep aside all their metic-
ulously assembled work of centuries, with its supporting
checks and sceptical cross-referencing, and just say ‘Nah!
’Tain’t true!’
Four years ago, during a previous skirmish with ID,
which started with an advert in the American papers
signed by 100 ‘scientists’ denying Darwin, Eugenie Scott
was called by numerous outraged people insisting she
and her National Center for Science Education answer
with an ad containing 200 scientists saying the opposite.
She refused, answering, ‘Science isn’t done by plebiscite.’
Instead she offered, in memory of Stephen Jay Gould,
who’d just died, to find a few hundred Steves—and
Stephanies—who would sign a more jocular statement
in support of evolution as a theory. Hundreds did so
(Steve Weinberg, Steve Pinker, Steve Jones, Steven
Rose . . . ).
I interviewed Eugenie and, back in Australia, my
producer David Fisher wrote a Steve song and performed
it on air to accompany the item. A few stern souls were
annoyed by our levity. Richard Dawkins (and I) may
157
become infuriated at some of the antiscientific antics of

creationists, but a majority of scientists, in their innocence,
prefer burlesque to bombast.
The Australian Skeptics are of the same ilk. I remember
Barry Williams, editor of the skeptic, suggesting that
‘balance’, in terms of allowing air time for creationist
opinions on ABC programs, is like requesting equivalent
balance in politics or public affairs by setting up programs
called Nazi News and Paedophiles’ Half Hour. Neither
is in the schedules, as yet. (But the ABC does have a
radio program called Counterpoint, in which successions
of retired blimps are paraded denying things like climate
change and threats to biodiversity. So there’s still hope.)
Meanwhile, of course, the essence of ID and what it
represents remains, as Chris Mooney is quoted as saying
in Chapter Four, an anti-intellectual threat of the first
order. Its tactics remind me of an incident of my youth
when I and some friends were part of a pleasant group
of youngsters running the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament in South London. Two hulking lowbrows
appeared wanting to join. Their language and manner
made us suspicious; besides, I knew something of the
background of one of them through my father. Both
were communists attempting to take over and run what
appeared to them to be an influential political organis-
ation. That it was merely a loose assembly of idealistic
young hedonists is beside the point. We kept the
scoundrels out.
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
Later, in the 1970s in Britain, a similar ‘entrist’

manoeuvre was tried, with devastating results, within the
British Labour Party. It took a generation and some
battering of the leadership to recover. Both the Wedge
document and the tactics of ID in the US and Australia
are disturbingly similar to the Stalinist tactics of those
times. It is a mistake to ‘misunderestimate’ such
deviousness.
It is a matter of intellectual freedom. Religion, at its
worst, like Stalinism, is an authoritarian instrument and
resents any questioning of its pronouncements, directives
or rules of conduct. The hard-line encyclicals of the
Islamic militants are typical of this. What began as a
unifying force thousands of years ago as populations
expanded has become an instrument of control. It is
interesting that those Islamic communities, and there are
a few, where freedom of thought and expression has
flourished have become ones where peaceful intention,
orderliness and the understanding of other cultures is
most robust. It is the same with other faiths.
So it is not a question of Williams versus God so
much as Williams versus jackboots. There has been a
shocking amount of mutilation, rape and murder in the
name of God throughout history and it is still going
on. We owe it to the future survival of decent society
to ask why this happens and how it may be stopped.
Though the sheer numbers killed in wars so far in the
twenty-first century, as former Australian Foreign Minister
159
Gareth Evans has made plain, is nowhere near the

appalling scale of the twentieth century, it is still bad
enough, and it could get much worse. The risks are
enormous.
It is also insulting to suggest that religious belief is
the only source of a moral order. This is not the experience
of most people in societies such as Australia who, I am
sure, do not give a second thought to a deity as they go
through their busy lives, except perhaps when they hatch,
match or dispatch. Baptisms, weddings and funerals are
lonely reminders of the sacred tradition of forebears.
There may certainly be religious fingerprints on various
laws and practices as they have been established and
refined over the centuries; that is to be expected. Present-
day rules and regulations tend, however, to be much more
utilitarian and remind one of the systems in nature as
described by Lynn Margulis. After the upheavals of
adjustment (to war, revolution, plague or eruption),
everything settles to a new stability and most plants and
animals much prefer a quiet, less disrupted life.
So what is the source of our morals, our sense of
purpose? Why, what we decide, of course. Professor
Susan Greenfield likes to refer to two general ways of
getting the most from life: being ‘in the moment’ on
the one hand, and working for more distant ambitions
for yourself, family or even your society. Orchestrating
the appetites of the moment is one of life’s skills. Those
not good at it turn to, as Greenfield puts it, ‘in your
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
face’ turn-ons like drugs, violence and crime. Those of

