Denys writes:

> Thanks Wirt.  I am printing out the message and I will read it on the plane.
>  I am going into "hostile territory" (Ok, it's Europe,) for a week but I 
hope
>  to have email access.
>  
>  I am just telling you this so you don't feel bad when I don't answer right
>  away.

Be sure to print out all of the images that I referenced before you go. The 
text I wrote won't make much sense without them.

 
>  A few people privately recommended "The Ancestor's Tale."  I will be 
picking
>  it up shortly.

Dawkins is an excellent writer, but like all "silver-tongued devils," you 
have to pause every so often and reflect on what he's written and see if you 
agree with it. My agreement level tends to run at about 30%. But quite often he 
writes something that I profoundly agree with. Here's one of his quotes that I 
use often in my own writings or lectures:

"A few years ago, if you had asked almost any biologist what was special 
about living things as opposed to nonliving things, he would have told you about a 
special substance called protoplasm. Protoplasm wasn’t like any other 
substance; it was vital, vibrant, throbbing, pulsating, “irritable” (a schoolmarmish 
way of saying responsive). . . . 

"When I was a schoolboy, elderly textbook authors still wrote about 
protoplasm, although, by then, they really should have known better. Nowadays, you 
never hear or see the word. It is as dead as phlogiston and the universal aether. 
There is nothing special about the substances from which living things are 
made. Living things are collections of molecules, like everything else. What is 
special is that these molecules are put together in much more complicated 
patterns than the molecules of nonliving things, and this putting together is done 
by following programs, sets of instructions for how to develop, which the 
organisms carry around inside themselves. Maybe they do vibrate and throb and 
pulsate with “irritability,” and glow with “living” warmth, but these properties 
all emerge incidentally. What lies at the heart of every living thing is not 
a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life.” It is information, words, 
instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fires and sparks and breath. 
Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets 
of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, 
throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology."

     --  "The Blind Watchmaker" (1987):pp. 111-112

Wirt Atmar

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