Whales

"A great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening"(Carl Sagan)

"Does God have to be, like us, a primate? How would it be if he manifested as a whale, a dolphin or an elephant?... We make him in our image as essentially a member of our own species. As the Old Testament shows, this can lead us at times to credit him with our obvious faults: our arrogance, our partiality, our bloody-mindedness, as well as with a human gender. But it also has another effect which has not, I think, received quite so much attention. Assimilating ourselves to him, we easily come to see ourselves too as in some degree godlike. We seem to be the central bearers of all value, an essential feature of the universe, perhaps even the purpose for which it exists, and therefore a set of beings whose status can never really be in danger." (Mary Midgley)

Jersey is currently hosting the IWC, and already, as BBC News reports, this is likely to be a controversial conference:

ST. HELIER, Jersey, UK, July 12, 2011 (ENS) - The seas around Antarctica will be the scene of confrontations over whaling again this year.
Japan will send its whaling fleet to the Antarctic again, a senior Japanese official has told BBC News, and the Sea Shepherd's anti-whaling vessels will be there to disrupt the hunt. At the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which opened Monday in Jersey, Joji Morishita said Japan plans to send its whaling fleet back to the Southern Ocean to conduct "research" whaling. The IWC allows scientific research but not commercial whaling, which has been banned worldwide since 1986.

The rules of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) allow for "special permit whaling", commonly referred to as "scientific permit whaling" or simply "scientific whaling", provided it is "for the purpose of scientific research". Scientific whaling is not under the control of the IWC - permits and quotas are at the total discretion of each nation, which basically means that while it can make recommendations, it is something of a spent force as far as conservation is concerned, because this is a loophole which can be exploited easily. Jersey is hosting a conference of the IWC, and unless this changes, it may well turn out little more than a talking shop, especially if whaling countries continue to make use of so-called "scientific whaling". If some of the banns were given more "bite", and "scientific whaling" was more restricted, Jersey could bask in the glory of being the place where it happened, But as the breaking story shows, Jersey could end up with some very unwelcome publicity.

Jeff Kingston explains how the IWC did make some headway with a ban on whaling, but the Japanese are conducting a campaign to reinstate whaling:

Since the international moratorium on whaling was imposed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986, Japanese consumption of whale meat has declined markedly, the commercial whaling fleet has all but disappeared, and consumer interest is negligible. Nonetheless, the government spends considerable sums underwriting 'scientific whaling,' campaigning for a resumption of commercial whaling, and subsidizing sales of whale meat supplied from scientific whaling.

In an attempt to defend Japan's 'scientific whaling' and interest in resuming commercial whaling, Japanese government officials regularly describe whales as 'ocean cockroaches,' a phrase designed to rob these marine mammals of the appealing image they have gained in the West. The scavenger image refers to the huge appetite for fish that whaling advocates - and whaling advocates alone - believe is the reason for the depletion of world fishing stocks. The campaign to resume commercial whaling, and end the international moratorium that has successfully prevented some species from becoming extinct, is yet another example of bureaucratic commitment to a policy that does little to further the national interest at considerable expense.

But in fact, this is a bogus argument:

Critics also dismissed claims that whales are responsible for depleted fishing stocks: the simplistic assumption that fewer whales eating fewer marine resources means more fish for human consumption cannot be squared with the complex ecosystems characteristic of oceans. As one environmentalist quipped, this is the scientific equivalent of claiming that to save a rainforest we must cut down the tallest trees.

As an example of "scientific whaling" in practice, consider this:

Almost 13,000 fin, sperm, sei, Bryde's and minke whales have been killed using scientific permits since the moratorium on commercial whaling came into effect in 1986. There is heated debate in the IWC about the exploitation of this loophole as the governments of Japan and Iceland continue to issue their whaling fleets with scientific permits to kill whales, all of which are processed for their domestic whale meat markets.

and Kingston, again, writing in 2004, noted that:

Japan is not whaling to conduct research, but rather is conducting research to provide an acceptable cover for whaling. The scale of the program has grown considerably, from 300 whales in 1987 to a projected 700 in 2003. Critics point out that the scientific research has produced paltry results, with only a small number of papers published in internationally refereed scientific journals.

