Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species fighting for the idea of common descent. Though physically dead, he is still doing battle for the notion that chimps are your cousins and cauliflowers your kin. It is a sufficiently weird concept to keep Darwin relevant, revered and resented in equal measure. But in some ways it is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a ‘bottom-up’ place.

On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a credit-card debt left him by a profligate boyfriend; and Bob Wright’s book on the Almighty is still unpublished. They are not the only ones. The philosopher Dan Dennett has recently published Breaking the Spell while Richard Dawkins’s eagerly awaited (by friends and enemies) The God Delusion is now in the bookshops. This fascination with God does not imply a mass conversion among the typically agnostic scientific ranks.

Scientists are not interested in facts. What they like is ignorance. They mine it, eat it, attack it – choose the metaphor you prefer – and in the process they keep discovering more ignorance. Every answer leads to a set of new questions. The past few years have seen a once-in-an-aeon explosion of new knowledge about the human body and mind, as a consequence of our becoming the first creature in four billion years to read our own genetic recipe. Even more, they have seen an explosion of newly discovered ignorance. Most people now know the humiliating news from the Human Genome Project that we have the same number of genes as a mouse. There is no special set of 50,000 genes for making human brains, as was being seriously mooted just a decade ago.