From DAVID STRANGE
For Linda Bailey to have failed so completely to understand Mark Ridley’s
‘Infected with science’ article (25 December), I can only imagine she has
not read it.
Religion is only advantageous when the ‘knowledge density’ within a
society is too low to support rationality. Once knowledge rises within a
culture, logical minds can exploit it, conferring upon themselves a selective
advantage in a knowledgeable society.
Assuming we do live in a knowledgeable society, the rejection of irrationality
by Dawkins and Ridley would be the type of selfish behaviour one would expect
to find in a Darwinian scheme of cultural evolution.
David Strange University of Oxford
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