The basis of science is the same as the basis of life: pattern-recognition. Even plants recognize patterns in the weather and the attacks of insects . The difference between scientists and trees, or scientists and sharks, is that scientists use reason and method, not instinct and other forms of biological automation.

Mathemodels of reality

Scientists try to identify and understand patterns in the world by creating patterns of their own: they perform experiments, they model and analyse data using mathematics, trying to create symbolic patterns that behave like real ones. Astronomy is the paradigm of this endeavour. There was sufficient regularity and permanence in the heavens for the ancients to predict lunar and solar eclipses. Ptolemy had an effective mathemodel of the solar system in the Second Century A.D.; Copernicus put forward a better one in 1543; Newton refined and expanded it in 1687. The power of Newton’s mathemodel was confirmed by the successful predictions it made: there were undiscovered planets out there. Neptune was mathematics before it became matter.

Biology proved much more difficult than astronomy and other branches of physics. The great pattern of evolution escaped the notice of Aristotle before Christ and Linnaeus long after, and when Darwin and Wallace recognized it in the nineteenth century, their description was linguistic, not mathematical. Their logic was good and their evidence substantial, but evolutionary biology didn’t become a proper science until it had a solid foundation of mathematics. Stale pale males like Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) and W.D. Hamilton (1936–2000) built mathemodels of biological systems that behaved like the real thing and made good predictions. Indeed, biology turned out to have a mathemodel of its own: the three-dimensional double helix of DNA carries a two-dimensional genetic code, which synthesizes proteins, evolves, and protects itself from error in ways that are illuminated by the human mathemodel of information theory.

Digital Dawkins

As Richard Dawkins puts it: “The essential difference between classical Darwinism (which we now understand could not have worked) and neo-Darwinism (which does) is that digital genetics has replaced analogue.” Dawkins will need no introduction. He’s much more famous than Fisher or Hamilton and a much better and clearer writer than his late rival, the Jewish Marxist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). Dawkins’ line about Darwinism comes from the lecture “Science and Sensibility,” which is collected in a new book of his called Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist (Bantam Press 2017). I’ve enjoyed the book and it’s reminded me again both of what I admire about Dawkins and of what I deplore.

First, a little of what I admire. Dawkins is not a genius, but he has a lot of learning and wears it lightly. After the “sonorous imponderables” of Stephen Jay Gould, writing like this is a delight:

If a time machine could serve up to you your 200-million-greats-grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon. He was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species as its parents and its children. (Science in the Soul, “The Dead Hand of Plato,” p. 292)

Dawkins is making an excellent point in easy language: species can be distinct without being discontinuous. There are huge differences between human beings and that ancestral species of fish, but the genetic gradient from fish to fishermen has always been very gentle. The same point can be made about distinct races among human beings. It’s easy to find or imagine a smooth genetic continuum between Tibetans and Tongans or Swedes and Somalis. That does not make these distinct races “the same under the skin.” Race is a real biological pattern, whatever Gouldean Marxists and their dupes might say. And mirabile dictu, here is proof from Science in the Soul that Dawkins recognizes the obvious pattern of race:

Whenever the exodus [from Africa], there has evidently been time for humans to adapt to non-African conditions. Arctic humans are different from tropical. We northerners have lost the black pigmentation that our African ancestors presumably had. There has been time for biochemistries to diverge in response to diet. Some peoples – perhaps those with herding traditions – retain into adulthood the ability to digest milk. In other peoples, only children can digest it; the adults suffer from an unpleasant condition known as lactose intolerance. Presumably such differences have evolved by natural selection in different culturally determined environments. If natural selection has had time to shape our bodies and biochemistry since some of us left Africa, it should also have had time to shape our brains and our values. (Science in the Soul, “The Values of Science and the Science of Values,” p. 53)

By “peoples,” Dawkins effectively means “races.” By accepting that natural selection could have shaped “our brains and our values” to fit different environments, he is explicitly rejecting the Psychic Unity of Mankind (PsUoM) and saying that differences between African and non-African psychology can have a genetic basis. Apparently he no longer believes in what I once called “Dawkins’ Demon,” the supernatural entity that has been crouching in the human neck for many millennia, swatting away environmental influences on brain genetics.

