All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that

whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however

exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and

tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains

enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions

and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life

as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever

fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a

manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our

relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our

tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

—JOSEPH CONRAD, AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE SHADOW-LINE

T here is a central paradox at the core of religion. The three great monotheisms teach people

to think abjectly of themselves, as miserable and guilty sinners prostrate before an angry and

jealous god who, according to discrepant accounts, fashioned them either out of dust and clay

or a clot of blood. The positions for prayer are usually emulations of the supplicant serf before

an ill-tempered monarch. The message is one of continual submission, gratitude, and fear. Life

itself is a poor thing: an interval in which to prepare for the hereafter or the coming—or second

coming—of the Messiah.

On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be

extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and

it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the

supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse

my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand for god.

Since human beings are naturally solipsistic, all forms of superstition enjoy what might be

called a natural advantage. In the United States, we exert ourselves to improve high-rise

buildings and high-speed jet aircraft (the two achievements that the murderers of September 11,

2001, put into hostile apposition) and then pathetically refuse to give them floors, or row

numbers, that carry the unimportant number thirteen. I know that Pythagoras refuted astrology

by the simple means of pointing out that identical twins do not have the same future, I further

know that the zodiac was drawn up long before several of the planets in our solar system had

been detected, and of course I understand that I could not be “shown” my immediate or long

term future without this disclosure altering the outcome. Thousands of people consult their

“stars” in the newspapers every day, and then have unpredicted heart attacks or traffic

accidents. (An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his

editor which began, “As you will no doubt have foreseen.”) In his Minima Moralia, Theodor

Adorno identified the interest in stargazing as the consummation of feeble-mindedness.

However, happening to glance at the projected situation for Aries one morning, as I once did tobe told that “a member of the opposite sex is interested and will show it,” I found it hard to

suppress a tiny surge of idiotic excitement, which in my memory has outlived the later

disappointment. Then again, every time I leave my apartment there is no sign of a bus, whereas

every time I return to it a bus is just drawing up. In bad moods I mutter “just my luck” to myself,

even though a part of my small twoor three-pound brain reminds me that the mass-transit

schedule of Washington, D.C., is drawn up and implemented without any reference to my

movements. (I mention this in case it might later become important: if I am hit by a bus on the

day this book is published there will certainly be people who will say it was no accident.)

So why should I not be tempted to overrule W. H. Auden and believe that the firmament is in

some mysterious way ordered for my benefit? Or, coming down by a few orders of magnitude,

that fluctuations in my personal fortunes are of absorbing interest to a supreme being? One of

the many faults in my design is my propensity to believe or to wish this, and though like many

people I have enough education to see through the fallacy, I have to admit that it is innate. In Sri

Lanka once, I was traveling in a car with a group of Tamils, on a relief expedition to a Tamil area

of the coastline that had been hard-hit by a cyclone. My companions were all members of the

Sai Baba sect, which is very strong in South India and Sri Lanka. Sai Baba himself has claimed to

raise the dead, and makes a special on-camera performance of producing holy ash from his

bare palms. (Why ash? I used to wonder.)

Anyway, the trip began with my friends breaking some coconuts on a rock to ensure a safe

journey. This evidently did not work, because halfway across the island our driver plowed

straight into a man who staggered out in front of us as we were racing, too fast, through a

village. The man was horribly injured and—this being a Sinhala village—the crowd that instantly

gathered was not well disposed to these Tamil intruders. It was a very sticky situation, but I was

able to defuse it somewhat by being an Englishman wearing an off-white Graham Greene type

suit, and by having press credentials that had been issued by the London Metropolitan Police.

This impressed the local cop enough to have us temporarily released, and my companions, who

had been very scared indeed, were more than grateful for my presence and for my ability to

talk fast. In fact, they telephoned their cult headquarters to announce that Sai Baba himself had

been with us, in the temporary shape of my own person. From then on, I was treated literally

with reverence, and not allowed to carry anything or fetch my own food. It did occur to me

meanwhile to check on the man we had run over: he had died of his injuries in hospital. (I

wonder what his horoscope had foreshadowed for that day.) Thus in miniature I saw how one

mere human mammal—myself—can suddenly begin to attract shy glances of awe and wonder,

and how another human mammal—our luckless victim—could be somehow irrelevant to Sai

Baba’s benign design.

“There but for the grace of God,” said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing

wretches led to execution, “go I.” What this apparently compassionate observation really mean

—not that it really “means” anything—is, “There by the grace of God goes someone else.” As I

was writing this chapter, a heart-stopping accident took place in a coal mine in West Virginia.

