Richard Dawkins is a British biologist specializing in evolutionary biology and in ethology. He is best known for his gene-centered theory of evolution and his extension of evolutionary principles to cultural and social phenomena through the meme postulate. More recently, Mr. Dawkins has become prominent for his advocacy of secularism and opposition to religion and religious dogma.
Mr. Dawkins’s lecture “Queerer than We Can Suppose” begins with the observation that science has suggested as true many ideas that are unexpected or even contradictory to common sense. He immediately introduces quantum mechanics as an example, a concept that is so difficult to grasp that even scientists specializing in the field claim to not fully understand it; he notes the various conflicting and paradoxical interpretations that exist. Quoting Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who popularized quantum theory, Mr. Dawkins asserts that although quantum physics is almost certainly accurate to some extent, it demands assumptions that appear extraordinary to the common man.
Turning to more mundane matters, Mr. Dawkins reveals that even common and familiar events have strange implications. He uses two humorous examples to illustrate his point: a glass of water is almost certain to contain molecules that were previously imbibed by Oliver Cromwell, and the air in the lecture hall is almost certain to contain nitrogen that was inhaled by some ancient Iguanodon. Although superficially both examples appear absurd, the number of molecules extant is such that a seemingly improbable event is in fact enormously likely.
Human beings have just as much difficulty visualizing the infinite as the infinitesimal, Mr. Dawkins argues. The discovery that the Earth orbited the Sun, and not the other way around, required an extraordinary leap, considering the knowledge available in that time. Given the space exploration of present day, people nowadays are accustomed to the notion of a heliocentric solar system; however, this goes against the “obvious” fact that from an Earth denizen’s perspective, the Sun is small and mobile, while the Earth is large and static.
Mr. Dawkins proposes that human beings are evolutionarily adapted to perspectives in what he designates “Middle World”. It is true that the majority of an atom, and thus the majority of any matter, is empty space, but this knowledge was not necessary or applicable to the lives of ancestral hominids. Similarly, life on Earth had no use for the notion of relativistic mechanics, since speeds nearing the speed of light are not typically encountered in the normal course of life. Properties such as the solidity of objects are merely mental constructs designed to comprehend that which is common in “Middle World”; similarly, bacteria are sensitive toward Brownian motion and insects toward surface tension, while human beings are not.
Reality itself is simply a formation of the mind in the same vein. Mr. Dawkins analogizes the human body to a barchan sand dune in order to emphasize its impermanence: like the sand dune that moves as the wind blows, the atoms composing the body are perpetually moving. Although a person has memories of his experiences, he is not the same person as he was during those experiences; Mr. Dawkins declares that not a single atom has remained constant between a particular person’s remembered experience and the present. This is a jarring revelation that confounds the ordinary human conceptualization of reality.
According to Mr. Dawkins, the inescapable conclusion is that each organism formulates its own reality that best suits its needs; there is no universal reality. Reality is only that which helps in an organism’s survival, with extraneous material excluded. Terrestrial animals do not “need” the ability to conceptualize flight, in the same way that human beings do not “need”, and therefore do not possess, the ability to easily grasp orders of magnitude tremendously different than those found in “Middle World”. Mr. Dawkins mentions that he believes that animals dependent on senses other than sight may assign descriptions for sensory triggers in the same way that human beings assign colors to things seen. To a bat, a certain texture detected by echolocation might be “red” or “blue”.
Human beings, having established a reality for themselves, believe that the range of experiences commonly present in “Middle World” to be “normal”. Generally, the events that are considered abnormal by human beings are those that are improbable in the realm to which they are accustomed. The example Mr. Dawkins presents is again solidity: a solid is actually a mass of vibrating atoms that only appears solid because the vibrations happen randomly and thus usually cancel each other out. The visual stasis would be interrupted if, by some infinitesimal chance, all the atoms happened to vibrate in the same direction repeatedly, and thus a statue could appear to wave.
Mr. Dawkins concludes his lecture with the topic of life itself. The human mind, simultaneously unable to process both large magnitudes and small probabilities, underestimates the likelihood of events such as abiogenesis. While the chance that the chemical reactions necessary for life is slim in the human generational time scale, it is so large as to be almost inevitable in the geologic time scale. Billions of planets are postulated to exist, and life could emerge on many of them. Mr. Dawkins states that the point is moot that life has emerged on this particular planet; in order for life to consider its own existence, it must have emerged on “this particular planet”.
