ABSTRACT
In his 1905 manuscript, "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes", Mark Twain "translates" a manuscript describing how a Magician accidentally changed one "B. b. Bkshp" from a man into a cholera germ and injected him into the bloodstream of a drunken tramp named "Blitzowski". Twain's playing with perspective may seem a reveling in Dawkinsian grotesquery and relativism, but that would be a mistaken reading. Richard Dawkins too wants truthful authorship, science and morality, without religion, but he actually denies the necessary foundations for all of these practices. To deny the amoral implications of reductionism is a naturalistic evasion, the opposite of the so-called naturalistic fallacy. The description of minds and their memes as but vehicles of genes and their programming means that empirical science is deconstructed. The chapter argues that Richard Dawkins is a less able guide to life's complexities than Mark Twain.
