Gene genie
From Edward Frostick
Sir: I find myself agreeing with Mary Midgley rather than Philip Hensher (‘A good book and the Good Book’, 25 March). If Richard Dawkins had not intended to imply that genes are selfish, then he should not have said so in the title of his book. The fact is that The Selfish Gene is not a scientific textbook; it’s a mixture of science and personal opinion: one could describe it as ‘Charles Darwin meets David Hume’. For example, Dawkins fails to give a satisfactory explanation of why sometimes one animal group will, without gain, give survival assistance to another group — even to another species.
As for his theory of memes, namely that ideas can infect the mind rather like a computer virus, I strongly doubt that Dawkins would have developed the theory had he not lived in the computer age. However, to suggest that ideas can spread in a similar way to a computer virus shows little understanding of computers or their viruses. Let us take Dawkins’s pet hate, the religion ‘memes’. People frequently change their religion, give up religious belief altogether or adopt religious belief after an agnostic or atheist upbringing. Now let us look at a political ‘meme’. Where are the idealists who were members of, and indoctrinated by, Marxist groups in the 1960s and 1970s? You’ll find a lot of them working for banks and stockbrokers. You’ll also find a few in New Labour; or so I’m told.
Edward Frostick By email
From Simon West
Sir: I contest that those who espouse evolution have failed to produce the evidence, fossil or otherwise, of any creature in a transitionary stage. The coelacanth, thought extinct and declared as ‘transitionary’ by evolutionists, spoiled the theories by turning up alive and well in AD 2000, fully functioning and largely unchanged after ‘390 million years’. Many such examples exist; mudskippers are still mudskippers. Life does not seem to be evolving around us.
However, lives are changing around us. Part of the evidence for the truth of Christianity is the transformation in the characters of those who follow its teaching. How is this to be accounted for? What power is at work here? Which gene? Some Christians are even willing to die for being Christians, it seems; they are either utterly deluded or enlightened.
Simon West
Edinburgh
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