That is a bit of a puzzle, and that’s something, perhaps, you need to ask the religious fundamentalists themselves. My guess would be two-fold. One is that [evolution] very clearly complicates the literal text of Genesis and other holy books.
The other is that there’s a kind of revulsion to the idea that humanity is related to apes, who have long been regarded as figures of fun. I think this was particularly the case in Victorian times when Darwin first came up with the idea. People were actually revolted, physically revolted, of the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees.
It’s interesting that evolution tends to be described in these terms of ugliness or degradation. A lot of your work celebrates the aesthetics, the beauty, of evolution.
Very much so. I see science in general, and evolution in particular, as a deeply poetic and aesthetic experience. It is wonderful that we have a purely naturalistic explanation for the astonishing, astounding variety of life, the complexity of life, the beauty of life, the elegance of life and the powerful illusion of design that life carries. That is all wonderful and marvelous and poetic. The people who miss that are missing something very substantial.
How do you help people see evolution as beautiful?
I hope that most, if not all, of my books do that. I try to write in a style that verges on prose poetry, sometimes. I try to open people’s eyes to see how astonishing it is that we are here and we have brains big enough to understand why we are here.
You’ve written beautiful books diving into these large questions. But in the last few years, it seems like you’ve become best known for the things you say on Twitter. Are your friends trying to drag you off of there?
I think that is unfortunate. I would rather people concentrated on my books. Some of the things I’ve done on Twitter have been jokes. There’s not much you can do in a 140 characters. It isn’t a sort of art form.
In the book, you defend your tweet comparing the number of Nobel Prizes won by Muslims with the number won by affiliates of Trinity College, Cambridge.
I first wrote a tweet calling attention to the remarkable fact that the number of Nobel Prizes won by Muslim societies is, I believe, one — possibly two — compared with hundreds by Jews. And yet the number of Muslims in the world is in the billions. Well, that’s an interesting comparison.
But then I thought to myself, oh dear, I can’t compare Jews with Muslims because that will arouse all the hostility, because of Israel and Palestine. So I impulsively changed Jews to Trinity College, Cambridge. That was a mistake. I should have stuck with Jews because that’s the really important point that needs to get a conversation going.
We need to ask ourselves why these two cultural traditions, Judaism and Islam, have produced such a fantastic imbalance in the number of scientific achievement.
If you took most largely non-European groups of people, they would have very few Nobel Prizes. Even more so when you look at the dynamics of colonialism, such as the wrecking of Muslim societies and empires.
I implied that by saying, in the very same tweet, that in the Middle Ages Muslims are at the forefront of science, and I’ve said, “What has changed?” And you’ve just given the answer.