Did Darwin Kill God Page #5

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trying to have lots of offspring,

in effect.

Then you will see...

that they do this by competing with

other genes to make survival vehicles

that will help them

in their effort to reproduce.

So would you describe yourself

as a Darwinian fundamentalist?

The theory of natural selection -

it's all or nothing.

There are no exceptions.

There is not

a single magnificent feature

of anything alive in the universe

that it doesn't apply to.

For ultra-Darwinists,

evolution explains all of existence,

and all of reality.

If this view was unanimous, if everyone

agreed, then there would be no place for God.

But not everyone does agree.

And some of those who disagree are

the best scientists in the world.

Good evening. It's taken ten years,

it's cost billions of pounds,

and the result is a giant leap forward

in our understanding of the human body.

For 15 years, Francis Collins was the

leader of the Human Genome Project.

At the start of the project, there

was an expectation that humans,

as the most advanced creatures on earth,

would have the greatest number of genes.

But that was not how

things turned out...

as Francis Collins explained over a glass

of wine at his home in Washington DC.

First came the shock we didn't have

as many genes as we thought we did.

Mmm. People had been saying 100,000

for a long time, you know?

It's probably

only about 20,000,

now that the dust

has really settled here.

'In fact, the genome of the pinot noir

grape contains more genes than a human being.

'And rice contained even more. '

.. more than twice our gene count.

So, at dinner, invariably there's stuff on

your plate that has more genes than you do.

'In fact, scientists agree that our

current understanding of the gene

'is fast becoming as out of date

as the idea that the atom

'is the smallest particle.

'This is an exciting

evolutionary development,

'but it does means that

ultra-Darwinism can no longer use

'the selfish gene to try

and explain everything. '

According to some, evolution is

all about the survival of the genes.

What do you think of that?

Well, I think that's much too narrow a

view. I mean, a gene is just a packet of DNA.

We don't even quite know what the

boundary of that packet is any more.

The definition of the gene has gotten blurry,

but say it's a gene that codes for a protein,

that protein doesn't operate in

a vacuum, it interacts with others,

and so evolution actually acts on the

organism, or even on a group of organisms.

And so, I don't think one

can understand

natural selection in anything

like its real force

by reducing it to something

as simple as the selfish gene,

and that's the only unit

that's at work there.

'Francis Collins believes that

ultra-Darwinists are wrong to say

'evolution is all about the survival

of the gene and nothing else,

'but what about their claim

that evolution entails atheism?'

Well, I think that's going well

outside the evidence. COLLINS SIGHS

Atheism - the statement that there is

no God - is not a scientific statement.

Let's unwrap that.

Science is limited

to making statements about nature.

It's very good at that, by the way,

figuring out how things work,

but science is committing a category error

to claim dominion over the question of God.

You're a Christian. How do you reconcile

your faith with the theory of evolution?

Yes, evolution is true,

but yes, God is the author of our universe,

and of our planet, and of you and me,

and God simply used that process of evolution to carry

out that creation in a way that is incredibly elegant.

I think evolution

is the answer to how...

God is the answer to why.

This doesn't mean that Collins

has opened up a gap

for a creationist God to come in

and help explain evolution.

The God of the gaps

was never part of Christianity.

Still, you may think Collins is

putting his faith before his science,

but it's not only believers

in God who share his views.

Michael Ruse is a staunch Darwinist,

a philosopher and also an atheist.

Ultra-Darwinists argue that the theory of

evolution entails, or necessitates, atheism.

Have you come to the same conclusion

yourself? Absolutely not.

I just don't think that is

something which follows at all.

I think that it is

just simply false to say

that Darwinism implies atheism.

And I think that those people

like Richard Dawkins,

like Dan Dennett, who say otherwise,

I think they're just wrong.

I think that people make commitments about

religion, or non-religion, for other reasons,

and then what's going to happen is

you're going to try to make sense of

science within the context of your belief,

or your non-belief.

I mean, if one goes into the lab,

or one goes out into the field

to do science, one is,

as a scientist, not looking for God.

And therefore one should

not be surprised, disappointed,

or pleased

when one does not find God.

I mean, I think it's a question

of what you're after.

I don't think science

proves the existence of God,

I don't think science proves

the non-existence of God.

I think science

is science is science.

Along with many atheists, I believe that God's

existence lies beyond the reach of Darwin's theory.

But ultra-Darwinists

haven't given up.

They have built

on the idea of the selfish gene

to try and show the theory of

evolution does after all imply atheism.

A theory has emerged that thinks

it can explain everything -

love, morality,

even my belief in a divine creator.

So has the time come to accept

that Darwinism has killed God?

It's a theory

which was born in Britain.

It's called the theory of memes.

Richard Dawkins first used the word

in his book The Selfish Gene

to describe how it was not just

biology that was governed by evolution.

Memes are to culture

as genes are to nature.

A meme describes a unit of information which

survives through being selected by someone,

and then being passed

on to another.

# I just can't get you out of my head

# Boy, your lovin'

is all I think about

# I just can't get you... #

It applies to everything.

For example, songs are memes.

We hear them,

play them and sing them,

and transfer them to others, and

in doing so, we aid their survival.

The theory of memes attempts

to explain all human activity

in evolutionary terms, including

culture, religion and morality.

It goes much further than saying there's no God

- it concludes that there's no you or me.

I've come to meet

Dr Susan Blackmore,

who believes that memes are the key to understanding

everything about what we say and do and think.

Memes are any kind of information that's copied from

person to person, so when I am speaking to you now,

I might be telling you a story,

or a joke,

or I could sing you a song, and if

you then pass that on, it's a meme,

and it can go on

to infect loads of other people.

So how are memes

part of evolutionary theory?

The idea of memes comes straight

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