What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us?

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THE GOD DELUSION
Richard Dawkins

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

a division of The Random House Group Ltd

Published 2006 by Bantam Press


p362
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THE MOTHER OF ALL BURKAS

One of the unhappiest spectacles to be seen on our streets today is
the image of a woman swathed in shapeless black from head to toe,
peering out at the world through a tiny slit. The burka is not just
an instrument of oppression of women and claustral repression of
their liberty and their beauty; not just a token of egregious male
cruelty and tragically cowed female submission. I want to use the
narrow slit in the veil as a symbol of something else.

Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electro-
magnetic spectrum. Visible light is a chink of brightness in the vast
dark spectrum, from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at
the short end. Quite how narrow is hard to appreciate and a
challenge to convey. Imagine a gigantic black burka, with a vision
slit of approximately the standard width, say about one inch. If the
length of black cloth above the slit represents the short-wave end of
the invisible spectrum, and if the length of black cloth below the slit
represents the long-wave portion of the invisible spectrum, how
long would the burka have to be in order to accommodate a one-
inch slit to the same scale? It is hard to represent it sensibly without
invoking logarithmic scales, so huge are the lengths we are dealing
with. The last chapter of a book like this is no place to start toss-
ing logarithms around, but you can take it from me that it would
be the mother of all burkas. The one-inch window of visible light is
derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth
representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at
the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head. What
science does for us is widen the window. It opens up so wide that
the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely,
exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom.

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Optical telescopes use glass lenses and mirrors to scan the
heavens, and what they see is stars that happen to be radiating in
the narrow band of wavelengths that we call visible light. But other
telescopes 'see' in the X-ray or radio wavelengths, and present to us
a cornucopia of alternative night skies. On a smaller scale, cameras
with appropriate filters can 'see' in the ultraviolet and take photo-
graphs of flowers that show an alien range of stripes and spots that
are visible to, and seemingly 'designed' for, insect eyes but which
our unaided eyes can't see at all. Insect eyes have a spectral window
of similar width to ours, but slightly shifted up the burka: they are
blind to red and they see further into the ultraviolet than we do -
into the 'ultraviolet garden'.*

The metaphor of the narrow window of light, broadening out
into a spectacularly wide spectrum, serves us in other areas of
science. We live near the centre of a cavernous museum of magni-
tudes, viewing the world with sense organs and nervous systems
that are equipped to perceive and understand only a small middle
range of sizes, moving at a middle range of speeds. We are at home
with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a
mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin).
Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we
need the help of instruments and of mathematics - which,
fortunately, we can learn to deploy. The range of sizes, distances or
speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band,
set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of
quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian
cosmology at the larger.

Our imaginations are forlornly under-equipped to cope with
distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally
familiar. We try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball, in orbit
around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons.
That isn't what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls.
They are not like anything we recognize. It isn't clear that 'like'
even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality's further
horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the
neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in

* ‘The Ultraviolet Garden' was the title of one of my five Royal Institution
Christmas Lectures, originally televised by the BBC under the general title
‘Growing Up in the Universe'. The whole series of five lectures will be made available
at www.richarddawkins.net, the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

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the way matter - as we are evolved to think - ought to behave. Nor
can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some
appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us
down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing
moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large.

At the end of a famous essay on 'Possible Worlds', the great
biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote, 'Now, my own suspicion is that the
universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can suppose I suspect that there are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any
philosophy.’ By the way, I am intrigued by the suggestion that the
famous Hamlet speech invoked by Haldane is conventionally mis-
spoken. The normal stress is on 'your':

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Indeed, the line is often plonkingly quoted with the implication that
Horatio stands for shallow rationalists and sceptics everywhere.
But some scholars place the stress on 'philosophy', with 'your'
almost vanishing: '. . . than are dreamt of inya philosophy.’ The
difference doesn't really matter for present purposes, except that the
second interpretation already takes care of Haldane's 'any' philosophy.