us with greater hedonistic experience and skill cannot
understand how anyone can want to choose crack cocaine
and oblivion in a world offering chocolate, Mozart and
beaches. (I am being glib—I should remember the lessons
of Matthew Chapman in Dayton and the way poverty
obliterates choice.) Long-term goals provide the satis-
factions of service and achievement. Both ingredients,
immediate and far-reaching, provide plenty of point and
meaning for the average life.
When it comes to the ethical basis for running a
society we have had, through history, a bewildering
range. Everything’s been tried, and only a few things
work. Jared Diamond has explored some of the
experiments in his book Collapse. Whatever the contin-
gencies of geography or heritage, societies ruled by fear
tend, eventually, to fall apart. We can each of us provide
our own appalling list of ghastly failures, from Genghis
Khan to Pol Pot. If you leave people alone to explore
what’s best for them, in a social order where the ground
rules have been agreed upon, then you stand a good
chance of building success. Moral codes that are just,
flexible and based on an understanding of human
psychology tend to work best. It is interesting that the
teachings of Jesus, minus the referrals upwards to Dad,
reflect this rather well.
Giving people a say in how they run the village is
called democracy,‘the worst system’ according to Winston
161
Churchill ‘apart from all the others’. This goes back to

the Greeks but has only recently been applied to whole
societies. Women, former slaves and indigenous people
have had a say for only one or two generations. This is
an extraordinarily short time when you think about it.
Only in the last few decades have our societies had
the opportunity to run themselves with reference to
their entire adult populations. On any scale, this is but
a blink in history. Unfortunately it comes at the very
time when our populations are being crushed into vast
conurbations of twenty to fifty million mainly impov-
erished people. How will any moral codes work in those
overwhelming conditions?
Be they in a cosy village or a vast metropolis, what
do human beings actually require to be able to cope?
Do they really need the hope of a reward in heaven to
help them get through the thankless struggles of daily
existence? Is God a comfort for the miseries most human
beings have to endure? All will, one day, face death.
Most will experience terrible loss. Can they do so just
as well with only a little help from their friends?
Well, I hope no one will force them to try one way
or the other. Coping with life as a humanist or as a
believer is a personal choice. So it should be. I, personally,
regard my religious friends as I do my gay friends: I do
not see what they are so excited or moved by, but I am
delighted that they are so. Their fulfilled lives enrich a
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
pluralist society. None wishes to impose their beliefs on

others.
I am now even friendly with my old headmaster,
though I still haven’t asked him about his God. He is a
little too close, at nearly ninety, to finding out the truth.
Meanwhile, it is worth trying to imagine how it was,
before civilisation began, that our human ancestors first
thought up the notion of God or gods. The philosopher
Daniel C. Dennett has had a go in a book boldly titled
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He
is director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts
University and a rare philosopher who realised that to
get to grips with the true nature of his craft he had to
get to know the brain and learn some neurology.
He asks us to imagine the hostile environment in
which we evolved. The men hunted, usually with lean
results; the women gathered, arduously; and life continued
unchanging for thousands of years, a continuing battle
against the elements. The days, and especially the nights,
were long, and until 40 000 to 70 000 years ago not
enlivened with much art or music. But people could
dream. In those dreams, suggests Dennett, it is virtually
certain that departed elders such as fathers, uncles, maybe
mothers and aunts, would feature significantly. Though
long gone, their presence was not.
What is more natural than to ask advice of those
who were so important to daily living previously and
whose ‘spirits’ seem to linger? This conversation can
163
then become ritualised and enhanced by symbols, sticks,

