Religion's DNA

        Recently we started reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, its plot is based around evolution. Not only scientific evolution but change in our knowledge. His way of writing is arrogant, he expects the reader to know most if not all the biology terms present in the book. Dawkins uses analogies to somehow explain scientific terms or events in evolution, but only he understands them. This book is almost as having biology all over again but with a bad teacher. The Selfish Gene is also a psychological study, it tries to understand why living organisms or survival machines as he calls us are altruistic.

       Through this book Dawkins is clearly trying to transmit a message that criticizes religion and society today and in the past. He contradicts religion with scientific evidence. "It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam."(14) Adam is a biblical character created by god put in the garden of eden where he was given everything, even Eve a women born from his flesh. Dawkins is criticizing how religion simplifies the truth. The creation of a human being is as complex as it could get, the process of meiosis during reproduction, the division of cells, the distribution of the 23 chromosomes from one parent and the 23 from the other, the fight between the dominant and the recessive alleles etc. The point is that the process is long and complex and religion prefers to say that a superior being created Adam, a perfect human being out of the blue. The message he tries to transmit  is that society is very naive, they stick to a believe that somehow isolates them from reality and the true complexity of the world.   

 
       Another example of Dawkins' critics is when he is talking about transcription, the process by which RNA molecules are produced by copying a part of the nucleotide sequence of DNA.  In other words it is when the RNA polymerase copies and translates the DNA strand into and RNA strand. If a mistake is made it can cause a lot of damage, it generates a mutation. According to Dawkins mutations can and have happened in society and cause great damage and controversy. His example is of the Septuagint  ("A Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), including the Apocrypha, made for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bc and adopted by the early Christian Churches"). "They mistranslated the Hebrew word for "young woman" into the greek word for "virgin", coming up with the prophecy:"Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.." How could this be possible? All this time we could say people have been deceived, because what they thought was a miracle turned out to be a fraud. Many people still don't know this, I didn't know until I read this book  but this misconception could lead to huge controversy amongst the people all around the world. A simple mistake can cause "mutations" in society.