Devil’s Chaplain Essay by Dawkins - Summary

When Darwin realised the cruel process of which natural selection that lead to evolution of life, he wrote

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature

Ichneumonidae sting their hosts(like caterpillar or moth cocoons) to paralyse them and injects eggs into the living bodies. The larvae grows by consuming the living host. Isn’t this cruel? But nature is neither kind nor cruel, its indifferent. Blindness to suffering is a consequence of Natural selection.

We humans, are a result of the same slow and cruel process. So, are we bound to behave so cruelly and selfishly? When humans act indifferently, are they behaving in accordance with rules of nature? Some men misguided or with intention to mislead cite the cruel process of Natural selection to justify their selfish deeds like killing or ill-treating a set of fellow human beings of the society. They coined the term “Social Darwinism”. It has been used to justify social inequality, racism, imperialism and eugenics. These were the Devil’s Chaplains that Darwin was talking about. Darwin would have been infuriated with his name being attached to such cruel idiotic idea.

But a simpler question that one might ponder is, aren’t we supposed to be indifferent as we are a product of such process. In his essay titled Devil’s Chaplain, Dawkins quoting various people argues that it is the opposite what we should do.

By nearly three billion years of evolution, we humans have been given a brain, which is capable of understanding its provenance. Quoting Dobzhansky

In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, become apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself

It is as if a machine has become of the cruel algorithm through which it was built. Through evolution, we have the gift of understanding the cruel process that gave us its existence, gift of revulsion against its moral implications. So, as humans with this gift of conscience, we should be obliged to be kind. As T.H.Huxley wrote in Evolution and Ethics

…the ethical progress of the society doesn’t depend on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

In Dawkins words - We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

A comic from evolution.berkeley.edu

My favourite essays the book

The book Devil’s Chaplain is a collection of essays by Dawkins on Science, evolution, religion and pseudoscience. Here are list of essays that I loved.

Essays on Pseudoscience: It is easy to impress and convince audience with attaching “Quantum” prefix and proving any absurdity as true - Quantum Healing, Quantum theology, Quantum psychology. Essays containing Dawkins take on Pseudoscience is full of wit, and at places you also find great humour. Here are the essays that might like

  • Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls
  • The Great Convergence
  • Dolly and the Cloth Heads

Essays on Genetics and Evolution: There are some interesting ideas related to genetics and evolution in the following essays.

  • Gaps in the Mind: Addressing an interesting argument against evolution. And how humans are prejudiced to think in discrete terms.
  • Darwin Triumphant: The universality of Darwin’s theory.
  • The Information Challenge: About the information contained in Genes.
  • Gene’s aren’t us: A discussion that our character is not linked with one specific Gene. Its statistical!
  • Son of Moore’s Law: A discussion on Genome project - collecting a database of genes and the decreasing costs of collection.

Essays on Memes: A Meme is a self-replicating element of culture passed by imitation. Dawkins discuss the growth of culture in terms of memes. He also discusses about how children are vulnerable to wrong ideas.

  • Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers
  • Viruses of the Mind

Last but not the least, you must read the open letter written by Dawkins to his daughter on her 18th Birthday. The letter is titled - Good and Bad Reasons for Believing. The letter is an advice to a child by a Scientist and a Father on what should one choose to believe.

Interesting Terms

  • Physics Envy: Freud had proposed a term called “Penis Envy” which describes the anxiety of young girls on realisation that they don’t have a penis. Physicists employ mathematical rigour to make their predictions. “Physics Envy” is used to describe the anxiety of researchers from fields that lack mathematical rigour.
  • Spiciest: The term refers to human beings, who believe that all other animal species are inferior.

Post Scriptum

There is one essay in the book, whose conclusion will last for long in my mind. The essay Son of Moore’s Law concludes with the following words

…my only anxiety is that I am unlikely to live long enough to see it. Or to extend my short arm to a new Lucy’s long one and shake her tearfully by the hand…

In this essay, Dawkins says that one day embryology may advance enough that we could successfully collect all genomes of a some person named Lucy, and the reconstructed genome could be inserted into a human egg and implanted in a woman, and a new Lucy born into the light of today.

To any curious human, seeing all this advancement in science happen in one’s life time is surely an exciting thing. This excitement is many-fold in scientists who dedicate their lives to understand nature and advance scientific development. But human mortality doesn’t let one live long enough to witness the progress.

Einstein couldn’t live long enough to witness the Gravitational Waves detection. Stephen Hawking couldn’t live long enough to see the Black Hole image(Hawking and Penrose together theorised that existence of Black Holes were practical thing, and they would inevitably form from the death of enough massive stars). But these people surely believed that such an advancement was possible. Witnessing those miracles would surely have been the one of happiest moments of their lives.

This reminds me of the story of Charles Babbage, the father of computers. He was the first human, who conceived the immense potential of computing. He once declared that he would gladly give away rest of his life, if he could come back after 500 years and have a 3-day guided scientific tour of the new age. He would have been thrilled if he had witnessed the revolution that happened a near century later. A fun fact, Charles Babbage was first among those who battled Noise pollution. He was popular for running campaigns to reduce street nuisances on London.