The dedicatee of this book [Douglas Adams] made a living from the
strangeness of science, pushing it to the point of comedy. The following
is taken from the same extempore speech in Cambridge in 1998 from which
I have already quoted: 'The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep
gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a
nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be
normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective
tends to be.’ Where other science-fiction writers played on the odd-
ness of science to arouse our sense of the mysterious, Douglas
Adams used it to make us laugh (those who have read The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy might think of the infinite
improbability drive', for instance). Laughter is arguably the best
response to some of the stranger paradoxes of modern physics. The
alternative, I sometimes think, is to cry.

Quantum mechanics, that rarefied pinnacle of twentieth-century

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scientific achievement, makes brilliantly successful predictions
about the real world. Richard Feynman compared its precision to
predicting a distance as great as the width of North America to an
accuracy of one human hair's breadth. This predictive success seems
to mean that quantum theory has got to be true in some sense; as
true as anything we know, even including the most down-to-earth
common-sense facts. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory
needs to make, in order to deliver those predictions, are so
mysterious that even the great Feynman himself was moved to
remark (there are various versions of this quotation, of which the
following seems to me the neatest): 'If you think you understand
quantum theory . . . you don't understand quantum theory.'*

Quantum theory is so queer that physicists resort to one or
another paradoxical 'interpretation' of it. Resort is the right word.
David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many
worlds' interpretation of quantum theory, perhaps because the
worst that you can say of it is that it is preposterously wasteful. It
postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes, existing
in parallel and mutually undetectable except through the narrow
porthole of quantum-mechanical experiments. In some of these
universes I am already dead. In a small minority of them, you have
a green moustache. And so on.

The alternative 'Copenhagen interpretation' is equally pre-
posterous - not wasteful, just shatteringly paradoxical. Erwin
Schrodinger satirized it with his parable of the cat. Schrodinger's
cat is shut up in a box with a killing mechanism triggered by a
quantum-mechanical event. Before we open the lid of the box, we
don't know whether the cat is dead. Common sense tells us that,
nevertheless, the cat must be either alive or dead inside the box. The
Copenhagen interpretation contradicts common sense: all that
exists before we open the box is a probability. As soon as we open
the box, the wave function collapses and we are left with the single
event: the cat is dead, or the cat is alive. Until we opened the box,
it was neither dead nor alive.

The 'many worlds' interpretation of the same events is that in
some universes the cat is dead; in other universes the cat is alive.
Neither interpretation satisfies human common sense or intuition.
The more macho physicists don't care. What matters is that the

* A similar remark is attributed to Niels Bohr: 'Anyone who is not shocked by
quantum theory has not understood it.’

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mathematics work, and the predictions are experimentally fulfilled.
Most of us are too wimpish to follow them. We seem to need some
sort of visualization of what is 'really' going on. I understand, by
the way, that Schrodinger originally proposed his cat thought-
experiment in order to expose what he saw as the absurdity of the
Copenhagen interpretation.

The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of
modern physics is just the tip of the iceberg. Science in general, as
opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. 156 Here's a
favourite example: every time you drink a glass of water, the odds
are good that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed
through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. It's just elementary prob-
ability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely
greater than the number of glassfuls in the world. So every time we
have a full glass, we are looking at a rather high proportion of the
molecules of water that exist in the world. There is, of course,
nothing special about Cromwell, or bladders. Haven't you just
breathed in a nitrogen atom that was once breathed out by the third
iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree? Aren't you glad to be
alive in a world where not only is such a conjecture possible but
you are privileged to understand why? And publicly explain it to
somebody else, not as your opinion or belief but as something that
they, when they have understood your reasoning, will feel com-
pelled to accept? Maybe this is an aspect of what Carl Sagan meant
when he explained his motive in writing The Demon-Haunted
World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: ”Not explaining science
seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the
world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love
affair with science."

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a
universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or
would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist
only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process.
There is an anthropic sense, then, in which our existence should not
be surprising. I'd like to think that I speak for my fellow humans in
insisting, nevertheless, that it is desperately surprising.