In other words, Dawkins is committing crime-think. Compare what he wrote for the New Statesman in 2014:

But human beings have only recently shown how very special they are. Fifty thousand years ago we had the same bodies and brains as today and we probably had language. … That changed around 40,000 years ago, when the archaeological record shows a sudden magnificent flowering of art and even musical instruments. Cultural evolution – which outpaces by orders of magnitude the superficially similar genetic evolution that had given rise to our big brains in the first place – went into overdrive. (Apes with big brains: Richard Dawkins on what makes us human, The New Statesman, 6th January 2014)

That was goodthinkful Gouldeanism: all differences in human behaviour and intellect are explained by culture. But was it sincere Gouldeanism? Dawkins wasn’t reasoning straight. If human beings fifty thousand years ago had “the same bodies and brains as today,” then they certainly had language. He goodthinked like that in 2014; now he rejects the PsUoM, as that quote from Science in the Soul proves. Dawkins doesn’t believe that all human brains are necessarily the same beneath the skull. But he’s still failing to reason straight.

Deplorable Dawkins

Yes, here comes about what I deplore about Dawkins. The claim of liberal atheists like him to be “rationalist” is about as solid as the claim of North Korea to be a “Democratic People’s Republic.” Here is some of Dawkins’ reasoning in an essay that asks “Is Science a Religion?”:

One of the problems is that our culture has been taught to become tolerant of [astrology], even vaguely amused by it – so much so that even scientific people who don’t believe in astrology often think it’s a bit of harmless fun. I take astrology very seriously indeed: I think it’s deeply pernicious because it undermines rationality, and I should like to see campaigns against it. (Science in the Soul, p. 271)

So that’s Dawkins’ sternly rationalist attitude to astrology: it’s “deeply pernicious” and he would like to see “campaigns against it.” But what is Dawkins’ sternly rationalist attitude to mass immigration by adherents of a much more pernicious ideology than astrology? Has he or any other liberal “scientific rationalist” ever pointed out the lunacy of allowing millions of Muslims to colonize Western nations like Britain? On the very first page of Science in the Soul, Dawkins is sneering at the “petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world.” (“Author’s introduction,” p. 1)

By “the Abrahamics,” he means the Abrahamic faiths Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three monotheistic religions that acknowledge Abraham as their founding father. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Western world was only “afflicted” by two of those Abrahamic cults, Christianity and Judaism, both of them much weaker than in the past. By the end of the twentieth century, the third “Abrahamic” had joined them. And Islam retains its fangs. It truly is an affliction: from the murderous rejection of free speech to organized sexual slavery, from female genital mutilation to the denial of evolution, even as a relatively small minority Muslims have launched a determined and effective assault on every tenet of liberal democracy and scientific rationalism.

Invasion by immigration

And this affliction by Islam is no “historical accident.” Western elites have deliberately imported Muslims and subsidized their colonization of great cities like London, Paris and Berlin. Dawkins and other liberal atheists haven’t merely acquiesced in the lunacy: they and their fellow liberals actively support it by decrying all opposition as “racist” and “xenophobic.” On any rational ground, their behaviour has been staggeringly misguided and hypocritical. Dawkins wants “campaigns” against astrology, for Darwin’s sake, but he has never lifted a finger or written a word to oppose a prolonged and continuing invasion by the most irrational, backward and pernicious religion on earth. Any evolutionist understands that this invasion of different peoples is completely analogous to an invasion of a sub-species in the natural world: it will change gene frequencies and result in natural selection in favour of the invading sub-species at the expense of the previously dominant sub-species.

But the behaviour of liberal atheists is irrational even by “culturalist” standards. If non-White Muslims were “the same under the skull” as Whites (and they aren’t), their presence in such large numbers would have ensured that their illiberal and anti-scientific culture was impossible to overcome. But Science in the Soul proves that the liberal atheist Richard Dawkins has rejected pure culturalism: he now accepts that evolution in different cultural and physical environments has “shaped brains and values” in different ways. For example, the clannishness and criminality of Muslims, which are so antithetical to liberal democracy, likely have a partly genetic basis as do virtually all human behaviors. Science in the Soul pours seething contempt on Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, creationists, astrologers and those who voted for Brexit. It doesn’t let fall a drop of criticism, let alone contempt, on the Muslims merrily inter-breeding with their close cousins in Bradford, London and many other Western cities. Dawkins has written that astrology is “pernicious” and that it is deeply wrong for parents to “force their religious opinions” on their children. But he doesn’t campaign against consanguineous marriage, the horrors it inflicts and the expense it imposes.

