Concerning the goal of truth-seeking vs social harmony, science and law may not be as far apart as the author suggests. The enlightenment era considered scientific truth as independent of the efforts of scientists attempting to achieve it. The positivist philosopher Karl Popper, taking a cue from Kant, transformed this naive notion of truth into an asymptotic goal;scientists can never grasp the thing in itself , and therefore can never exhaustively prove the truth of a theory. Butt we can approach it liminally through successive approximations via falsification.

More recently, the whole concept of a reality existing independently of our constructions of it has come under question. Scientific truth is not so much a matter of discovering truths of a static, externally existing world as it is a social construction. Thus, social consensus and harmony within a scientific community can be seen as not just a political achievement , but the essence of scientific truth itself.

By this reckoning, the difference between the sort of social consensus manifested by a legal community and that of a scientific community is a matter of degree; in maters of legal dispute, it is not possible to attain more than a partial harmony. The larger community may be satisfied with the outcome, but rarely is the defendant. On the other hand, while consensus within an empirical field concerning anchoring theoretical assumptions is generally less complete than is often assumed, there is normally sufficiently tight agreement that it can be said that self-evident truth has been achieved.

It seems that for some reason, Dawkins wants to impose the older Kantian positivist notion of science onto law.