Think about it. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in
the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing

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more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together
into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that
they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing,
hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of com-
plexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in
love with yet other chunks of complex matter. We now understand
essentially how the trick is done, but only since 1859. Before 1859
it would have seemed very very odd indeed. Now, thanks to
Darwin, it is merely very odd. Darwin seized the window of the
burka and wrenched it open, letting in a flood of understanding
whose dazzling novelty, and power to uplift the human spirit,
perhaps had no precedent - unless it was the Copernican realization
that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.

'Tell me,’ the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein once asked a friend, 'why do people always say it was
natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather
than that the Earth was rotating?’ His friend replied, 'Well,
obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the
Earth.’ Wittgenstein responded, 'Well, what would it have looked
like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?’ I sometimes
quote this remark of Wittgenstein in lectures, expecting the
audience to laugh. Instead, they seem stunned into silence.

In the limited world in which our brains evolved, small objects
are more likely to move than large ones, which are seen as the back-
ground to movement. As the world rotates, objects that seem large
because they are near - mountains, trees and buildings, the ground
itself - all move in exact synchrony with each other and with the
observer, relative to heavenly bodies such as the sun and stars. Our
evolved brains project an illusion of movement onto them rather
than the mountains and trees in the foreground.

I now want to pursue the point mentioned above, that the way
we see the world, and the reason why we find some things
intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are
themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us
survive in a world -I shall use the name Middle World - where the
objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor
very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly
compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable

368 THE GOD DELUSION

could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is
narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our
ancestors to survive.

Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that appar-
ently solid things like crystals and rocks are really composed almost
entirely of empty space. The familiar illustration represents the
nucleus of an atom as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The
next atom is right outside the stadium. The hardest, solidest,
densest rock, then, is 'really' almost entirely empty space, broken
only by tiny particles so far apart that they shouldn't count. So why
do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable?

I won't try to imagine how Wittgenstein might have answered
that question. But, as an evolutionary biologist, I would answer it
like this. Our brains have evolved to help our bodies find their way
around the world on the scale at which those bodies operate. We
never evolved to navigate the world of atoms. If we had, our brains
probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel
hard and impenetrable to our hands because our hands can't
penetrate them. The reason they can't penetrate them is un-
connected with the sizes and separations of the particles that
constitute matter. Instead, it has to do with the force fields that are
associated with those widely spaced particles in 'solid' matter. It is
useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and im-
penetrability, because such notions help us to navigate our bodies
through a world in which objects - which we call solid - cannot
occupy the same space as each other.

A little comic relief at this point - from The Men who Stare at
Goats by Jon Ronson:

This is a true story. It is the summer of 1983. Major
General Albert Stubblebine III is sitting behind his desk in
Arlington, Virginia, and he is staring at his wall, upon
which hang his numerous military awards. They detail a
long and distinguished career. He is the United States
Army's chief of intelligence, with sixteen thousand sol-
diers under his command . . . He looks past his awards to
the wall itself. There is something he feels he must do even
though the thought of it frightens him. He thinks about

A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 369

the choice he has to make. He can stay in his office or he
can go into the next office. That is his choice. And he has
made it. He is going into the next office . . . He stands up,
moves out from behind his desk, and begins to walk. I
mean, he thinks, what is the atom mostly made up of any-
way? Space! He quickens his pace. What am I mostly
made of? He thinks. Atoms! He is almost at a jog now.
What is the wall mostly made up of? He thinks. Atoms!
All I have to do is merge the spaces. . . . Then General
Stubblebine bangs his nose hard on the wall of his office.
Damn, he thinks. General Stubblebine is confounded by
his continual failure to walk through his wall.

General Stubblebine is appropriately described as an 'out of the
box thinker' on the website of the organization which, in retire-
ment, he now runs with his wife. It is called HealthFreedomUSA,
and it is dedicated to 'supplements (vitamins, minerals, amino
acids, etc.), herbs, homeopathic remedies, nutritional medicine and
clean food (untainted by pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics), without
corporations (through the use of government coercion) dictating to
you what dosages and treatments you are allowed to use'. There is
no mention of precious bodily fluids.*

Having evolved in Middle World, we find it intuitively easy to
grasp ideas like: 'When a major general moves, at the sort of
medium velocity at which major generals and other Middle World
objects do move, and hits another solid Middle World object like a
wall, his progress is painfully arrested.‘ Our brains are not
equipped to imagine what it would be like to be a neutrino passing
through a wall, in the vast interstices of which that wall 'really'
consists. Nor can our understanding cope with what happens when
things move at close to the speed of light.

