Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Superficially, we would expect the very opposite, since myth is the stuff of
religion—something Dawkins vehemently dislikes. Indeed, one of his mani-
fest purposes in
Ancestor's Tal e
is to repudiate the traditional religious idea
that the natural order privileges human beings.
25
But upon closer inspec-
tion, it becomes evident that Dawkins undertakes to remove human beings
from the top rung of this more traditional Great Chain of Being because
he has an alternative natural order in mind. As Johnson points out in her
critique, it is not to uphold the value neutrality of science that Dawkins
repudiates the privileging of human beings; rather, his goal is to construct
an alternative natural order by claiming to reveal an egalitarian meaning
in the evolutionary record.
26
While we might agree with Dawkins that the
testimony of science could never bear witness to the privileging of human
nature, neither could it bear witness to the equality of all living things. Yet
this is the overarching theme of Dawkins' topic. He trades on the ambiguity
that one may find in the notion of “common ancestry” in order to project
the value of equality upon the biological world. At first glance, the “Pilgrim-
age to the Dawn of Evolution” of his subtitle might seem to be a merely
playful allusion to Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
, but in reality he has made
the “Dawn of Evolution” a sacred place. As the author introduces us to our
various evolutionary ancestors as we journey with him from the present
into the deep past, he promises that “we shall inevitably meet these other
pilgrims and join forces with them in a definite order, the order in which
their lineages rendezvous with ours, the order of ever more inclusive cousin-
ship.”
27
Those who make this journey—in other words, those who adopt an
evolutionary perspective—will overcome the “speciesism” that plagues the
common lot of humanity.
28
But from a truly scientific point of view how
could the evolutionary forces that Dawkins has famously called a “blind
watchmaker” be more “inclusive”? Dawkins has added his own anthropo-
morphic meaning to the lesson of evolution. He has made it a sign of the
universal democracy of all living things.
Why would a “Professor of the Public Understanding of Science” so
freely promulgate confusion about biological history? This should seem
especially odd in the face of how often we hear scientists complain about
the fact that only roughly half of Americans fully accept what evolutionary
science teaches.
29
Why would so many of the very scientists who so strongly
criticize lay observers who dismiss the rigorous reasoning and vast stores
of evidence that support evolution be so quick to take up a pseudoscien-
tific perspective of their own? Professional concern for evolutionary science
would seem to demand the very opposite. We would expect scientists to be
