Jolly Good Show

Really enjoying Prof Dawkins's The Greatest Show On Earth. Learnt a lot about dogs in the last few minutes, all of it fascinating. Which makes me wonder, why doesn't he just stick to what he is supremely good at, explaining biological ideas lucidly to the layman, and steer clear of lame commentaries regarding areas of human experience of which he obviously knows precious little?

Even the preface of Greatest Show came as a breath of fresh air as the writer tells us of collaborating with various bishops in the writing of sanely balanced letters supporting the teaching of evolution as a theory of great explanatory power, beyond simply a 'faith position'. Quite so. So if it's so easy to point out: The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the pope, why write a whole book implying, almost stating, that they do, and certainly giving the world the impression that every theist does?

But enough of this genuinely pointless irritation. It's back to the wonder of it all. And just a small point that I've been thinking about today. Dawkins illuminatingly points out how pernicious Plato's Doctrine of the Forms is in supporting an essentialist position regarding various forms of life. It stands in the way of seeing the forms of life as in a state of flux, subtly changing over time. It occurred to me that language itself in many ways is obviously essentialist in nature - a dog is after all precisely that - yet it's the very fluidity, the mutability of language that keeps it attuned to the flux.