stones, living creatures. As the small band grows to a
village, it becomes someone’s job to be in charge of
these connections and a shaman is invented. So, in various
ways, the tradition grows around the world.
Will such scientific descriptions of origins explain
belief, or even dismiss it? Dennett hopes it will do both.
‘I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly
distrustful of the tack I am taking here. They will see
me as another liberal professor trying to cajole them
out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right
about that—that’s what I am and that is exactly what I
am trying to do.’
I am less prescriptive. Let us simply embrace
knowledge. In the process let us recognise that which
serves, like ID, to distort knowledge, to tell deliberate
lies. In that recognition we can expose Proud Ignorance
for what it is. Then, when ideas are allowed to flow
freely, let folk make up their own minds.
I’ll leave the last thoughts on this to Jared Diamond.
He was born to a Jewish family of scholars and has
written much about the ways in which the extra wealth
of the first village and town dwellers enabled them to
afford the shamans and witchdoctors who later became
their rulers. Diamond is also of firm opinion about our
ethical codes and where they came from.
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WILLIAMS VERSUS GOD
Personally, I accept purely secular reasons to pay taxes

and to refrain from murder and theft, so that societies
can promote the happiness of their citizens. I deny a
religious need to kill members of out-groups, and I
accept a secular need to do so under extreme circum-
stances, where the alternative would be worse. I remain
uneasy about relying on religion to justify morality:
today, as in the past, it’s too small a step from there to
justifying the killing of adherents of other religions. I
accept the possibility of scientific explanations for almost
every mystery of the natural world—but not for the
greatest mystery of all. I still have no scientific answer,
and expect there never to be one to the challenge ‘Why
is there something, when there could have been nothing?’
Religion will thrive as long as there are human beings
alive to reflect the mystery of the First Cause.
Amen!
165

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Bh1145M-PressProofs.

QX5 16/5/06 12:51 PM Page i Bookhouse

First published in 2006

For Melvin Schmendrick . . .

And thanks to Richard Walsh (RW1)

This is a little book about ‘ID’, but it is more than that.

Thatcher was talking about terrorists, and ID is, in

Then David Hume (1711–76) asked why we are so

Science is replete with delicious examples that scotch

I come across similar stories dozens of times a week.

weave, disappear and then reform in disguise. And like

Science cannot solve the ultimate Mystery of Nature.

Sir, I am amazed at your faith in evolution. It far

You look like a miracle. The odds against your existing

Did I say 115 quadrillion to one? Call that 230

dangerous. Before the modern scientific revolution of

the other. They could coexist in a society that respected

2005, he remarked that scientists should carry some of

and why human beings need one to survive; we have

Intelligent Design is a morphed version of creationism,

Michael Shermer, who writes for Scientific American,

Most observers today would put their money on the

West, or at least their science departments, and persecute

A final Johnsonian flourish, reminding one of the

klatura. According to their critics, elites include all those

Of this campaign, Mooney writes:

That is where the true threat emerges. ID theorists and

In this little book I shall take a swift look at some

As for intellectuals, or ‘elites’, W.H. Auden had it well

To the man in the street, who I’m sorry to say,

Politics is for the present, but an equation is something

At first glance the cosmos looks as if it was prepared

place just in time, after nearly turning our planet to

And then there is this final conundrum: Why did we

The universe began 13.7 billion years ago.

public lectures to packed houses and was in line for the

pigeon poop on their instruments be causing the

said that one of the installation’s roles would be to look

and then . . . trillions of other galaxies extending as far as

to be so well ‘designed’ for our presence—not any old

that Someone’s been setting up a Wendy House for us

• The three dimensions in which we operate. Yes, it is

• omega, the total of dark matter,

Fiddle with any of these values and you rearrange

concept of a profligate tailor and many other universes.

Religion can have a go. But some of us don’t accept

* Winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize

to its limits. In its most straightforward form the theory

Frank Tipler’s deliciously imaginative twist on all this

There remains a curiosity I mentioned at the beginning

too good a scientist (and not as reckless as Hoyle) to

people, be able to take part in the discussion of the

Fred Hoyle was a maverick. He was, indeed, a tragic

through to famous fossils such as Archaeopteryx being

Fred Hoyle was beaten up, or may even have fallen

To see the entire sequence of a human chromosome

1953 was a very good year. I was nine and living in

deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Perhaps, as with Fred

find means to do the job in years less than anyone (apart

compelling story of how we came to be. What course

On the other hand, we may sometimes need to shuffle

Other visitors who came to stay, other microbes, are the

instead, major organic intersections—our bodies comprise

around in his pocket) may even have ‘seeded’ this planet