Dawkins, Dimness, Aids and the Pope

Richard Dawkins offers his opinion on an evolutionary dead-end: the condom.

Professor Dawkins, the prominent biologist and atheist, said that Benedict XVI would have blood on his hands if his beliefs were followed by Catholics around the continent.

Speaking at a university in Spain, he said: “I wonder on what basis anyone can say condoms make Aids worse. The Pope is either stupid, ignorant or dim.

That must make Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies dim, too. It couldn’t be Dawkins that is dim, could it?

“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online Wednesday, “or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that “condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.'”

“There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

If Richard Dawkins had the courage of his convictions, he would be advocating as much reproduction as possible between HIV infected people in order for natural selection to develop an Aids resistant strain of humanity. This, after all, is his religion’s view of progress.