The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

So Dawkins argues – and here he is invoking the Principle of Mediocrity – that there is no reason to expect our brains to be any different from our eyes in this regard: they evolved to cope with the narrow class of phenomena that commonly occur in the biosphere, on approximately human scales of size, time, energy and so on. Most phenomena in the universe happen far above or below those scales. Some would kill us instantly; others could never affect anything in the lives of early humans. So, just as our senses cannot detect neutrinos or quasars or most other significant phenomena in the cosmic scheme of things, there is no reason to expect our brains to understand them.

Hence Dawkins agrees with an earlier evolutionary biologist, John Haldane, who expected that ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’