Thirteen miners survived the explosion but were trapped underground, compelling the nation’s

attention for a whole fraught news cycle until with huge relief it was announced that they had

been located safe and sound. These glad tidings turned out to be premature, which was an

impossible additional anguish for the families who had already begun celebrating and giving

thanks before discovering that all but one of their menfolk had suffocated under the rock. It

was also an embarrassment to the newpapers and news bulletins that had rushed out too soon

with the false consolation. And can you guess what the headline on those newspapers and

bulletins had been? Of course you can. “Miracle!”—with or without the exclamation point—was

the invariable choice, surviving mockingly in print and in the memory to intensify the grief of the

relatives. There doesn’t seem to be a word to describe the absence of divine intervention in thiscase. But the human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to

another account is apparently universal. In England the monarch is the hereditary head of the

church as well as the hereditary head of the state: William Cobbett once pointed out that the

English themselves colluded in this servile absurdity by referring to “The Royal Mint” but “The

National Debt.” Religion plays the same trick, and in the same way, and before our very eyes.

On my first visit to the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, a church that was built to celebrate the

deliverance of Paris from the Prussians and the Commune of 1870–71, I saw a panel in bronze

which showed the exact pattern in which a shower of Allied bombs, dropped in 1944, had missed

the church and burst in the adjoining neighborhood...

Given this overwhelming tendency to stupidity and selfishness in myself and among our

species, it is somewhat surprising to find the light of reason penetrating at all. The brilliant

Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said that “against stupidity the gods themselves

contend in vain.” It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility

into something ineffable.

The “design” arguments, which are products of this same solipsism, take two forms: the

macro and micro. They were most famously summarized by William Paley (1743–1805) in his

book Natural Theology. Here we encounter the homespun example of the primitive human who

stumbles across a ticking watch. He may not know what it is for, but he can discern that it is not

a rock or a vegetable, and that it has been manufactured, and even manufactured for some

purpose. Paley wanted to extend this analogy both to nature and to man. His complacency and

wrongheadedness are well caught by J. G. Farrell in his portrayal of a Paley-trained Victorian

divine in The Siege of Krishnapur:

“How d’you explain the subtle mechanism of the eye, infinitely more complex than the mere

telescope that miserable humanity has been able to invent? How d’you explain the eel’s

eye, which might be damaged by burrowing into mud and stones and is therefore

protected by a transparent horny covering? How is it that the iris of a fish’s eye does not

contract? Ah, poor, misguided youth, it is because the fish’s eye has been designed by Him

who is above all, to suit the dim light in which the fish makes his watery dwelling! How d’you

explain the Indian Hog?” he cried. “How d’you account for its two bent teeth, more than a

yard long, growing upwards from its upper jaw?”

“To defend itself?”

“No, young man, it has two tusks for that purpose issuing from the lower jaw like those of

a common boar.... No, the answer is that the animal sleeps standing up and, in order to

support its head, it hooks its upper tusks on the branches of the trees...for the Designer of

the World has given thought even to the hog’s slumbers!”

(Paley did not bother to explain how the Designer of the World came to command so many

of his human creatures to treat the said hog as if it were a demon or a leper.) In fact, surveying

the natural order, John Stuart Mill was far nearer the mark when he wrote:

If a tenth part of the pains taken in finding signs of an all-powerful benevolent god had

been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the creator’s character, what scope would

not have been found in the animal kingdom? It is divided into devourers and devoured,

most creatures being lavishly fitted with instruments to torment their prey.

Now that the courts have protected Americans (at least for the moment) from the

inculcation of compulsory “creationist” stupidity in the classroom, we can echo that other great

Victorian Lord Macaulay and say that “every schoolchild knows” that Paley had put his creaking,

leaking cart in front of his wheezing and broken-down old horse. Fish do not have fins because

they need them for the water, any more than birds are equipped with wings so that they can

meet the dictionary definition of an “avian.” (Apart from anything else, there are too manyflightless species of birds.) It is exactly the other way about: a process of adaptation and

selection. Let no one doubt the power of the original illusion. Whittaker Chambers in his seismic

book Witness recounts the first moment when he abandoned historical materialism, mentally

deserted the Communist cause, and embarked on the career which would undo Stalinism in

America. It was on the morning when he glimpsed the ear of his baby daughter. The pretty

whorls and folds of this external organ persuaded him in a flash of revelation that no

coincidence could have created it. A fleshly flap of such utter beauty must be divine. Well, I too

have marveled at the sweet little ears of my female offspring, but never without noticing that

(a) they always need a bit of a clean-out, (b) that they look mass-produced even when set

against the inferior ears of other people’s daughters, (c) that as people get older their ears look

more and more absurd from behind, and (d) that much lower animals, such as cats and bats,

have much more fascinating and lovely and more potent ears. To echo Laplace, in fact, I would

say that there are many, many persuasive arguments against Stalin-worship, but that the anti

Stalin case is fully valid without Mr. Chambers’s ear-flap-based assumption.

