（外文电子版资料）Richard Dawkins - Religions Misguided Missiles The Improbability of God.pdf

Religions misguided missiles Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster The following Richard Dawkins essay appeared in the popular U.K. news website, The Guardian on September 5, 200 1, four days after the World Trade Center terrorist attack. A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet planes exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated ew York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston. That is precisely what a modern smart missile can do. Computer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of todays smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative? In the second world war, before electronics became cheap and miniature, the psychologist BF Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the missile, the target would be for real. The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US authorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinners boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the southern end of Manhattan island. The pigeon has no idea that it is guiding a missile. It just keeps on peckin