Memo to science bashers. On the Origin of Species is not a sacred text.
There has been much fluttering in Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail blogs that Richard Dawkins could not remember the full title of On the Origin of Species when challenged by the Rev Giles Fraser on Radio 4's Today.
Dawkins was on the programme yesterday to talk about a survey suggesting around two thirds of Christians don't know the title of the first book of the New Testament.
Fraser retaliated with his own question about the full title of Origin, and when Dawkins couldn't reel it off he concluded: "If you ask people who believe in evolution that question, and you came back and said 2% got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to say they don't believe it after all."
If you're interested, the full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Hardly a snappy title.
Crowing about Dawkins's inability to remember the full, tongue-twisting title of a 150-year-old book says more about the shallowness of anti-science arguments than his early morning memory lapse.
Many years ago, when science was in its infancy (1986) I studied the history of the idea of evolution as part of my final year as an indifferent zoology student at Liverpool University. There were some fine budding biologists in that lecture theatre, many of whom had a hinterland of interests, in defiance of the stereotype of scientists.
Which made it all the more telling when our professor, an eminent man from the days when zoology involved fewer genes and bleeping machines, asked how many of us had read On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural etc. etc. etc.
Not one hand of the 30-odd strong honours class went up.
Were it a sacred text, surely we would have been richly indoctrinated in its tenets from an early age. Biology teachers would ask quaking A level students if they had visited their local pigeon fancying club during their free time, and demand that they contemplate an entangled bank.
They don't, because although it may get an honourable mention in textbooks and lessons, Origin does not represent the state of modern evolutionary biology.
If our professor assembled the class of '86 today (greyer, somewhat thicker around the middle) and asked again, my hand would go up. I have now read Origin several times. Turgid read though it can be, I love it for what it represents and the wonderful human drama that started with a young man stepping aboard HMS Beagle and culminated in a sick, tortured Darwin sitting in a freezing Ilkley penning self-deprecating notes to go with the first complementary copies of Origin.
Sacred texts tend not to be superseded. Origin, for all the affection it commands among scientisis, has been, time and again as the evidence in support of evolution mounts.
And the authors of sacred texts tend not to have doubts about their work. Darwin did.
All scientists do. That is why science works. Origin is not a sacred work, but the antipathy shown to it by some might have something to do with the wounds it inflicted on a whole herd of sacred cows.
Peter McGrath is a director of the HMS Beagle Trust