Ears are predictable and uniform, and their flaps are every bit as adorable when the child

has been born stone deaf. The same is not true, in the same sense, of the universe. Here there

are anomalies and mysteries and imperfections—to use the most minimal terms—that do not

even show adaptation, let alone selection. Thomas Jefferson in old age was fond of the analogy

of the timepiece in his own case, and would write to friends who inquired after his health that

the odd spring was breaking and the occasional wheel wearing out. This of course raises the

uncomfortable (for believers) idea of the built-in fault that no repairman can fix. Should this be

counted as part of the “design” as well? (As usual, those who take the credit for the one will fall

silent and start shuffling when it comes to the other side of the ledger.) But when it comes to the

whirling, howling wilderness of outer space, with its red giants and white dwarfs and black holes,

its titanic explosions and extinctions, we can only dimly and shiveringly conclude that the

“design” hasn’t been imposed quite yet, and wonder if this is how dinosaurs “felt” when the

meteors came smashing through the earth’s atmosphere and put an end to the pointless

bellowing rivalry across primeval swamps.

Even what was first known about the comparatively consoling symmetry of the solar system,

with its nonetheless evident tendency to instability and entropy, upset Sir Isaac Newton enough

to make him propose that god intervened every now and then to put the orbits back on an even

keel. This exposed him to teasing from Leibniz, who asked why god couldn’t have got it working

right the first time around. It is, indeed, only because of the frightening emptiness elsewhere

that we are bound to be impressed by the apparently unique and beautiful conditions that have

allowed intelligent life to occur on earth. But then, vain as we are, we would be impressed,

wouldn’t we? This vanity allows us to overlook the implacable fact that, of the other bodies in

our own solar system alone, the rest are all either far too cold to support anything recognizable

as life, or far too hot. The same, as it happens, is true of our own blue and rounded planetary

home, where heat contends with cold to make large tracts of it into useless wasteland, and

where we have come to learn that we live, and have always lived, on a climatic knife edge.

Meanwhile, the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some

jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!

So much for the macro-dimension. What of the micro? Ever since they were forced to take

part in this argument, which they were with great reluctance, the religious have tried to echo

Hamlet’s admonition to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are

dreamed of by mere humans. Our side willingly concedes this point: we are prepared for

discoveries in the future that will stagger our faculties even more than the vast advances in

knowledge that have come to us since Darwin and Einstein. However, these discoveries will

come to us in the same way—by means of patient and scrupulous and (this time, we hope)unfettered inquiry. In the meanwhile, we also have to improve our minds by the laborious

exercise of refuting the latest foolishness contrived by the faithful. When the bones of

prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were

those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This

cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are

observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony

and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.

However, I was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to

that extent a weak one.

Now we are being told that astonishing features, such as the human eye, cannot be the

result of, so to speak, “blind” chance. As it happens, the “design” faction have chosen an

example that could not be bettered. We now know a great deal about the eye, and about which

creatures have it and which do not, and why. I must here for a moment give way to my friend Dr.

Michael Shermer:

Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from

simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous

creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that

goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light

sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the

light; it developed into a recessed eyespot, where a small surface indentation filled with

light-sensitive cells provided additional data on the direction of light; then into a deep

recession eyespot, where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate

information about the environment; then into a pinhole camera eye that is able to focus an

image on the back of a deeply-recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; then into a pinhole

lens eye that is able to focus the image; then into a complex eye found in such modern

mammals as humans.

All the intermediate stages of this process have been located in other creatures, and

sophisticated computer models have been developed which have tested the theory and shown

that it actually “works.” There is a further proof of the evolution of the eye, as Shermer points

out. This is the ineptitude of its “design”:

The anatomy of the human eye, in fact, shows anything but “intelligence” in its design. It is

built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through the cornea,

lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and

bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light

signal into neural impulses—which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the

brain for processing into meaningful patterns. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent

designer have built an eye upside down and backwards?