A letter by an international group scientists in May 2002, published in the New York Times, noted that:

We are concerned that Japan's whaling program is not designed to answer scientific questions relevant to the management of whales; that Japan has refused to make the information it collects available for independent review; and that it lacks a testable hypothesis or other performance indicators consistent with accepted scientific standards. Most of the data being gathered by Japan's 'scientific whaling' are obtainable by nonlethal means. . The commercial nature of Japan's whaling program conflicts with its scientific independence . These commercial considerations create a profit incentive to kill whales even when no scientific need exists...By continuing to fund and carry out this program, Japan opens itself to serious charges that it is using the pretense of scientific research to evade its commitments to the world community.

and as far as "scientific study" goes for Iceland, consider how this study is done - as the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society note (and easily verified fact):

"We are seeing increasing numbers of tourists walking off whale watching vessels and straight into restaurants that serve whale meat," the group said in a statement. More than 100 Icelandic restaurants and shops are currently selling minke whale meat as an exotic food - smoked, marinated or cut into steaks for grilling."

So much for science!

If one wanted to have "scientific permit" for gorilla studies, and it involved going out and shooting gorillas in order to study them, you would think there was something rather bizarre about the permit. If it was a "scientific permit" which allowed people to go and shoot elephants in order to study them, and somehow when the study was over, the ivory would enter the commercial market, you would begin to smell something rotten. But it is apparently fine to have "scientific permit whaling" when whales are killed supposedly for study.

Or, to take the human population, it is as if the scientific study of human beings involved a massive amount of permits being granted to people like Burke and Hare, and Desmond Morris had a book called "Man hunting" rather than "Man watching", and stated that it was about the scientific study of mankind.

The Victorians used to make collections of fish picked in glass jars, and while you can learn something of the anatomy of the fish, and even use it to identify different species, most scientists today realise that to study a fish while it is alive is of far more value, to learn from its behaviour, its feeding grounds etc. The same must surely be true of whales, although they are mammals, of course, and not fish. Scientific study should, as far as possible, study the whale in its natural environment, and live whales rather than dead ones.

In his series Cosmos, Carl Sagan has this to note on whale evolution:

The whales are recent arrivals in the ocean. Only seventy million years ago their ancestors were carnivorous mammals who migrated in slow steps from the land into the ocean. Among the whales, mothers suckle and care tenderly for their offspring. There is a long childhood in which the
adults teach the young. Play is a typical pastime. These are all mammalian characteristics, all important for the development of intelligent beings.

And he explains how whale's distinct songs developed:

The sea is murky. Sight and smell, which work well for mammals on the land, are not of much use in the depths of the ocean. Those ancestors of the whales who relied on these senses to locate a mate or a baby or a predator did not leave many offspring. So another method was perfected by evolution; it works superbly well and is central to any understanding of the whales: the sense of sound. Some whale sounds are called songs, but we are still ignorant of their true nature and meaning. They range over a broad band of frequencies, down to well below the lowest sound the human ear can detect. A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hour. Often it is repeated, identically, beat for beat, measure for measure, note for note. Occasionally a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst of a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Whales are very good at remembering. More often, on their return, the vocalizations have changed.

Very often the members of the group will sing the same song together. By some mutual consensus, some collaborative songwriting, the piece changes month by month, slowly and predictably. These vocalizations are complex. If the songs of the humpback whale are enunciated as a tonal language, the total information content, the number of bits of information in such songs, is some 106 bits, about the same as the information content of the Iliad or the Odyssey. We do not know what whales or their cousins the dolphins have to talk or sing about. They have no manipulative organs, they make no engineering constructs, but they are social creatures. They hunt, swim, fish, browse, frolic, mate, play, run from predators. There may be a great deal to talk about.

Is it or can it be scientific to study such creatures by killing them? While the examination of dead bodies may yield some important information about the larynx and vocal chords in human beings, our most exceptional characteristic, the production of speech, needs examination of the living human being, not the dead one.

The philosopher Mary Midgley notes that we must be wary of understanding the intelligence of whales in purely human terms, as the kind of thing than an IQ test shows, or - ironically - something that computers could develop artificially. Even in science fiction, the stories of aliens, and alien intelligence almost always - with some notable exceptions like H.P. Lovecraft - cast intelligence as analogous to our own, but writ large. But she notes that this is a flaw in our understanding of intelligence, and reducing it to just one kind of thing.

Where do we draw the line?' because intelligence is a matter of degree. Some inhabitants of our own planet, including whales and dolphins, have turned out to be a lot brighter than was once supposed. Quite how bright they are is not yet really clear. Indeed, it may never become so to us because of the difference in the kind of intelligence appropriate to beings with very different sorts of life. How can we deal with such a situation?

