Science v Tradition

Saturday 15 July 2000 12:00AM (view full episode)

In Prince Charles' recent Reith Lectureon sustainability, he advised warned against the use of genetic technology in agriculture and defended age-old traditions as being more beneficial to the planet.
Professor Richard Dawkins responded in 'An Open Letter to Prince Charles' published in The Observer on Sunday, May 21, 2000, in which he champions the cause of science.


Robyn Williams: This year's Reith Lectures for the BBC are about a sustainable world. They've been run on Radio National every Sunday. Next week the final talk will be aired in full on "Encounter" and is presented by Prince Charles. Some of his remarks appeared in the press just after they were broadcast in Britain. Here's an extract of the lecture.

Prince Charles: In this technology driven age it is all too easy for us to forget that mankind is a part of nature, and not apart from it. And this is why we should seek to work with the grain of nature in everything we do. For the natural world is, as the economist Herman Daly puts it, 'the envelope that contains, sustains and provisions the economy' - not the other way around.

So which argument do you think will win? The living world is one, or the world made up of random parts - the product of mere chance, thereby providing the justification for any kind of development. This to my mind lies at the heart of what we call the sustainable development.

We need therefore to rediscover a reverence to the natural world, irrespective of its usefulness to ourselves; to become more aware in Philip Sherrard's words 'of the relationship of interdependence, interpenetration and reciprocity between God, man and creation'. Above all, we should show greater respect for the genius of nature's designs, rigorously tested, and refined over millions of years.

This means being careful to use science to understand how nature works. Not to change what nature is, as we do when genetic manipulation seeks to transform a process of biological evolution into something altogether different.

The idea that the different parts of the natural world are connected through an intricate system of checks and balances which we disturb at our peril, is all too easily dismissed as no longer relevant. So, in an age when we are told that science has all the answers, what chance is there for working with the grain of nature?

As an example of working with the grain of nature, I happen to believe that if a fraction of the money currently being invested in developing genetically manipulated crops were applied to understanding and improving traditional systems of agriculture, which have withstood the all important test of time, the results would be remarkable.

There is already plenty of evidence of just what can be achieved through applying more knowledge and fewer chemicals to diverse cropping systems. These are genuinely sustainable methods, and they are far removed from the approaches based on mono culture which lend themselves to large scale commercial exploitation, and which Vandana Shiva condemned so persuasively and so convincingly in her lecture.

Our most eminent scientists accept that there is still a vast amount that we don't know about our world and the life forms that inhabit it. As Sir Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal points out, 'it is complexity that makes things hard to understand - not size'. And in a comment which only an astronomer could make, he describes a butterfly as a more daunting intellectual challenge than the cosmos.

Others like Rachel Carson, have eloquently reminded us that we don't know how to make a single blade of grass. And St Matthew in his wisdom emphasised that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as the lilies of the field.

Faced with such unknowns it is hard not to feel a sense of humility, wonder and awe about our place in the natural order. And to feel this at all, stems from that inner heart felt reason which, sometimes despite ourselves, is telling us that we are intimately bound up in the mysteries of life, and that we don't have all the answers. Perhaps even, that we don't have to have all the answers before knowing what we should do in certain circumstances.

As Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, 'it is the heart that experiences God, not the reason'.

So do you not feel that buried deep within each and everyone of us there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness that provides, if we will allow it to, the most reliable guide as to whether or not our actions are really in the long-term interests of our planet and all the life it supports. This awareness, this wisdom of the heart, may be no more than a faint memory of a distant harmony rustling like a breeze through the leaves. Yet, sufficient to remind us that the earth is unique and that we have a duty to care for it.

Wisdom, empathy and compassion have no place in the empirical world, yet traditional wisdoms would ask, without them are we truly human? And it would be a good question.

It was Socrates who when asked of his definition of wisdom, gave as his conclusion 'knowing that you don't know'.

In suggesting that we will need to listen rather more to the common sense emanating from our hearts if we are to achieve sustainable development, I am not suggesting that the information gained through scientific investigation is anything other than essential - far from it. But I believe that we need to restore the balance between the heartfelt reason of instinctive wisdom, and the relational insights of scientific analysis. Neither I believe is much use on its own. So it is only be employing both the intuitive and the rational halves of our own nature, our hearts and our minds that we will live up to the sacred trust that has been placed in us by our creator or our sustainer - as ancient wisdom referred to the creator.

Robyn Williams: Prince Charles.
After the broadcast by the BBC, Richard Dawkins from Oxford wrote a letter to Charles, which I asked him to read for us today. This is what he said:

Richard Dawkins: "Your Royal Highness.
Your Reith Lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: 'Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.'

Let's look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer over scientific reason. First, intuition, the heart's wisdom 'rustling like a breeze through the leaves'. Unfortunately, it depends whose intuition you choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your own intuitions coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of long-term stewardship of our planet, with its diverse and complex biosphere.

But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein's black heart? What price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler's twisted leaves? The Yorkshire Ripper heard religious voices in his head urging him to kill. How do we decide which intuitive inner voices to heed?

This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My own passionate concern for world stewardship is as emotional as yours. But where I allow feelings to influence my aims, when it comes to deciding the best method of achieving them I'd rather think than feel. And thinking, here, means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it did, science would incorporate it.

Next Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness of 'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary time scale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stone ground, is not a natural food of Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a Pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!

The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem, began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artefact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture - all agriculture - is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.

Does that mean there's nothing to choose between different kinds of agriculture when it comes to sustaining planetary welfare? Certainly not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it's no use appealing to 'nature or to 'instinct' in order to decide which ones. You have to study the evidence, soberly and reasonably - scientifically. Slashing and burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being 'traditional') destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again widely practised by 'traditional' cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into desert.

Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered fertilisers and poisons is bad for the future; indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM GM GM!

Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of letdown may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf?

Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some sort of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good role model? Here we must think carefully. There really is a sense in which ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their constituent species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the corporate thuggery that is destroying the rainforests is so criminal. On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw.

Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature.

We can do it. Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.

Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb up hill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction - and indeed 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct. The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands.

Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious and fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it. It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.' Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable.

In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor by the way is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else drives us to find out?

What saddens me most Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I'd call your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins"

Robyn Williams: Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.


HRH Prince Charles
6th and final Reith Lecture
Series 2000
'Respect for the Earth'
Richard Dawkins
Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science
New College
Oxford University
Holywell Street
Oxford OX1 3BN


Richard Dawkins

Further Information

BBC Reith Lecture Series, 2000


Robyn Williams
Polly Rickard