It is because we evolved from sightless bacteria, now found to share our DNA, that we are so

myopic. These are the same ill-designed optics, complete with deliberately “designed” retinal

blind spot, through which earlier humans claimed to have “seen” miracles “with their own eyes.”

The problem in those cases was located elsewhere in the cortex, but we must never forget

Charles Darwin’s injunction that even the most highly evolved of us will continue to carry “the

indelible stamp of their lowly origin.”

I would add to Shermer that, though it is true we are the highest and smartest animals,

ospreys have eyes we have calculated to be sixty times more powerful and sophisticated than

our own and that blindness, often caused by microscopic parasites that are themselves miracles

of ingenuity, is one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. And why award the

superior eye (or in the case of the cat or bat, also the ear) to the inferior species? The osprey

can swoop accurately on a fast-moving fish that it has detected underwater from many, manyfeet above, all the while maneuvering with its extraordinary wings. Ospreys have almost been

exterminated by man, while you yourself can be born as blind as a worm and still become a

pious and observant Methodist, for example.

“To suppose that the eye,” wrote Charles Darwin,

with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for

admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic

aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in

the highest possible degree.

He wrote this in an essay titled “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication.” Since that

time, the evolution of the eye has become almost a separate department of study. And why

should it not? It is immensely fascinating and rewarding to know that at least forty different

sets of eyes, and possibly sixty different sets, have evolved in quite distinct and parallel, if

comparable, ways. Dr. Daniel Nilsson, perhaps the foremost authority on the subject, has found

among other things that three entirely different groups of fish have independently developed

four eyes. One of these sea creatures, Bathylychnops exilis, possesses a pair of eyes that look

outward, and another pair of eyes (set in the wall of the main two) that direct their gaze

straight downward. This would be an encumbrance to most animals, but it has some obvious

advantages for an aquatic one. And it is highly important to notice that the embryological

development of the second set of eyes is not a copy or a miniature of the first set, but an

entirely different evolution. As Dr. Nilsson puts it in a letter to Richard Dawkins: “This species has

reinvented the lens despite the fact that it already had one. It serves as a good support for the

view that lenses are not difficult to evolve.” A creative deity, of course, would have been more

likely to double the complement of optics in the first place, which would have left us with nothing

to wonder about, or to discover. Or as Darwin went on to say, in the same essay:

When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common

sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of vox populi, vox Dei, as

every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous

gradations from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade

being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, as is certainly the case; if further, the

eye ever slightly varies, and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case;

and if such variations should ever be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life,

then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural

selection, though insuperable by our imagination, cannot be considered real.

We may smile slightly when we notice that Darwin wrote of the sun standing still, and when

we notice that he spoke of the eye’s “perfection,” but only because we are fortunate enough to

know more than he did. What is worth noting, and retaining, is his proper use of the sense of

what is wondrous.

The real “miracle” is that we, who share genes with the original bacteria that began life on

the planet, have evolved as much as we have. Other creatures did not develop eyes at all, or

developed extremely weak ones. There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have

eyes but it can create them. The brilliant Professor Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the

double helix, had a colleague named Leslie Orgel who encapsulated this paradox more elegantly

than I can. “Evolution,” he said, “is smarter than you are.” But this compliment to the

“intelligence” of natural selection is not by any means a concession to the stupid notion of

“intelligent design.” Some of the results are extremely impressive, as we are bound to think in

our own case. (“What a piece of work is a man!” as Hamlet exclaims, before going on to

contradict himself somewhat by describing the result as a “quintessence of dust” both

statements having the merit of being true.) But the process by which the results are attained is

slow and infinitely laborious, and has given us a DNA “string” which is crowded with useless junkand which has much in common with much lower creatures. The stamp of the lowly origin is to

be found in our appendix, in the now needless coat of hair that we still grow (and then shed)

after five months in the womb, in our easily worn-out knees, our vestigial tails, and the many

caprices of our urinogenital arrangements. Why do people keep saying, “God is in the details”?

He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure,

and incompetence.

Those who have yielded, not without a struggle, to the overwhelming evidence of evolution

are now trying to award themselves a medal for their own acceptance of defeat. The very

magnificence and variety of the process, they now wish to say, argues for a directing and

originating mind. In this way they choose to make a fumbling fool of their pretended god, and

make him out to be a tinkerer, an approximator, and a blunderer, who took eons of time to

fashion a few serviceable figures and heaped up a junkyard of scrap and failure meanwhile.

