I may get banned for saying this, but I've never understood the near-idolatrous veneration with which many of my secular and rationalist colleagues regard Richard Dawkins. I find the man preachy, intolerant, mean-spirited and aggressively evangelistic; as simplistic and blase about nonscience as many on the nonscience front are about science. Given that criticising him usually leads to one of his snarling acolytes accusing me of being a Young Earth Creationist, I tend to leave him alone. Recently, however, he really rubbed me the wrong way.

He has given his blessing to a summer camp for eight- to seventeen year-olds to act as an atheist alternative to Christian summer camps, as if normal, non-religious summer camps were all secret hotbeds of malicious piety, but I digress. Anyhoo, he claims that this camp will teach kids to sceptically inquire and to think for themselves, which is all well and good, but I have long been suspicious of what Dawkins calls "independent thought", and he gave the game away, as it were, with one of the planned recreations. He says he is offering a signed ten pound note to the kid who provides the best scientific disproof of the existence of the unicorn.

Now, even given that a ten pound note signed by Richard Dawkins is a fairly lame prize for an essay, I find it difficult to believe that an eight year old has sufficient command of his rational faculties to launch an unbiased examination of the evidence for and against the existence of the unicorn. To say nothing of the fact that this competition, rather than asking children to examine and judge evidence on its own merits, begins with the a priori assumption that the unicorn does not exist and orders them to work from there, biasing the study with social pressure to reach a single conclusion. Also, proving that something does not exist is usually impossible, proving that something NEVER existed probably is impossible. All that can be done is to evaluate the evidence for and against, and make a judgement based on the balance of probabilities.

If I were staging the competition, I would ask the children to evaluate the evidence for and against the unicorn. Let them see that the vast majority of material on the creature is derived from a single paragraph written by the Greek naturalist Ctesias two thousand years ago. Let them see that Cetesias admits that his account is based on hearsay about a distant land (Arabia) hundreds of miles from his home which he had likely never visited. Let them discover that no such creature had ever been observed or believed to have been observed in Arabia. Let them discover that, allowing for the unlikely discovery of a similar creature in some as-yet unmapped region of the world, no naturalist or biologist has ever encountered anything remotely resembling a unicorn in 2000 years. Let them understand that the unicorn represents an unlikely fusion of two separate lineages within the ungulate mammals: horses and deer, a fusion that is not supported by any evidence either genetically or within the fossil record. Let them understand also that, even given the possibility that the unicorn may have originally referred to a type of deer, that no deer has ever been found with merely a single horn. All found throughout the world have had two. Allowing for the possibility of a freak genetic mutation (artificial "unicorns" have been created by splicing calves' horn buds together) the overwhelming balance of probability is that the unicorn, as envisioned, neither exists nor has ever existed.

That would, to my mind, be the proper sceptical method for disproving the unicorn. Does anyone think Dawkins is expecting eight year olds to do all that?

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There is a growing tendancy to think of Man as a rational, thinking being, which is absurd.- Marvin the Martian.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.