Currently, I’m adjunct professor of Artificial Intelligence and a senior researcher of the Software Department (LSI), at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) (Barcelona, Spain), and director of research at TMT Factory (Barcelona, Spain). My main research interests combine: ontologies; collaborative innovation; software agents; Web services; the semantic Web; interactive television; personable, attentive personal-assistants; and application of artificial intelligence in environmental sciences. I'm lead of UPC participation in the European IP project "Laboranova: a collaboration environment for strategic innovation", to change existing technological and social infrastructures for collaboration and support knowledge workers in sharing, improving and evaluating ideas systematically across teams, companies and networks (IST-5-035262-IP), with a total budget of 10M €. I'm currently taking part in the evaluation of European research proposals submitted in response to the call FP7-ENV-2007-1 for Theme 6 "Environment (including climate change)", specifically on  forecasting methods and assessment tools for sustainable development taking into account differing scales of observation. In 2003-2006, I served as lead of technical activities in the European project @LIS TechNET, to develop an advanced technology demonstration network for education and cultural applications in Europe and Latin America (ALA2002/049-055/2209), with a total budget of 2.5M €; and I was the coordinator of the IntegraTV-4all project, to develop interactive television for blind people in Spain (FIT-350301-2004-2), with a total budget of 1.2M €. In 2001-2003 I have worked as a member of research staff at the Network Agent Research (NAR) group at Fujitsu Laboratories of America. As a member of NAR, I shared the vision to enable software, individuals and organizations to confidently collaborate on shared tasks and transactions in the context of the public Internet. At NAR, my research work, within the Agentcities project, included the creation and management of semantic communication, through shared ontologies, for software agents. As a member of the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning group (KEMLg), I completed my PhD in Artificial Intelligence (first class honors), with a thesis entitled "OntoWEDSS - An Ontology-based Environmental Decision-Support System for the management of Wastewater treatment plants", at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in December 2001. Previously, I obtained an MSc degree in Information-Technology Languages and Systems from UPC in 2000 and a BSc degree in Environmental Sciences (first class honors) from the University of Bologna (Ravenna, Italy) in 1995. 

Since 2004, I'm a member of the National Council of Greenpeace Spain.

Come ricercatore, mi occupo d’ontologie e d’agenti. L'ontologia e' una scienza, un ramo della filosofia: la scienza che indica la maniera di rappresentare la realtà al fine di comprenderla e magari processarla con un computer. L'informazione e' il prodotto di questa rappresentazione: un modello, da noi creato, del mondo. Questo modello, in genere, è chiamato un’ontologia, come la scienza, il che può confondere un po' le idee. Ma non tanto quanto la definizione che comunemente si cita: "Un’ontologia e' una specificazione esplicita e formale di una concettualizzazione condivisa". In intelligenza artificiale, per ontologia s’intende generalmente il modello di una parte del mondo, non il ramo della filosofia. Una caratteristica importante di queste ontologie e' il poter essere lette e processate da un computer, ragion per cui rappresentano un elemento importante nella comunicazione dei computer, tra loro e con gli uomini; importante, perché permette ai computer (che oggigiorno, nel mondo, sono quelli che eseguono la maggior parte del calcolo) di capire meglio la realtà. Gli agenti sono pezzi di software, in pratica programmi, più o meno autonomi, che agiscono per conto degli uomini e che interagiscono tanto con gli uomini quanto con altri agenti. Gli agenti sono i principali consumatori d’ontologie, senza le quali e' difficile avere una comunicazione semanticamente ricca.

Come ricercatore, fa parte del mio costume scientifico l'abitudine a convivere con il dubbio e un atteggiamento critico nei confronti di ogni verità, che non è mai eterna e inamovibile ma parziale e provvisoria. È una disposizione mentale nella quale non è facile porsi, perché è più semplice vivere con delle certezze, anche se sono illusorie.

Come professore, poiché l'università è uno strumento molto potente, sento la responsabilità enorme di chi fa lezione. Deve essere ben chiaro che così come capire è un diritto, essere comprensibili e interessanti è un dovere.

D'altra parte, tra gli studenti non c'è una consapevolezza diffusa di questo diritto. Sono in molti a ritenere normale che un professore parli in modo difficile e incomprensibile. Altrimenti, se si fa capire, che persona colta è? Il linguaggio oscuro è ancora percepito come un simbolo di prestigio e potere. Ma è una trappola. Non ci si rende conto che dietro si nasconde o un'incapacità di comunicare o qualcosa di peggio. C'è per esempio una sorta di complesso d’inferiorità nei confronti di certi professori, i quali, parlando in classe, si esprimono in modo oscuro. Ma invece di dire: "Come sono stupido! Non capisco... ", bisognerebbe dire: "Com’è stupido! Non riesce a farsi capire". Bloccare l'interlocutore dicendogli: "Non ho capito" è una dimostrazione di forza che lo mette a nudo, lo costringe a uscire allo scoperto. La colpa non è di chi non capisce, ma sempre di chi non si fa capire. Non ci vuole molto per riuscire a essere incomprensibili. Invece, è più difficile essere facili.