Imported cane-toads in Australia

Trump-supporters, creationists, astrologers and Brexit-fans aren’t, of course, going to come for Dawkins with machetes or machine-guns when he criticizes them. Muslims might well do so if he ever follows his own principles and begins to acknowledge the harm they’ve done to the West. But Muslim aggression wasn’t so dangerous in the 1960s and ’70s, when Dawkins and other liberal atheists should have begun condemning the lunacy of mass immigration by Muslims. Christianity was mostly defanged by then. Even if Islam seemed harmless to those too ignorant and lazy to investigate its homelands and its history, why on earth take the risk of importing it? Biologists knew what havoc imported species can wreak on new ecosystems and if Dawkins disliked the “Abrahamics” for their “squabbling,” adding a new and aggressive Abrahamic to the West would obviously make the scope for that much worse.

Sanity vs suicide

It didn’t require great intellect or powers of reasoning to know that mass immigration by Muslims was a very bad idea. The failure of liberal atheists to oppose it explodes their claim to “rationalism.” Indeed, they reacted to mass immigration exactly as Western theists did. The three “Abrahamic cults” now in the West aren’t “squabbling”: self-serving Jews and self-harming Christians welcome Muslim colonization, celebrating it as a vibrant enrichment of stale pale nations like Britain, France and America.

Is science a religion? No. But liberalism in its corrupt modern form clearly is. As a liberal, Richard Dawkins has been far more irrational than any of the fundamentalist believers he has so often scorned. Fundamentalists don’t belong to a suicide-cult: their beliefs and behaviour advance the cause of fundamentalism rather than undermining it. Liberalism, by contrast, is a dedicated suicide-cult. It welcomes mass immigration from the most illiberal, misogynistic and superstitious regions on earth, then covers up the inevitable results in places like Rotherham and Cologne.

Science in the Soul contains some good examples of the psychology behind the liberal suicide-cult. The book concludes with a eulogy called “Honouring Hitch,” in which Dawkins lavishes praise on the scientific rationalism and moral courage of the late Christopher Hitchens. For example, who were Hitch’s “favourite heroines in real life”? Dawkins quotes Hitch’s answer: “The women of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy.” (p. 416) Thanks to liberals like Dawkins and Hitchens, “the foulness of theocracy” is now firmly re-established in the West, oppressing women and attacking free speech.

The “foulness” of superstition and science-denial is also firmly re-established in the West. Take Sweden, a small nation that, like Scotland and Hungary, has produced a disproportionate number of great scientists. Mass immigration from countries like Somalia and Iraq has done entirely predictable harm to Swedish education and science. It has also done entirely predictable harm to Swedish women, despite the feminism that flourishes there.

Islam vs science

Or rather: because of the feminism that flourishes there. Feminism is central to the liberal suicide-cult, constantly wailing about imaginary rape-atrocities committed by stale pale males, while resolutely ignoring the real rape-atrocities committed by vibrant non-White males. Richard Dawkins himself has been one of the stale pale males targeted by feminists: he was heavily criticized when he suggested that an atheist woman over-reacted to a pass made by a stale pale male at a World Atheist Conference in Dublin. He was also heavily criticized when he pointed out that the Muslim world as a whole has produced far fewer Nobel prize-winners in science than Trinity College at Cambridge.

He was right, but he didn’t attribute Muslims’ backwardness in science to their genetically mediated low average IQ (Heaven forfend!). Instead, he attributed it to the pernicious influence of Islam. But if Islam is so antithetical to science, how on earth could any supporter of science agree with mass immigration by Muslims? Science in the Soul includes a mocking piece called “Fundraising for Faith” (pp. 361–5), which attacks Tony Blair and his support for “faith schools.” Dawkins think they’re a very bad idea. But liberals like him think that mass immigration from the Third World is an excellent idea. It’s enriching to import millions of Muslims who utterly reject liberal democracy and female rights. At the same time, liberals like Dawkins want the children of Muslims to have a strictly secular education extolling the sacredness of liberal democracy and female rights.