Have they no more respect for the deity than that? They unwisely say that evolutionary biology

is “only a theory,” which betrays their ignorance of the meaning of the word “theory” as well as

of the meaning of the word “design.” A “theory” is something evolved—if you forgive the

expression—to fit the known facts. It is a successful theory if it survives the introduction of

hitherto unknown facts. And it becomes an accepted theory if it can make accurate predictions

about things or events that have not yet been discovered, or have not yet occurred. This can

take time, and is also subject to a version of Ockham’s procedure: Pharaonic astronomers in

Egypt could predict eclipses even though they believed the earth to be flat: it just took them a

great deal more unnecessary work. Einstein’s prediction of the precise angular deflection of

starlight due to gravity—verified during an eclipse off the west coast of Africa that occurred in

1919—was more elegant, and was held to vindicate his “theory” of relativity.

There are many disputes between evolutionists as to how the complex process occurred, and

indeed as to how it began. Francis Crick even allowed himself to flirt with the theory that life was

“inseminated” on earth by bacteria spread from a passing comet. However, all these disputes,

when or if they are resolved, will be resolved by using the scientific and experimental methods

that have proven themselves so far. By contrast, creationism, or “intelligent design” (its only

cleverness being found in this underhanded rebranding of itself) is not even a theory. In all its

well-financed propaganda, it has never even attempted to show how one single piece of the

natural world is explained better by “design” than by evolutionary competition. Instead, it

dissolves into puerile tautology. One of the creationists’ “questionnaires” purports to be a “yes

no” interrogation of the following:

Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder?

Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter?

Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker?

If you answered YES for any of the above, give details.

We know the answer in all cases: these were painstaking inventions (also by trial and error)

of mankind, and were the work of many hands, and are still “evolving.” This is what makes piffle

out of the ignorant creationist sneer, which compares evolution to a whirlwind blowing through a

junkyard of parts and coming up with a jumbo jet. For a start, there are no “parts” lying around

waiting to be assembled. For another thing, the process of acquisition and discarding of “parts”

(most especially wings) is as far from a whirlwind as could conceivably be. The time involved is

more like that of a glacier than a storm. For still another thing, jumbo jets are not riddled with

nonworking or superfluous “parts” lamely inherited from less successful aircraft. Why have we

agreed so easily to call this exploded old nontheory by its cunningly chosen new disguise of

“intelligent design”? There is nothing at all “intelligent” about it. It is the same old mumbo-jumbo

(or in this instance, jumbo-mumbo).Airplanes are, in their human-designed way, “evolving.” And so, in a quite different way, are

we. In early April 2006 a long study at the University of Oregon was published in the journal

Science. Based on the reconstruction of ancient genes from extinct animals, the researchers

were able to show how the nontheory of “irreducible complexity” is a joke. Protein molecules,

they found, slowly employed trial and error, reusing and modifying existing parts, to act in a

key-and-lock manner and switch discrepant hormones “on” and “off.” This genetic march was

blindly inaugurated 450 million years ago, before life left the ocean and before the evolution of

bones. We now know things about our nature that the founders of religion could not even begin

to guess at, and that would have stilled their overconfident tongues if they had known of them.

Yet again, once one has disposed of superfluous assumptions, speculation about who designed

us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that

designer. Aristotle, whose reasoning about the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause is the

beginning of this argument, concluded that the logic would necessitate forty-seven or fifty-five

gods. Surely even a monotheist would be grateful for Ockham’s razor at this point? From a

plurality of prime movers, the monotheists have bargained it down to a single one. They are

getting ever nearer to the true, round figure.

WE MUST ALSO CONFRONT the fact that evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more

callous and cruel, and also capricious. Investigation of the fossil record and the record of

molecular biology shows us that approximately 98 percent of all the species that have ever

appeared on earth have lapsed into extinction. There have been extraordinary periods of life

explosion, invariably succeeded by great “dyings out.” In order for life to take hold at all on a

cooling planet, it had first to occur with fantastic profusion. We have a micro-glimpse of this in

our little human lives: men produce infinitely more seminal fluid than is required to build a

human family, and are tortured—not completely unpleasantly—by the urgent need to spread it

all over the place or otherwise get rid of it. (Religions have needlessly added to the torture by

condemning various simple means of relieving this presumably “designed” pressure.) The

exuberant teeming variety of insect life, or sparrow or salmon or codfish life, is a titanic waste

that ensures, in some but not all cases, that there will be enough survivors.

