The Science of Discworld IV

(she had only a half-pension). Jack found a mated pair of angelfish, very rare at that time, and bought them for £50. That was a lot of money: he had about £75 in the bank, from breeding other fish. Within a week, one angelfish had died. He then bought another one, for £15.
    His grandfather, with whom they were living, said (and he remembers this very vividly, especially his grandfather’s ‘study’: one corner of the living room with piles of newspapers): ‘This is where we tell if you are a queen bee or a wasp.’ His grandfather didn’t know much biology, and Jack remembered that un-biological aspect of the remark all these years. But his grandfather did know the distinctionbetween having global concerns or only immediate concerns, and that’s the distinction he was making.
    The angelfish bred, and Jack sold the first brood for £50; they bred again six weeks later, and again and again. He made a lot of money from them. The important distinction stayed with him: he became a scientist. He gave up on becoming a rabbi, which his father had intended for himself, an intention that fell on Jack’s shoulders, being the only boy. He could perhaps have taken on a pet shop, but that was not to his taste. Without understanding his grandfather’s distinction – he only understood it, to his shame, when writing this chapter – he was a queen bee with global concerns, not a wasp concerned only with human-centred things.
    One irony of the story: Jack had thought that the fish that had died was a male, and replaced it with what he thought was another male. It turned out that both were females; the one he’d thought was female, which survived, was actually male. Even if you are a queen bee, you still need a bit of luck. Now, it becomes clear that Jack’s grandfather was asking whether Jack was human-centred or universe-centred: an Omnian fundamentalist, or a wizard.
    Is a science-versus-religion argument going on now? Like there was, after Darwin published
The Origin of Species
? To read the newspapers, you could easily think that scientists are up in arms, trying to destroy religions.
    Without doubt, there is a desperate anti-Darwinism prejudice in the middle states of the USA, in Indonesia, and in a few other countries. This seems to have its origin in politics rather than anti-rationality, since many of its proponents, such as those promoting the hypothesis of intelligent design, claim to be putting forward a rational, scientific criticism of Darwinism. The political aim in the USA is to get round the constitutional separation of church and state, by putting religion into the schools wrapped in science’s clothing. (That’s not solely our view: it’s what Judge John Jones concludedwhen presiding over
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
, when he ruled that the teaching of intelligent design in school science classes was unconstitutional.) The methodology is to present an anti-Darwin stance in schools, perhaps in order to deny ‘naturalism’, the belief that nature can work perfectly well without gods. Alvin Plantinga and Dennett discuss this point in
Science and Religion; Are They Compatible?
This is yet another example of Benford’s distinction. Believers in, and promoters of, an intelligent designer want a human-centred system of the world. They want evolution to be guided. They have completely missed Darwin’s point, that a creator is unnecessary: natural selection can produce the same results without there being any human-type design.
    This anti-Darwin prejudice, this wish for a human kind of design in evolution, must be distinguished from all those places in the world that haven’t yet emerged from a medieval dependence on religion in people’s daily lives, and where evolution isn’t ‘believed in’. And it must also be distinguished from an unthinking commitment to religion, hence disbelief in evolution – or in science in general – in the lives of most people even in scientific/technological societies today.
    Dennett and Thomson explain the commitment to religion very well. It is irrational and faith-based, but for many people it seems almost to be a necessary part of being human. It provides a sense of identity and a shared culture. Part of the reason is that most religions have, in the course of their evolution, changed to become more and more adapted, more appropriate to the creatures they’re serving. All of their organisation, and most of their practices, have been developed