Oh, and we also have to battle Sharia courts and such horrors as honour killings and FGM. Short of setting up a police state, I don’t see how we can do any of that. If a school is controlled by Muslims, as numerous Western schools now are, it will follow Muslim principles. If a First-World nation allows mass immigration from the Third World, it will acquire Third-World pathologies. But who could have seen any of that coming? Liberal atheists could have. If the Abrahamic religions are so pernicious, how on earth could it be a good idea to import a new one? But in fact the West already had a new one by 1900. It was called Marxism. The liberal atheist Bertrand Russell pointed out that Marxism is a Christian heresy in A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Which is ironic, because Dawkins celebrates the Marxist Christopher Hitchens as a spiritual heir to Russell and other rationalist giants in his eulogy “Honouring Hitch.”

Rabbinic psychology

As I pointed out in “Gasbags Are Not Great,” the verbose and self-righteous Hitchens had a rabbinic psychology arising from his Jewish ancestry. His devotion first to overt Trotskyism, then to crypto-Trotskyist neo-conservatism, satisfied not his reason but his taste for violence and self-righteousness. Bertrand Russell would have understood Hitchens better than Dawkins ever did. Here’s some of what Russell said after he met Lenin, Trotsky and other prominent Bolshevik leaders:

Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it is the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible. They are a nation of artists, down to the simplest peasant; the aim of the Bolsheviks is to make them industrial and as Yankee as possible. Imagine yourself governed in every detail by a mixture of Sidney Webb and Rufus Isaacs, and you will have a picture of modern Russia. (From a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell about his trip to Russia, 25th June 1920)

Rufus Isaacs (1860-1935) was a Jewish lawyer who became a very successful politician in the British Liberal party, serving at various times as Viceroy to India, Foreign Secretary, Lord Chief Justice, Solicitor General, Attorney General and British Ambassador to the United States, before becoming the first ever Jewish Marquess. He and another successful Jewish politician, Herbert Samuel, were prominent in the Marconi Scandal, in which members of Lloyd George’s government allegedly conspired to enrich themselves by buying shares before a government contract was awarded to a company managed by Isaacs’ brother Godfrey.

Traditionalist Catholics like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc claimed that the scandal was proof of how Jews corrupted British politics and wielded excessive influence there. Bertrand Russell’s comments about Bolshevism show that some liberal atheists were suspicious of Rufus Isaacs too. But Russell went further: he attributed the “close tyrannical bureaucracy” of the Soviet Union, with its “elaborate and terrible” “spy system,” to an “insolent and unfeeling” “aristocracy” of “Americanised Jews.” As a student, Christopher Hitchens belonged to a Trotskyist party called the International Socialists (IS). So did his brother Peter Hitchens. If the party had won power in Britain, we would have had a similar Jewish “aristocracy” imposing a “tyrannical bureaucracy.” After all, the IS and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) into which it developed were headed by a man whose nom de guerre was Tony Cliff but whose real name was Yigael Gluckstein.

Atheists for Judaism

The over-representation of Jews both in Marxism and in financial scandals is a clear pattern that respectable commentators don’t discuss. In Science in the Soul, Richard Dawkins repeatedly criticizes “ideologically motivated scientists” (p. 27) like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin and Steven Rose. Dawkins says that he stands “by every word” of the harsh review he gave the book Not in Our Genes, an error-laden attack made by Lewontin, Kamin and Rose on sociobiology in 1984 (“The Values of Science and the Science of Values,” p. 38). He and the New Scientist were threatened with a lawsuit at the time and there’s no doubt that Dawkins is very familiar with the intolerant, dishonest and cultish psychology of those four Marxist comrades. Does he think that their Jewish ancestry has no bearing on their psychology and their “science”? And did he fail to see the same psychology in Christopher Hitchens?