The higher animals are hardly exempt from this process. The religions that we know of hav

—for self-evident reasons—also emerged from peoples that we know of. And in Asia and the

Mediterranean and the Middle East, the human record is traceable back for an impressively long

and continuous period of time. However, even the religious myths mention periods of darkness

and plague and calamity, when it seemed that nature had turned against human existence. The

folk memory, now confirmed by archaeology, makes it seem highly probable that huge

inundations occurred when the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were formed, and that these

forbidding and terrifying events continued to impress the storytellers of Mesopotamia and

elsewhere. Every year, Christian fundamentalists renew their expeditions to Mount Ararat in

modern Turkey, convinced that one day they will discover the wreckage of Noah’s Ark. This

effort is futile and would prove nothing even if it were successful, but if these people should

chance to read the reconstructions of what really did happen, they would find themselves

confronted with something far more memorable than the banal account of Noah’s flood: a

sudden massive wall of dark water roaring across a thickly populated plain. This “Atlantis” event

would have adhered to the prehistoric memory, all right, as indeed it does to ours.

However, we do not even possess a buried or ill-chronicled memory of what happened to

most of our fellow humans in the Americas. When the Catholic Christian conquistadores arrived

in the Western Hemisphere in the early sixteenth century AD, they behaved with such

indiscriminate cruelty and destructiveness that one of their number, Bartolemeo de las Casas,

actually proposed a formal renunciation and apology, and an acknowledgment that the whole

enterprise had been a mistake. Well-intentioned as he may have been, he based his badconscience on the idea that the “Indians” had been living in an undisturbed Eden, and that Spain

and Portugal had missed their chance of rediscovering the innocence that had pre-dated the fall

of Adam and Eve. This was wishful piffle and also extreme condescension: the Olmec and other

tribes had gods of their own—mainly propitiated by human sacrifice—and had also developed

elaborate systems of writing, astronomy, agriculture, and trade. They wrote down their history

and had discovered a 365-day calendar that was more accurate than its European counterparts.

One particular society—the Mayan—had also managed to come up with that beautiful concept

of zero to which I alluded earlier, and without which mathematical computation is very difficult.

It may be significant that the papacy of the Middle Ages always resisted the idea of “zero” as

alien and heretical, perhaps because of its supposedly Arab (in fact Sanskrit) origin but perhaps

also because it contained a frightening possibility.

Something is known of the civilizations of the American isthmus, but until very recently we

were unaware of the vast cities and networks that once stretched across the Amazon basin and

some regions of the Andes. Serious work has only just begun on the study of these impressive

societies, which grew and flourished when Moses and Abraham and Jesus and Muhammad and

Buddha were being revered, but which took no part at all in those arguments and were not

included in the calculations of the monotheistic faithful. It is a certainty that these people, too,

had their creation myths and their revelations of the divine will, for all the good it did them. But

they suffered and triumphed and expired without ever being in “our” prayers. And they died out

in the bitter awareness that there would be nobody to remember them as they had been, or

even as if they had been. All their “promised lands” and prophecies and cherished legends and

ceremonies might as well have occurred on another planet. This is how arbitrary human history

actually is.

There seems to be little or no doubt that these peoples were annihilated not just by human

conquerors but by microorganisms of which neither they nor their invaders had any knowledge.

These germs may have been indigenous or they may have been imported, but the effect was

the same. Here again one sees the gigantic man-made fallacy that informs our “Genesis” story.

How can it be proven in one paragraph that this book was written by ignorant men and not by

any god? Because man is given “dominion” over all beasts, fowl and fish. But no dinosaurs or

plesiosaurs or pterodactyls are specified, because the authors did not know of their existence,

let alone of their supposedly special and immediate creation. Nor are any marsupials

mentioned, because Australia—the next candidate after Mesoamerica for a new “Eden”—was

not on any known map. Most important, in Genesis man is not awarded dominion over germs

and bacteria because the existence of these necessary yet dangerous fellow creatures was not

known or understood. And if it had been known or understood, it would at once have become

apparent that these forms of life had “dominion” over us, and would continue to enjoy it

uncontested until the priests had been elbowed aside and medical research at last given an

opportunity. Even today, the balance between Homo sapiens and Louis Pasteur’s “invisible

army” of microbes is by no means decided, but DNA has at least enabled us to sequence the

genome of our lethal rivals, like the avian flu virus, and to elucidate what we have in common.