Legend apart, it was assumed that whales and dolphins were much like fish. The great apes were not even discovered until the eighteenth century, and real knowledge of their way of living has been acquired only within the last few decades. About better-known creatures too there was a very general ignorance and unthinking dismissal of available evidence; their sociality was not noticed or believed in. The central, official intellectual tradition of our culture never expected to be forced to refine its crude, extreme, unshaded dichotomy between man and beast. In spite of the efforts of many concerned thinkers, from Plutarch to Montaigne and from Blake to John Stuart Mill, it did not develop other categories. If alien beings landed tomorrow, lawyers, philosophers and social scientists would certainly have to do some very quick thinking. (I don't expect the aliens myself, but they are part of the imaginative furniture of our age, and it is legitimate to use them to rouse us from our dogmatic slumbers.) Science fiction, though sometimes helpful, has far too often sidetracked the problem by making its aliens just scientists with green antennae, beings whose 'intelligence' is of a kind to be accepted instantly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -only, of course, a little greater. Since neither dolphins nor gorillas write doctoral theses, this would still let us out as far as terrestrial non-human creatures were concerned. 'Persons' and their appropriate rights could still go on being denned in terms of this sort of intelligence, and we could quietly continue to poison the pigeons in the park any time that we felt like it.

It is understandable that people should have thought so, but this surely cannot really be the issue. What makes creatures our fellow beings, entitled to basic consideration, is surely not intellectual capacity but emotional fellowship. And if we ask what powers can justify a higher claim, bringing some creatures nearer to the degree of consideration which is due to humans, those that seem to be most relevant are sensibility, social and emotional complexity of the kind which is expressed by the formation of deep, subtle and lasting relationships. The gift of imitating certain intellectual skills which are important to humans is no doubt an indicator of this, but it cannot be central.

And, of course, how does one understand whales best? Carl Sagan, in his epoch making series Cosmos, criticised the hunting of whales - which back then was not banned. Sagan - as a sounder of Seti - was well aware that any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence (in any radio transmissions) might not be readily understood in human terms - and he noted how the UFO cults invariable did just that. But if intelligences from beyond the stars, perhaps sending out messages across the light years to reach out to any others, might be quite different from our own, how can we best communicate with them? Sagan saw the language of science as a possible universal, a "Rosetta stone", but he was also perceptive enough to see that the study of whales offered a unique scientific opportunity to explore and learn how to communicate with non-human intelligences - and it was on our own planet. Here is a real, and nor fraudulent, agenda for the scientific study of whales:

We have done worse than that, because there persists to this day a traffic in the dead bodies of whales. There are humans who hunt and slaughter whales and market the products for lipstick or industrial lubricant. Many nations understand that the systematic murder of such intelligent creatures is monstrous, but the traffic continues, promoted chiefly by Japan, Norway and the Soviet Union. We humans, as a species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestrial intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphins, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the, great whales?

References
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2011/2011-07-12-02.html
http://www.awcs.org.au/index.php?pageId=13
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/midgley01.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/19/religion-anthropic-principle-environment
Cosmos, Carl Sagan
Japan's Quiet Transformation: Social Change and Civil Society in the 21st Century. Jeff Kingston, 2004

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review of Part Two

Another chance to see Richard Dawkins confronting an African bishop, and posing the deliberately provocative question: "I am an ape. Are you an ape?"

The presentation of apes to humans via skulls suggested that brain size was the deciding factor in our evolution. In fact we know that this is again a simplification, and not a good one. If Dawkin's had taken some time to look at Alfred Russell Wallace's work, rather than merely considering it the same as Darwin's, he would find this problem. Another biologist, Professor Ramachandran, states it succinctly:

The hominid brain reached almost its present size - and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones? I shall call this "Wallace's problem", after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who first proposed it.

To consider this problem when looking at human evolution would have been more interesting that suggesting that brain size alone was the contributory factor, which is what Dawkins tended to do with his presentation of skulls. Skulls are all very well, but they are rather unformative in showing what was going on within them. That is where the cutting edge of work on human evolution is becoming focused, and that was entirely missing from the programme.

There was the usual muddle about self-genes, which according to Dawkins may contribute to acts of altruism towards members of one's own family, but only do so with humans towards the wider world because they "misfire". When he says that genes strive to make more copies of themselves, he means: "selection has operated to favour genes that, by chance, varied in such a way that more copies survived in subsequent generations." But when he says we can overcome our selfish genes, and considers selfish behaviour to be the outcome of the selfish gene, he is perpetuating the same muddle over the use of the word "selfish" that an animal specialist accused him of earlier in the programme. He stated that most biologists now accepted his notion of the selfish gene, which from a brief survey of the academic literature, looks more like wishful thinking than anything else.