Unaided human intuition, evolved and schooled in Middle World,
even finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us that a cannon
ball and a feather, given no air friction, would hit the ground at the
same instant when dropped from a leaning tower. That is because,
in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we had evolved in
a vacuum, we would expect a feather and a cannonball to hit the
ground simultaneously. We are evolved denizens of Middle World,

* www.healthfreedomusa.org/aboutus/president.shtml. For what looks like a
very characterful portrait of General Stubblebine, see www.mindcontrol
forums.com/images/Mind94jpg.

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and that limits what we are capable of imagining. The narrow
window of our burka permits us, unless we are especially gifted or
peculiarly well educated, to see only Middle World.

There is a sense in which we animals have to survive not just in
Middle World but in the micro-world of atoms and electrons too.
The very nerve impulses with which we do our thinking and our
imagining depend upon activities in Micro World. But no action
that our wild ancestors ever had to perform, no decision that they
ever had to take, would have been assisted by an understanding of
Micro World. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal
movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle
Worlders are too cumbersomely massive to notice Brownian
motion. Similarly, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost
oblivious to the delicate force of surface tension. A small insect
would reverse that priority and would find surface tension anything
but delicate.

Steve Grand, in Creation: Life and How to Make It, is almost
scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this
tendency to think that only solid, material 'things' are 'really' things
at all. 'Waves' of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem
'unreal'. Victorians thought that waves had to be waves 'in' some
material medium. No such medium was known, so they invented
one and named it the luminiferous ether. But we find 'real' matter
comfortable to our understanding only because our ancestors evolved
to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful construct.

On the other hand, even we Middle Worlders can see that a
whirlpool is a 'thing' with something like the reality of a rock, even
though the matter in the whirlpool is constantly changing. In a
desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of Ol Donyo Lengai, sacred
volcano of the Masai, there is a large dune made of ash from an
eruption in 1969. It is carved into shape by the wind. But the
beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It is what is technically
known as a barchan (pronounced bahkahn). The entire dune walks
across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17
metres per year. It retains its crescent shape and creeps along in the
direction of the horns. The wind blows sand up the shallower slope.
Then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down
the steeper slope on the inside of the crescent.

A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 371

Actually, even a barchan is more of a 'thing' than a wave. A
wave seems to move horizontally across the open sea, but the
molecules of water move vertically. Similarly, sound waves may
travel from speaker to listener, but molecules of air don't: that
would be a wind, not a sound. Steve Grand points out that you and
I are more like waves than permanent 'things'. He invites his reader
to think

. . . of an experience from your childhood. Something you
remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even
smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were
there at the time, weren't you? How else would you
remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there.
Not a single atom that is in your body today was there
when that event took place . . . Matter flows from place
to place and momentarily comes together to be you.
Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of
which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand
up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does,
because it is important.

'Really' isn't a word we should use with simple confidence. If a
neutrino had a brain which had evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors,
it would say that rocks 'really' do consist mostly of empty space.
We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors, who
couldn't walk through rocks, so our 'really' is a 'really' in which
rocks are solid. 'Really', for an animal, is whatever its brain needs
it to be, in order to assist its survival. And because different species
live in such different worlds, there will be a troubling variety of
'reallys'.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world
but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data
- a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the
real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal
we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from
a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal. Predators need a
different kind of model from prey, even though their worlds
necessarily overlap. A monkey's brain must have software capable

372 THE GOD DELUSION

of simulating a three-dimensional maze of branches and trunks. A
water boatman's brain doesn't need 3D software, since it lives on
the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott Flatland. A mole's
software for constructing models of the world will be customized
for underground use. A naked mole rat probably has world-
representing software similar to a mole's. But a squirrel, although it
is a rodent like the mole rat, probably has world-rendering software
much more like a monkey's.

