Greetings Professor Dawkins:
Firstly, please let me say that I have been a fan of your work since David Dickens recommended "A Selfish Gene" at my first tutorial at Liverpool in 1976. My currently home educating fourteen year old son Noe has during the summer read the 30th anniversary edition for the second time and my daughter Rose says "The Magic of Reality" is a delight and we find the hate mail stuff great fun. Furthermore I have been moved to tears when recalling to all three of my children your anecdote of the professor congratulating the young researcher who had proved him wrong after so many years and all the audience erupting into applause for the older man. Yeah Science!
I am prompted to write as quite recently I changed my mind about the Templeton Prize and decided to nominate Christopher Alexander. I am well aware of the failings of the prize in the past but am encouraged on by the fact that Professor Alexander addressed you personally in his New Concepts in Complexity Theory (2003) as follows,
"Why do the creationists keep on making their fuss about evolution? I do not think it is only because of religion, but rather because some of them are aware that this problem of emergent beauty is not really solved. Why does Dawkins engage in such intense hand-to-hand combat with the creationists - something one would think hardly worth the ink? Is it not because of his own failure to acknowledge, more frankly, that the larger question of emergence of new, and beautiful configurations in evolution is not yet solved - at least not in the sense that computer simulations using the algorithms of selection as currently understood, could yet arrive at truly beautiful new configurations and thus demonstrate the truth of the ideas of evolution as we currently understand them? Approximations to beautiful configurations can be simulated, yes - just as in the case of snow crystals. The real thing - just as in the case of snow crystals - not quite yet.
The successful evolution of new biological form is, in my view, undoubtedly modified by transformations able to move towards structures that are inherently - that is to say geometrically - coherent. I believe this process accompanies natural selection, and is the crucial missing part of current explanations: a vital component in the gamut of selective pressures. We need more frankly to acknowledge such a possibility, and in my view scientists who aspire to realistic explanations, like Dawkins, should stop dueling with creationists (which is far too easy), and instead try to focus on this geometrical problem at its root (which is much harder). I believe the fifteen transformations I have described go some distance to laying a path toward the solution of these difficulties.
Most scientists, and most laypeople, share intuitions (not always acknowledged) which ascribe something great to the action of the universe. Roughly expressed, these intuitions rest on intuitive assessments that some deeper coherent, and more whole - oriented transformations, coupled with the action of the ordinary mechanisms we understand, and strengthening and reinforcing the wholeness which exists can give birth to new and beautiful configurations from the wholeness which exists. What the arguments in The Nature Of Order attempt, is to make these intuitions precise and susceptible to experiment."
Lastly, far be it for me to criticise your very useful rottweiler instinct but I thought it at least one toe over the line to bring World War II traitors into the equation. You almost fell foul of Godwin.
Meanwhile, I would be more than grateful if you would give these matters some attention and I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards
