3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

I’m told that Richard Dawkins begins his speaking engagements by listing his ‘fleas’; books responding to Dawkins’s The God Delusion by riffing on its title, premise or cover design: The Dawkins Delusion, Deluded by Dawkins?, The God Solution, etc. You get the idea. Fern Elsdon-Baker’s The Selfish Genius looks like a flea book, but isn’t. In it she challenges Dawkins’s work on evolution from an atheistic and scientific perspective.

It is hard to judge how Elsdon-Baker fares against Dawkins from a layman non-scientist perspective, but her story of the establishment and schisms of evolutionary science is fascinating, not least because of the wonderful personalities that inhabit the field. There’s an amazing footnote on the geologist Reverend Buckland, who ‘decided to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom, serving up to his unfortunate guests anything from boiled sea slugs to roast panther.’

Elsdon-Baker empathises the point that nineteenth-century science and religion were not always competing antethesis: in many respects, they overlapped, with prominent evolutionists also committed Christians - and Darwin himself a tormented agnostic, his faith shaken by his genius. Darwin’s ideas were not new, and could be found in ninth-century Baghdad. She warns us against the simplicity of a Whig or Great Man version of the history of science. Fair enough: we must bear in mind Goldacre’s First Rule: ’I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.’

Yet there’s a sense of Elsdon-Baker investing too much in the overlap between scientists and religious believers. It is no surprise that even Paine and Jefferson shared the predominant beliefs of their time - or at least were not prepared to contradict them in public. I am reminded of Sam Harris’s point: ‘It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do the job.’

Like many of Dawkins’s critics, Elsdon-Baker has a strong focus on the tone, rather than the content, of his arguments: ‘I am not too concerned about the quality and validity of Dawkins’ ideas… What does worry me is the style of presentation.’ She criticises Dawkins’s ‘highly charged, political style of political advocacy’ which ’seeks to polarise’ and ‘can be very divisive and ultimately counter-productive.’ The way forward is ‘respectful communication’ - or perhaps, like Lafayette Proulx, we should just make endearing noises.

True, Dawkins is not a particularly good communicator. I have seen his documentaries and he comes off as a shy yet passionate schoolboy, with great and infectious conviction but lacking the articulacy to express it or the self-discipline to control it. He strikes me as someone who has had celebrity thrust upon him, and does not deal with it well. But I can think of no one else who has done more to advance the public understanding of science - indeed, I doubt the general public was aware of the Charles Simony position before his tenure in it. How does his rampant atheism undermine this? Oh, because we must ‘respect other people’s faith’. But why? What is it about faith - as opposed to actual human beings - that makes it automatically worthy of respect? What can it offer?

When Elsdon-Baker gets to the substance of Dawkins’s views on religion, she struggles. In a chapter headed, predictably, ‘The Church of Dawkins,’ she argues that Dawkins ‘reduce[s] the intense geopolitical situation to a clash of cultures - us versus them, the modern rational West versus medieval Islam’ and supports this by referencing an article Dawkins wrote on 9/11 that, as you can see, contains no trace of this Huntingdonian narrative and instead attacks religion as a whole. The difficulty with painting Dawkins as a kind of twenty-first century rational imperialist is that he strongly opposed the war on Iraq: his critics tend to work around it, and most do a better job than Elsdon-Baker does here.

There are better challenges to Dawkins in The Selfish Genius, but not enough to sustain a book. Often Dawkins’s words are quoted without comment, as if their worthlessness is so well established as to render it unnecessary. Fern Elsdon-Baker is far more than ‘an intellectual mouse nibbling at the feet of the intellectual giants’ yet perhaps, in channelling her talent and knowledge into an attack on one man, she hasn’t applied either as well as she might have.     

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is a co-editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Saturday, July 11th, 2009.