Probably the most daunting task that we face, as partly rational animals with adrenal glands

that are too big and prefrontal lobes that are too small, is the contemplation of our own relative

weight in the scheme of things. Our place in the cosmos is so unimaginably small that we

cannot, with our miserly endowment of cranial matter, contemplate it for long at all. No less

difficult is the realization that we may also be quite random as presences on earth. We may

have learned about our modest position on the scale, about how to prolong our lives, cure

ourselves of disease, learn to respect and profit from other tribes and other animals, and

employ rockets and satellites for ease of communication; but then, the awareness that our

death is coming and will be succeeded by the death of the species and the heat death of theuniverse is scant comfort. Still, at least we are not in the position of those humans who died

without ever having the chance to tell their story, or who are dying today at this moment after a

few bare, squirming minutes of painful and fearful existence.

In 1909, a discovery of immense importance was made in the Canadian Rockies, on the

border of British Columbia. It is known as the Burgess shale, and though it is a natural formation

and has no magical properties, it is almost like a time machine or a key that enables us to visit

the past. The very remote past: this limestone quarry came into existence about 570 million

years ago and records what palaeontologists familiarly call “the Cambrian explosion.” Just as

there have been great “dyings” and extinctions during evolutionary time, so there have been

energetic moments when life was suddenly profuse and various again. (An intelligent “designer”

might have managed without these chaotic episodes of boom and bust.)

Most of the surviving modern animals have their origins in this grand Cambrian burgeoning,

but until 1909 we were unable to view them in anything like their original habitat. Until then, also,

we had to rely upon the evidence mainly of bones and shells, whereas the Burgess shale

contains much fossilized “soft anatomy,” including the contents of digestive systems. It is a sort

of Rosetta Stone for the decoding of life forms.

Our own solipsism, often expressed in diagram or cartoon form, usually represents evolution

as a kind of ladder or progression, with a fish gasping on the shore in the first frame, hunched

and prognathous figures in the succeeding ones, and then, by slow degrees, an erect man in a

suit waving his umbrella and shouting “Taxi!” Even those who have observed the “sawtooth”

pattern of fluctuation between emergence and destruction, further emergence and still further

destruction, and who have already charted the eventual end of the universe, are half agreed

that there is a stubborn tendency toward an upward progression. This is no great surprise:

inefficient creatures will either die out or be destroyed by more successful ones. But progress

does not negate the idea of randomness, and when he came to examine the Burgess shale, the

great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould arrived at the most disquieting and unsettling

conclusion of all. He examined the fossils and their development with minute care and realized

that if this tree could be replanted or this soup set boiling again, it would very probably not

reproduce the same results that we now “know.”

It may be worth mentioning that this conclusion was no more welcome to Gould than it is to

you or to me: in his youth he had imbibed a version of Marxism and the concept of “progress”

was real to him. But he was too scrupulous a scholar to deny the evidence that was so plainly

displayed, and while some evolutionary biologists are willing to say that the millimetrical and

pitiless process had a “direction” toward our form of intelligent life, Gould subtracted himself

from their company. If the numberless evolutions from the Cambrian period could be recorded

and “rewound,” as it were, and the tape then played again, he established there was no

certainty that it would come out the same way. Several branches of the tree (a better analogy

would be with small twigs on an extremely dense bush) end up going nowhere, but given

another “start” they might have blossomed and flourished, just as some that did blossom and

flourish might equally well have withered and died. We all appreciate that our nature and

existence is based upon our being vertebrate. The earliest known vertebrate (or “chordate”)

located in the Burgess shale is a two-inch and rather elegant creature named, after an adjoining

mountain and also for its sinuous beauty, Pikaia gracilens. It was originally and wrongly

classified as a worm (one must never forget how recent most of our knowledge really is), but in

its segments, muscularity, and dorsal-rod flexibility it is a necessary ancestor that yet demands

no worship. Millions of other life forms perished before the Cambrian period was over, but this

little prototype survived. To quote Gould:

Wind the tape of time back to Burgess times, and let it play again. If Pikaia does not

survive in the replay, we are wiped out of future history—all of us, from shark to robin toorangutan. And I don’t think that any handicapper, given Burgess evidence as known

today, would have granted very favorable odds for the persistence of Pikaia.