If the answer to both questions is “No,” then Dawkins’ powers of pattern-recognition have failed badly. Elsewhere, however, he does acknowledge an interesting pattern of Jewish behaviour: “Many people proudly call themselves Jewish atheists and observe festivals, holy days and even dietary laws” (“Atheists for Jesus,” p. 274). Jewish festivals and holy days often celebrate violent triumph over the goyim (see Passover, Purim and Hanukkah). The violence was overseen by a tribal deity whom Dawkins has described like this: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: … a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Apparently Jewish atheists don’t mind associating themselves with such a character, perhaps because they don’t mind violent triumph over the goyim. As Kevin MacDonald points out in “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” there’s a good case that Jewish Bolsheviks were motivated by ethnic hatred and Christophobia in the violence and oppression they directed at native Russians and Ukrainians. The scientific rationalist Bertrand Russell might well have agreed. But the scientific rationalist Richard Dawkins would condemn such claims as racist and anti-Semitic. Those labels aren’t scientific or rational: to call someone a racist or anti-Semite is the modern equivalent of calling someone a blasphemer or heretic. It’s designed not to persuade, but to intimidate and silence.

The curse of mass immigration

Dawkins is among the intimidated. In a footnote to his criticism of Lewontin et al, he says this:

I’d find it hard to justify research into alleged correlations between race and IQ. I’m not one of those who thinks [sic] that intelligence is unmeasurable or that race is “non-biological”, a “social construct” (see the distinguished geneticist A.W.F. Edwards’ splendid take-down of this claim in “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy”). But what could possibly be the point of investigating alleged correlations between intelligence and race? Certainly no policy decisions should ever be based on such research. (“The Values of Science and the Science of Values,” p. 27)

That last line is risible. If research proved the genetic basis of racial differences in IQ, of course policy decisions should be based on it. The research would justify not only the dismantling of the massive coercive apparatus of “anti-racism” and egalitarianism, but also an immediate end to mass immigration by groups with low average IQ. But we don’t need such research to know that anti-racism is a racket and that mass immigration is a curse. They both cause serious harm to liberal democracy and to the scientific rationalism that Richard Dawkins claims to hold dear.

Executions for blasphemy

That’s why I don’t think history is going to judge Dawkins and his allies well. In the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno braved the wrath of the Catholic Church by freely expressing his theological and scientific opinions. That wrath eventually fell upon him in its most terrible form: he was burned alive in Rome with a wooden gag on his tongue to silence his “wicked words.” Galileo escaped a similar fate by recanting his support for the Copernican theory and submitting to permanent house arrest. What did liberal atheists risk in the twentieth century for opposing mass immigration by Muslims?

Not death or imprisonment, but social disapproval and accusations of “racism.” Liberal atheists didn’t follow their own principles and resist irrational and intolerant Marxists as they began importing millions of Muslims and their illiberal and anti-scientific culture. The result is that executions for blasphemy have returned to Europe: witness the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. A prime candidate for the next assassination is the “Islamophobe” Douglas Murray, a homosexual liberal who nevertheless opposes mass immigration and understands the incompatibility of liberalism and Islam. He has also criticized Jewish support for mass immigration and Muslim colonization. He isn’t a scientist like Dawkins, but he has a far better ability to recognize important cultural patterns. And he may well pay a heavy price for his pattern-recognition.

The wisdom of H.L. Mencken

Dawkins should join Murray in opposing mass immigration and criticizing Jewish support for Muslim colonization. I doubt that he ever will. The inside back cover of Science in the Soul says this: “In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 100,000 readers from over a hundred countries.” That’s as ridiculous as the claim by the book’s editor, Gillian Somerscales, that Dawkins is “reason’s prophet” and “our ceaseless watchman” (p. 15). Dawkins and other liberal atheists have collaborated with the suicide-cult of liberalism and helped to undermine scientific rationalism. They are not worthy heirs of men like Bertrand Russell, nor of the great American atheist H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), who made these eminently rational and scientific comments before World War I:

I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. (See Men versus the Man, 1910)

Like Douglas Murray, H.L. Mencken wasn’t a scientist, let alone a biologist. But he recognized patterns of human psychology and intellect far better than liberal biologists like Richard Dawkins ever have. Like Murray today, Mencken was defending Western civilization and the science that is central to it. Dawkins has preferred to collaborate with a suicide-cult intent on the destruction both of Western civilization and of science.