Back in June, my fellow bloggist, Jon Eastgate, (Painting Fakes) challenged me to read a book that he reviewed called "The Selfish Genius" by Fern Elsdon-Baker. In my normal temperate manner, I fairly laid into Baker, accusing her of fleaism - that tendency to feed off the fame of others to promote your work or cause.
Naturally, Jon reminded me that one ought not criticise what one has not read. In a more contemplative moment, I saw his point. I decided to read it. I must add a few caveats. Although I am a flea, feasting on the blood of the great for my own sustenance, I count myself as a comfortable flea, giving no irritation. I am also, I think, a flea who will always be tiny in proportion to the host and have no desire otherwise.
I suspected that Baker was not one of these fleas, but a flea who hoped it might one day evolve into the dog and be famous itself. I do not support these fleas financially. So I borrowed the book from the library - no mean feat in a country area.
What is absolutely clear from her book is that Baker is very clever, very learned, very lucid and very flea. Not for a long time have I read a book which spends so much time name dropping. Certainly, if you are a historian it is important to mention a lot of people. But frankly, Baker's book could not possibly do justice to those theories it visits because there are so many. It appears that the mention of many names is about proving that she supposedly knows what she's talking about.
But in the end she just sounds whiny. "Oh, poor Lamarck - so misunderstood. Poor Gould, so berated. Poor Christians - so mercilessly badgered by Dawkins. Poor social scientists - so badly treated".
By the end of Part 1 I was beginning to see what this was. As a post graduate student, Baker was unimpressed with one of Dawkin's pronouncements on Darwin. As an eager little beaver, she felt it necessary to "put him right" - even wrote a thesis about it. Perhaps jealous that it did not get enough recognition, she was driven to find Dawkin's foibles at any cost and thence her little number.
The Selfish Genius is tedious. Where I hoped to get a real challenge to Darwinian theory, natural selection in particular, what I got was a very long history lesson with not much that I had not either read elsewhere or could not predict would have been the case.
My original thesis that perhaps Baker had not read Dawkins widely was flawed. The real problem is that the straw man she sets up as Dawkins just isn't the one I see. Dawkins is at times as clumsy as he is confident; he is often left speechless and one can see him struggling to form his thoughts. He is equally magnanimous as he is vitriolic. In fact, most of his opponents are far more socially inept in the way they handle his atheism than he is of their Christianity.
As far as I can see, this book poses no threat to the notion of natural selection as the primary mechanism driving evolution. Even if there is change in the understanding of this concept as scientific knowledge progresses it will continue to have explanatory power.
Putting aside the "red herring" of atheism, Dawkin's latest and fattest tome "The Greatest Show on Earth" finally puts paid to Baker's criticisms, expanding on all the areas she mentions as weaknesses.
Baker's call for us all to be nice to one another does not add anything to the debate about the role of science or religion in our society. In the end I hope she's one flea that falls off.
Just to go to a few points that Baker seems to have missed.
Darwin was not aware of the genetic basis for passing on characteristics - so much more the genius of his work. Dawkins' focus on genes or genotypes does not render Darwinian natural selection invalid - it simply makes it more credible. Even if genetics is found to be simply a tool of a more fundamental physical process of information transfer, this will not make genetics wrong.
Dawkin's maintains a position, most often articulated in his interviews, that science without atheism is essentially dishonest or bad science. Much of his criticism of religion sounds like incredulity, not invective. If the Almighty can skew experimental data, then the science is, at best, broken or, at worst, futile. We do science so we know the bogey man doesn't exist and so we can safely go out in the dark. This is its historical purpose - it enlighten.
Fruitless, then, to admit God just so you won't be seen as acerbic.
Atheism isn't an argument about whether religion is open to empirical or logical methods because by definition it admits neither. Its actually about whether religion adds to understanding or obfuscates. Its whether religion has explanatory relevance and thus is useful in guiding our actions.
