The Splendid Feast of Reason by S. Jonathan Singer, University of California
Press, 拢16.50/$24.95, ISBN 0520224256
JONATHAN SINGER despairs of reason. Nearing the end of a career teaching
biology at the University of California, San Diego, he reads that 93 per cent of
Americans say that they believe God created man. He concludes that only 7 per
cent believe in evolution. This says more about Singer than about the prevalence
of unreason, but it has inspired him to write The Splendid Feast of Reason.
The result is a hotchpotch and a ragbag. But such is the random nature of
cultural politics in the US that the book may turn into a cause
c茅l猫bre for no other reason than that it is written by a liberal
member of the National Academy of Sciences who supports the idea that
personality and intelligence are overwhelmingly inherited.
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Singer鈥檚 stated goal, though, appears to be to draw up a kind of manifesto
for rationalist altruists. He looks for a social-democratic morality in the way
science focuses on things beyond the self and the now. En route Singer concludes
that the relation between the Universe as described by physics, and the Universe
in which free will is experienced, resembles the duality which allows light to
behave both as waves and particles. Oh well.