The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,137

up on the same attraction: what matters is what happens to me. Such lifestyles don’t even pay religious dues (maintaining the church roof, the vicar’s salary, hush-money to erstwhile children assaulted by priests or celebrities). They are belief systems that pretend to knowledge of the future, my future – convincingly enough to have caught more than one American president – while taking no responsibility for the accuracy of those predictions. Religions whose compass includes heaven-or-damnation contrive equally to promise and threaten without any guarantee of a blissful, or terrible, afterlife. But it’s an afterlife for me that’s at stake; deeply personal, not a bit universal. No guarantee is needed if you have faith.

Contrast that with the scientific stance. It’s surprisingly difficult to find science that matters, to me, that isn’t embodied in technology. The numbers are meaningless; even that important Sun is about 150 million kilometres away; solar storms may disrupt electronics, but not (mostly) my electronics. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way, billions of galaxies each like our own – but what does that do for me? There are hundreds of chemicals in our foodstuffs, hundreds of kinds of plant – mostly weeds, whose particulars are not necessary for nearly everyone – in our forests and meadows. There are millions of transistors in a computer, a mobile phone or a television. But I don’t need to know about that to operate them; just turn them on, play games on the computer, watch EastEnders on telly. Watch nature programmes, watch science programmes. Don’t get involved, as there’s nothing there that seems to affect me directly. It’s all universe-related, not people-related; it’s Benford’s contrast again.

A story about Jack is relevant here. When he was about fourteen, he was breeding tropical fish to accumulate money for going to university. His father had been killed dumping ammunition after the end of World War II, and his mother was earning about £2 a week as a machinist: not enough to pay rent (she had only a half-pension). Jack found a mated pair of angelfish, very rare at that time, and bought them for £50. That was a lot of money: he had about £75 in the bank, from breeding other fish. Within a week, one angelfish had died. He then bought another one, for £15.

His grandfather, with whom they were living, said (and he remembers this very vividly, especially his grandfather’s ‘study’: one corner of the living room with piles of newspapers): ‘This is where we tell if you are a queen bee or a wasp.’ His grandfather didn’t know much biology, and Jack remembered that un-biological aspect of the remark all these years. But his grandfather did know the distinction between having global concerns or only immediate concerns, and that’s the distinction he was making.

The angelfish bred, and Jack sold the first brood for £50; they bred again six weeks later, and again and again. He made a lot of money from them. The important distinction stayed with him: he became a scientist. He gave up on becoming a rabbi, which his father had intended for himself, an intention that fell on Jack’s shoulders, being the only boy. He could perhaps have taken on a pet shop, but that was not to his taste. Without understanding his grandfather’s distinction – he only understood it, to his shame, when writing this chapter – he was a queen bee with global concerns, not a wasp concerned only with human-centred things.

One irony of the story: Jack had thought that the fish that had died was a male, and replaced it with what he thought was another male. It turned out that both were females; the one he’d thought was female, which survived, was actually male. Even if you are a queen bee, you still need a bit of luck. Now, it becomes clear that Jack’s grandfather was asking whether Jack was human-centred or universe-centred: an Omnian fundamentalist, or a wizard.

Is a science-versus-religion argument going on now? Like there was, after Darwin published The Origin of Species? To read the newspapers, you could easily think that scientists are up in arms, trying to destroy religions.

Without doubt, there is a desperate anti-Darwinism prejudice in the middle states of the USA, in Indonesia, and in a few other countries. This seems to have its origin in politics rather than anti-rationality, since many of its proponents, such as those promoting the hypothesis of intelligent design, claim to be putting forward a rational, scientific criticism of Darwinism. The