I've speculated, in The Blind Watchmaker and elsewhere, that
bats may 'see' colour with their ears. The world-model that a bat
needs, in order to navigate through three dimensions catching
insects, must surely be similar to the model that a swallow needs in
order to perform much the same task. The fact that the bat uses
echoes to update the variables in its model, while the swallow uses
light, is incidental. Bats, I suggest, use perceived hues such as 'red'
and 'blue' as internal labels for some useful aspect of echoes,
perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces; just as swallows use the
same perceived hues to label long and short wavelengths of light.
The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is
to be used rather than by the sensory modality involved. The lesson
of the bats is this. The general form of the mind model - as opposed
to the variables that are constantly being inputted by sensory nerves
- is an adaptation to the animal's way of life, no less than its wings,
legs and tail are.

J. B. S. Haldane, in the article on 'possible worlds' that I quoted
above, had something relevant to say about animals whose world is
dominated by smell. He noted that dogs can distinguish two very
similar volatile fatty acids - caprylic acid and caproic acid - each
diluted to one part in a million. The only difference is that caprylic
acid's main molecular chain is two carbon atoms longer than the
main chain of caproic acid. A dog, Haldane guesses, would prob-
ably be able to place the acids 'in the order of their molecular
weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano
wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes'.

There is another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the
other two except that it has yet two more carbon atoms in its main
chain. A dog that had never met capric acid would perhaps have no
more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble

A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 373

imagining a trumpet playing one note higher than we have heard a
trumpet play before. It seems to me entirely reasonable to guess
that a dog, or a rhinoceros, might treat mixtures of smells as
harmonious chords. Perhaps there are discords. Probably not
melodies, for melodies are built up of notes that start or stop
abruptly with accurate timing, unlike smells. Or perhaps dogs and
rhinos smell in colour. The argument would be the same as for the
bats.

Once again, the perceptions that we call colours are tools used
by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world.
Perceived hues - what philosophers call qualia - have no intrinsic
connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal
labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model
of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to
the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means
light of different wavelengths. In a bat's case, I have speculated, it
might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps
red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dogs or
a rhino's case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine
the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a
bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants us
when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the wider
range of what is out there for our delight.

The metaphor of Middle World - of the intermediate range of
phenomena that the narrow slit in our burka permits us to see -
applies to yet other scales or 'spectrums'. We can construct a scale
of improbabilities, with a similarly narrow window through which
our intuition and imagination are capable of going. At one extreme
of the spectrum of improbabilities are those would-be events that
we call impossible. Miracles are events that are extremely irn-
probable. A statue of a madonna could wave its hand at us. The
atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back
and forth. Because there are so many of them, and because there is
no agreed preference in their direction of motion, the hand, as we
see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the jiggling atoms in
the hand could all just happen to move in the same direction at the
same time. And again. And again In this case the hand would
move, and we'd see it waving at us. It could happen, but the odds

374 THE GOD DELUSION

against are so great that, if you had set out writing the number at
the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough
zeroes to this day. The power to calculate such odds - the power to
quantify the near-impossible rather than just throw up our hands in
despair - is another example of the liberating benefactions of
science to the human spirit.

Evolution in Middle World has ill equipped us to handle very
improbable events. But in the vastness of astronomical space, or
geological time, events that seem impossible in Middle World turn
out to be inevitable. Science flings open the narrow window
through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of
possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit
regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or in-
habited by dragons. We have already made use of this widening of
the window in Chapter 4, where we considered the improbability
of the origin of life and how even a near-impossible chemical event
must come to pass given enough planet years to play with; and
where we considered the spectrum of possible universes, each with
its own set of laws and constants, and the anthropic necessity of
finding ourselves in one of the minority of friendly places.

How should we interpret Haldane's 'queerer than we can
suppose'? Queerer than can, in principle, be supposed? Or just
queerer than we can suppose, given the limitation of our brains'
evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by train-
ing and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off
our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just
mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and
the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled
to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of
understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there
are no limits.