Here we need to be clear what is meant by “science”. Those aspects of science that overlap with technology might seem self-explanatory from an evolutionary standpoint. They qualify as what Dawkins calls our “extended phenotype”, the means by which organisms transform the environment to their reproductive advantage. But even here our efforts at extending the phenotype go well beyond the call of natural selection. The measure of success in medical science has been the capacity to sustain the largest number of healthy humans in the widest variety of environments for the longest period – even at the cost of eliminating other species. We act as if no natural obstacle is too great to be overcome.

To be sure, when medical scientists have taken Darwin to heart, they have diagnosed the urge to go forth and multiply and dominate the planet as a monotheistic residue. Only the religions descended from the biblical Abraham – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – accord humans, as beings created “in the image and likeness of God”, such an overriding species privilege. In contrast, Darwinists update the sense of death’s naturalness found in the ancient Greek sceptics and religions of the East. Death is not an affront to our supremacy but an instance of natural selection’s maintenance of the ecosystem.

Existentialist authors used to say that death is the ultimate personal experience. Evolutionists respond that the only thing personal about death is its experience, since any individual death is best understood as part of the process by which populations are brought into equilibrium. The “racial hygiene” movement inspired by social Darwinism, and ascendant in the half-century prior to Hitler, adopted just such a stance. Echoes of it continue to this day in, say, scepticism towards mass vaccination and disease eradication schemes. So, while evolution might be able to explain technological advance, it cannot easily explain, let alone justify, science’s signature interest in having us know and control everything.

Consider physics, which at least since Newton has been taken as the gold standard of intellectual achievement. But why? This is a science that unabashedly aspires to adopt what the monotheistic religions recognise as God’s point of view, whereby all natural phenomena – most of which are irrelevant to human survival – are understood under a common theoretical framework that only very few of us grasp. Moreover, physics has been pursued not merely as an elite hobby but as the basis for practices that have put us all at risk.