In fact, to promote his idea of the selfish gene is not to celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin, because for Darwin, natural selection had to act on individuals. The reason for this Stephen Jay Gould makes very apparent:

No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them-direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favours some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.

If, in favouring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their colours externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing. There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene. Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms because suites of parts, interacting in complex ways, confer advantages. The image of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival, bears little relationship to developmental genetics as we understand it.

The philosopher David Stove showed just how deficient the "selfish gene" argument actually is with his witty and erudite demotion job on the concept:

The truth is, 'the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances', genes. This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. It was not written by Dawkins, but he quoted it with manifest enthusiasm in a defence of The Selfish Gene.... His admirers even include some philosophers who have carried their airs and graces to the length of writing good books on such rarefied subjects as universals, or induction, or the mind. Dawkins can scarcely have gratified these admirers by telling them that, even when engaged in writing those books, they were 'totally prostituted to the blind purposiveness of their genes Still, you 'have to hand it' to genes which can write, even if only through their slaves, a good book on subjects like universals or induction. Those genes must have brains all right, as well as purposes. At least, they must, if genes can have brains and purposes. But in fact, of course, DNA molecules no more have such things than H20 molecules do.


Moreover, to suggest that genes alone are responsible for wider altruism is to completely ignore matters like "mirror neurons", which Armand Leroi, himself an evolutionary biologist, has explored, looking at the neurology of altruism, imitation and empathy.

Mirror neurons were so named because, by firing both when an animal acts and when it simply watches the same action, they were thought to "mirror" movement, as though the observer itself were acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. As Professor V.S. Ramachandran observes:

Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution

Dawkins cannot find a place easily for altruism alongside his selfish gene hypothesis, so he postulates that altruism is because of "misfiring selfish genes". Genes would have been capable of promoting kin selection, but on a global scale kin selection cannot differentiate between close kin and strangers, hence altruism, acts of generosity to complete strangers. Why this occurs in some case, such as the kindly Professor Dawkins, who is clearly a caring man, but does not occur in other people, such as Robert Mugabe, is not satisfactorily explained; instead it seems more like an "explaining away" difficulties with the theory, or what Karl Popper called "immunising the theory" against any possibly falsification.

But to return to the Bishop, who said "I am a human being" and asked why monkeys were still around if evolution was true, Dawkins then went on to explain that in evolutionary terms, we shared a common ancestor, and we both had evolved. He also went on to comment that with the number of shared genes, it might be possible for human and genetically close ape relative to breed. In fact, this has occurred, but not in Oxford, so that is why Dawkins probably did not know about it.

The Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a "humanzee" - a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.

With regard to "social Darwinism", in a fascinating section, Dawkins concentrated on "big men", the Rockefellers etc, as promoting "the business survival of the fittest", which led to cases like Enron where a blanket policy of firing employees who were not ruthless enough led to people with no business ethics at all running the company to financial disaster. But he overlooked in his interview with a businessman, the idea that companies diversify and then see where the consumer buys, and expand on that, and cut back on other areas of their business. This kind of "corporate Darwinism" fits an evolutionary paradigm rather well, but it was just ignored, and not explored at all with Dawkin's focus on the Herbert Spencer school of Social Darwinism.

Lastly, apart from the incessant tinkly music (from a glockenspiel?), what also seemed most odd was Dawkin's anthropomorphisms. Repeatedly, again and again, he thrust at the viewer - alongside footage of predators catching and eating prey - the idea that nature was "brutal" "savage" "cruel". Perhaps he should read some Mary Midgley - in "The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour". She notes:

We have thought of a wolf always as he appears to the shepherd at the moment of seizing a lamb from the fold. But this is like judging the shepherd by the impression he makes on the lamb, at the moment when he finally decides to turn it into mutton. Lately, ethologists have taken the trouble to watch wolves systematically, between meal-times, and have found them to be, by human standards, paragons of regularity and virtue. They pair for life, they are faithful and affectionate spouses and parents, they show great loyalty to their pack, great courage and persistence in the face of difficulties, they carefully respect each other's territories, keep their dens clean, and extremely seldom kill anything that they do not need for dinner. If they fight with another wolf, the fight ends with his submission; there is normally a complete inhibition on killing the suppliant and on attacking females and cubs. They have also, like all social animals, a fairly elaborate etiquette, including subtly varied ceremonies of greeting and reassurance, by which friendship is strengthened, co-operation achieved and the wheels of social life generally oiled. All this is not the romantic impressions of casual travellers; it rests on long and careful investigations by trained zoologists, backed up by miles of film, graphs, maps, population surveys, droppings analysis and all the rest of the contemporary toolbag.