And so, if you wish to ask the question of the ages—why do humans exist?—a major part

of the answer, touching those aspects of the issue that science can treat at all, must be:

because Pikaia survived the Burgess decimation. This response does not cite a single law of

nature; it embodies no statement about predictable evolutionary pathways, no calculation

of probabilities based on general rules of anatomy or ecology. The survival of Pikaia was a

contingency of “just history.” I do not think that any “higher” answer can be given, and I

cannot imagine that any resolution could be more fascinating. We are the offspring of

history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of

conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum

freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

A way “chosen,” one must add, within very strictly defined limits. Here is the cool, authentic

voice of a dedicated scientist and humanist. In a dim way, we knew all this already. Chaos

theory has familiarized us with the idea of the unscripted butterfly wing-flap that, stirring a tiny

zephyr, eventuates in a raging typhoon. Saul Bellow’s Augie March shrewdly observed the

fritillary corollary that “if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” And Gould’s

mind-stunning but mind-opening book on the Burgess shale is entitled Wonderful Life, a double

entendre with an echo of the best-loved of all American sentimental movies. At the climax of this

engaging but abysmal film, Jimmy Stewart wishes he had never been born but is then shown by

an angel what the world would be like if his wish had been granted. A middlebrow audience is

thus given a vicarious glimpse of a version of Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty: any attempt

to measure something will have the effect of minutely altering that which is being measured. We

have only recently established that a cow is closer in family to a whale than to a horse: other

wonders certainly await us. If our presence here, in our present form, is indeed random and

contingent, then at least we can consciously look forward to the further evolution of our poor

brains, and to stupendous advances in medicine and life extension, derived from work on our

elementary stem cells and umbilical-cord blood cells.

In the steps of Darwin, Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University have gone for the

past thirty years to the Galápagos Islands, lived in the arduous conditions of the tiny island of

Daphne Major, and actually watched and measured the way that finches evolved and adapted

as their surroundings changed. They have shown conclusively that the size and shape of the

finches’ beaks would adjust themselves to drought and scarcity, by adaption to the size and

character of different seeds and beetles. Not only could the three-million-year-old original flock

change in one way, but if the beetle and seed situation changed back, their beaks could follow

suit. The Grants took care, and they saw it happening, and could publish their findings and

proofs for all to see. We are in their debt. Their lives were harsh, but who could wish that they

had mortified themselves in a holy cave or on top of a sacred pillar instead?

In 2005, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago conducted serious work on two

genes, known as microcephalin and ASPM, that when disabled are the cause of microcephaly.

Babies born with this condition have a shrunken cerebral cortex, quite probably an occasional

reminder of the period when the human brain was very much smaller than it is now. The

evolution of humans has been generally thought to have completed itself about fifty to sixty

thousand years ago (an instant in evolutionary time), yet those two genes have apparently

been evolving faster in the past thirty-seven thousand years, raising the possibility that the

human brain is a work in progress. In March 2006, further work at the same university revealed

that there are some seven hundred regions of the human genome where genes have been

reshaped by natural selection within the past five thousand to fifteen thousand years. These

genes include some of those responsible for our “senses of taste and smell, digestion, bonestructure, skin color and brain function.” (One of the great emancipating results of genomics is

to show that all “racial” and color differences are recent, superficial, and misleading.) It is a

moral certainty that between the time I finish writing this book and the time that it is published,

several more fascinating and enlightening discoveries will be made in this burgeoning field. It

may be too soon to say that all the progress is positive or “upward,” but human development is

still under way. It shows in the manner in which we acquire immunities, and also in the way in

which we do not. Genome studies have identified early groups of northern Europeans who

learned to domesticate cattle and acquired a distinct gene for “lactose tolerance,” while some

people of more recent African descent (we all originate from Africa) are prone to a form of

sickle-cell anemia which, while upsetting in and of itself, results from an earlier mutation that

gave protection against malaria. And all this will be further clarified if we are modest and

patient enough to understand the building blocks of nature and the lowly stamp of our origins.

No divine plan, let alone angelic intervention, is required. Everything works without that

assumption.

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he

said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is

the problem to begin with. Our evolution has been examined “backward,” with life temporarily

outpacing extinction, and knowledge now at last capable of reviewing and explaining ignorance.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having

come “first.” But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our

hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit

of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to

imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a

virgin.

Thoughtful believers can take some consolation, too. Skepticism and discovery have freed

them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair

mad scientist, and also from having to answer distressing questions about who inflicted the

syphilis bacillus or mandated the leper or the idiot child, or devised the torments of Job. The

faithful stand acquitted on that charge: we no longer have any need of a god to explain what is

no longer mysterious. What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and

irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to

inculcate religion by any form of coercion.