Vanstone) was born in 1923 in a Lancashire vicarage, where his father and his mother were model leaders in a working-class parish, wholly devoted to the needs of the parishioners. Both lay and ordained men and women who were lonely, questioning or deeply wounded found their way to his door and his lights often burned late into the night.
William Hubert Vanstone (he published as W.H. Occasionally Vanstone allowed himself a twinkle and would remark: “Seven of my friends have just accepted jobs which I have refused.”

He was greatly respected within the ministry of the churches. He was a 20th-century John Keble who committed himself without compromise to a pastoral ministry as well as writing a number of small spiritual books, hymns and verses Many had prophesised for him a glittering academic career. BILL VANSTONE was the most intellectually brilliant of the many able men who were ordained after the Second World War. Still, it does offer the pleasure of a chapter entitled “And the meme raths outgrabe”.Even better, Brown’s fascination with the world of religion and morality leads him to use this debate as a means of examining the questions of why, if we are ruled by selfish genes, the intensely human qualities of mercy, faith, and admixtures of tolerance can exist.Most biologists simply dismiss religion; but dismissing something because you think it is stupid is not the same as explaining why it exists.These chapters form the heart of the book, which Brown sums up later by saying that “Most of this book has been concerned with scientists doing philosophy more or less badly, with occasional diversions to watch philosophers attempting science.” I conclude that both are good only in their areas of specialisation It must be something in the genes..

A meme is described as a concept that will pass from mind to mind and thrive in the correct environment. Some evolutionary scientists love this idea (indeed, this morning another book entirely devoted to it thudded on to my desk) but, as Brown points out, the concept is too sloppily defined to have any true value.Besides, its popularity among middle-class undergraduates having their first hit of marijuana should demonstrate its uselessness. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.’” The point is that, in Dawkins’s somewhat Humpty-Dumptyish use, neither of the words “selfish” and “gene” means what you or I (or even the person you kick under the table) normally mean But it’s a great metaphor. Ditto ideas such as the “blind watchmaker” of evolution, which to the unprepared reader raises a teleological point: whence the watchmaker?While describing the battle lines and forays, mostly conducted via the correspondence column of the New York Review of Books, Brown himself gets involved in a bit of the fighting, laying waste to the idea of the “meme” – often touted as the “idea” counterpart of a gene or virus. He classes them as the “Dawkinsians” and the “Gouldians”: hence The Darwin Wars.If spats between academics were all there was to it, this could be a dull book. Happily, Brown is never satisfied with the rodomontade, and he frequently writes like an angel.

(He also puts footnotes where they should be, at the bottom of the page rather than at the end of the chapter, and uses them to entertain and inform.) I laughed aloud at Brown’s imagined description of Dawkins’s birth: “The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. Nor has it even cleared up which of our human qualities we owe to unconscious evolution, and which to the culture that we have created with language and our intelligence.Indeed, the arguments over this latter point are so intense that they have allowed Brown (a former writer for The Independent) plenty of room to examine the bitter feuds that rage between the two camps. If they answer “makes proteins”, award half a point; if they answer “carries the code for a protein”, the full point. If the answer is neither of those, a kick under the table is in order, to get them to shut up.
Dawkins’s success, quickly followed by the rise to prominence of names such as Stephen Jay Gould, Edward (EO) Wilson, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker among the popular science-writing evolutionary-biologist crowd, has not brought with it much real enlightenment among the public about what genes, selfish or not, really do, or how they affect and are affected by the process of evolution. Andrew Brown would attach no little part of the blame for this to Richard Dawkins, whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene has shaped a generation’s thinking about those little stretches of DNA that, er, well, control us in some way, don’t they? The next time a non-scientist starts spouting to you about genes and DNA, see if he or she in fact knows what a gene does.

Indeed, you can’t throw a book these days without hitting someone who is prepared to tell you that genes hold the answers to everything we do, where we have come from, and where we are going. But that would have been preaching to the uninterested – a practice only marginally less rewarding than doing so to the converted or the stupid. The UN and its member states realise this – and they are doing something about it.. THE OTHER week I was at a lunch where a multimillionaire computer scientist wondered, “what is different about the genes in Silicon Valley that they can create so many more millionaires than we can in Britain?” I could have replied that it probably had little to do with genes and a lot to do with the better weather, a low-cost economy and ease of access to venture capital. It is in no one’s interest to have criminal money polluting the world’s financial system. He should read their charters, review the speeches of their members and take note of the work they have accomplished in recent years.The UN aims to complement and support this work, and to help realise its goals, the goals of member states worldwide. This initiative grew out of a realisation by a number of the more highly developed and successful offshore centres that even the merest hint of money-laundering in their markets would drive out legitimate business.
Working with a group of committed offshore financial services centres, we will assist them to develop an infrastructure that will deny criminals unfettered access to this important segment of the global financial market.The UN Global Programme against Money Laundering will continue to provide states, particularly the most vulnerable, with the means to protect their economies against infiltration by dirty money.Virtually every one of the states or territories to which Mr O’Shaughnessy refers are members of organisations dedicated to removing criminal money from their financial systems.

IN THE fight against money-laundering, the United Nations is not crusading against small states but against criminals abusing small states. It has not embarked on a “war” against offshore jurisdictions, but against criminal organisations exploiting the weaknesses of offshore markets to launder criminal money. Our endeavour is a co-operative effort instigated by and involving the offshore financial services community. Military bases have been down-graded, and sub-Saharan Francophonie is no longer regarded quite so obviously as France’s own backyard, to be defended at all costs against the great “Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy.Last week’s Hutu rebel raid into Uganda, however, and the deliberate killing of selected tourists seen as “Anglo-Saxon” (the term to include Americans and well as British), shows that in some quarters the African perception of the old Anglo-French rivalry is still alive and well and open to exploitation.A high-level diplomatic meeting between French and British on African soil must be the opportunity for which Africa has been waiting – a burying of the remnants of the old “Fashoda Syndrome” – a united European effort to get to the root of Africa’s varied troubles and to support those Africans who are themselves striving for a better future.The writer is the author of `History of Africa’, published by Macmillan (1995).