She comments on the trap which Dawkins, alongside others, is falling into:

Actual wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and the same goes for apes and other creatures. But it is the folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers. They have usually taken over the popular notion of lawless cruelty which underlies such terms as "brutal," "bestial," "beastly," "animal desires," etc., and have used it, uncriticized, as a contrast to illuminate the nature of man. Man has been mapped by reference to a landmark which is largely mythical.

In the old days, Disney used to put on supporting items to the main feature, which were a kind of nature documentary which false attributed all kinds of human like motivation to animals. Although Dawkins is very selective in his examples of predators, it is not apparent whether he is not indulging in little more than a Film Noire version of Disney. He doesn't show how cruel and savage pandas are, or how brutal the average cow is, or indeed any one of a dozen herbivores who are present only as illustrations of carnivores at work.

If only in his contempt for theology, Dawkins had not been so dismissive of the notion of anthropomorphism when it has occurred - and been rejected - with respect to ideas of God, perhaps he would be more aware of it occurring in his own work.

And if I had to answer the question ""I am an ape. Are you an ape?" I would be inclined to say that I was a perpendicular hairless tree shrew. If you are defining lineage by past speciation, why stop - arbitrarily - with the ape? Why not go back to when we were common cousins with the vole?

Links:

The Genes That Make Us Human by Dr Armand Leroi

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/563/

The Nature of Normal Human Variety by Armand Leroi

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/leroi05/leroi05_index.html

The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour by Mary Midgley

http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/midgley02.htm

Human Evolution: From Tree Shrew to Ape

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/anthro/bioanth/ch10/chap10.htm

Human Evolution

http://www.dorak.info/evolution/human.html

Are you ignorant?

I like the way in which Dawkins (speaking to Lawrence Krauss), weasels his way out of what "ignorant" means, saying that he was misunderstood when he used it; I seem to remember he used similar tactics when Midgley lambasted him on "The Selfish Gene" for the way in which the word "selfish" was used both techically and in an ordinary language sense; he came back saying he only meant it in the specialist way which (as extracts from his book in The Myths We Live By show) is palpable nonsense. The inability to see that in context it comes across as an insult (i.e. as in "you ignorant pig"), and synomymous with "dumb" shows that he has a very limited understanding of how language works.

Dawkins: I like your clarification of what you mean by reaching out. But let me warn you of how easy it is to be misunderstood. I once wrote in a New York Times book review, "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." That sentence has been quoted again and again in support of the view that I am a bigoted, intolerant, closed-minded, intemperate ranter. But just look at my sentence. It may not be crafted to seduce, but you, Lawrence, know in your heart that it is a simple and sober statement of fact. [...] To call somebody ignorant is no insult. All of us are ignorant of most of what there is to know. I am completely ignorant of baseball, and I dare say that you are as completely ignorant of cricket. If I tell somebody who believes the world is 6,000 years old that he is ignorant, I am paying him the compliment of assuming that he is not stupid, insane or wicked.

The writer of the blog also has a priceless remark (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/dawkins-and-kra.html)

The importance of promoting evolution without defining religion as some kind of ignorant voodoo has been a regular theme here at Wired Science.

In the end, the ultimate enemy of enlightenment isn't belief in a particular thing, but dogma and self-righteousness -- qualities that are amply demonstrated both by people of faith and by people of science.

Quite a few people manage to hold on to their religious convictions -- belief in God, in non-arbitrary morality, etc. -- while accepting that natural selection is real, the earth billions of years old, and so on. It's these sort of people that evolution's defenders need to produce.

Krauss seems to get this, but the boorishness of people like Dawkins doesn't help anyone, except maybe people who think scientists hate God. Is there some way of making him switch teams? At this point, the best thing that could happen to the public acceptance of evolution would be Richard Dawkins' full-fledged conversion to Christianity, whereupon his alienating intellectual tendencies would show moderate, generally sensible fence-sitters the stupidity of fundamentalism.