Mis aportaciones más relevantes como investigador son las siguientes:

1. Contribución, en el área de la inteligencia artificial, al desarrollo de una semántica para agentes informáticos, a través de ontologías y nuevos protocolos de comunicación. Responsable de la participación de la UPC en la Red Temática Nacional de Tecnología de Agentes y Sistemas Multi-Agente 2006-2008.
2. Contribución interdisciplinaria a la aplicación de la inteligencia artificial a la gestión de aguas residuales, a través del desarrollo de un sistema de soporte a la decisión en el dominio ambiental con tratamiento explicito de la semántica.
3. Contribución, en el área de la ingeniería ambiental, al tratamiento de aguas residuales, proporcionando una mayor flexibilidad en la capacidad de gestión y una mejora en la diagnosis del estado de una planta de tratamiento.
4. Contribución, en el área de la geología y tecnología marina, al estudio de la variación de los flujos de carbono orgánico y sílice biogénica en el margen continental antártico en respuesta a los eventos climáticos de los últimos 300.000 años, a través de observatorios submarinos, sensores oceánicos y otros sistemas de instrumentación oceanográfica.
5. Contribución, en el área de las ciencias ambientales, a la gestión integrada de la zona costera en Cataluña, a través de una recogida de datos sistemática y de la elaboración de un índice innovador de calidad para la costa.

Unified knowledge representation model in concept maps and ontologies
Simón, A., Ceccaroni, L., Willmott, S., Rosete, A., Estrada, V. and Lara, V.
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Concept Mapping (CMC 2006), San José, Costa Rica, 2006

Using AI to make interactive television more usable by people with disabilities
Ceccaroni, L., Febrer, A., Hernández, J. Z., Martínez, E., Martínez, P. and Verdaguer, X.
Proceedings of First International Conference on Home automation, Robotics and Remote Assistance for all (DRT4all), Madrid, Spain, 2005.

IntegraTV-4all: an interactive television for all
Ceccaroni, L., Martínez, P., Hernández, J. and Verdaguer, X.
In Bravo, J., Alamán, J. and Riesgo, T. (editors) 1º international symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI’05), Granada, Spain, 2005.

@LIS TechNET: Hacia la enseñanza práctica de las tecnologías de Internet de la próxima generación
Ceccaroni, L., Willmott, S., Cortés Garcia, U. and Barbera-Medina, W.
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Technology Supported Learning and Training (Online Educa Madrid 2005), 139-142, Madrid, Spain, 2005. (PDF)

Agent-oriented, multimedia, interactive services in home automation
Ceccaroni, L. and Verdaguer, X.
Proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2004), Barcelona, Spain, 2004. (PDF)

Coastwatch 2004: the state of Catalonia coast
Ceccaroni, L. (editor)
Greenpeace report, Barcelona, Spain, 2004. (PDF)

Implementation of the STREAMES Environmental Decision-Support System
Cabanillas, D., Llorens, E., Comas, J., Poch, M., Ceccaroni, L. and Willmott, S.
Proceedings of the special session iEMSs 2004 – Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Integrated Resource Management, Osnabrück, Germany, 2004. (PDF)

OntoWEDSS: Augmenting Environmental Decision-Support Systems with Ontologies
Ceccaroni, L., Cortés, U. and Sànchez-Marrè, M.
Environmental Modelling & Software 19 (9), 785-797, 2004. (PDF)

Magical Mirror: multimedia, interactive services in home automation
Ceccaroni, L. and Verdaguer, X.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Environments for Personalized Information Access - Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2004), 10-21, Gallipoli, Italy, 2004. (PDF)

ABRAZO: plataforma de comunicación e integración para personas con discapacidades mentales
Verdaguer, X., Aliana, M., Quílez, L. and Ceccaroni, L.
Proceedings of the First International Congress on e-learning and social inclusion, Barcelona, Spain, 2004. (PDF, abstract, presentation)

Coastwatch 2003: the state of the coast in Catalunya, Spain
Ceccaroni, L. and Olivar, M. (editors)
Greenpeace report, Barcelona, Spain, 2004. (PDF)

TV finder: una aproximación semántica a la televisión interactiva
Ceccaroni, L. and Verdaguer, X.
Proceedings of the workshop CAEPIA 2003 (10th Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence) - Computación Ubicua e Inteligencia Ambiental, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, 2003. (PDF)

A Graphical Environment for Ontology Development
Ceccaroni, L. and Kendall, E.
Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS 2003), Melbourne, Australia, 958-959, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 1 58113 683 8 2003. (PDF)

Implementing Agent-based Web Services
Dale, J., Ceccaroni, L., Zou, Y. and Agam, A.
Proceedings of the workshop AAMAS 2003 (International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems) – W01: Challenges in Open Agent Systems, Melbourne, Australia, 2003.

Fujitsu Evening Organizer Prototype
Dale, J., Ceccaroni, L., Zou, Y., Agam, A. and Knottenbelt, J.
FLA-NARTM02-13 Technical Memorandum, Fujitsu Laboratories of America, 595 Lawrence Expressway, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA, 2002. (PDF)

OntoWEDSS: an ontology-underpinned decision-support system for wastewater management
Ceccaroni, L., Cortés, U. and Sànchez-Marrè, M.
Proceedings of the special session iEMSs 2002 – BESAI: Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence, volume 3, 432-437, Lugano, Switzerland, 2002. (PDF)

Modeling Utility Ontologies in Agentcities with a Collaborative Approach
Ceccaroni, L. and Ribiere, M.
Proceedings of the workshop AAMAS 2002 (International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems) – W10: Ontologies in Agent Systems (OAS2002), Bologna, Italy, 2002. (PDF)

Pizza and a Movie: A Case Study in Advanced Web Services
Dale, J. and Ceccaroni, L.
Proceedings of the workshop AAMAS 2002 (International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems) – W04: Challenges in Open Agent Systems, Bologna, Italy, 2002. (PDF)

An April Agent Platform (AAP) Demonstration
Dale, J., Knottenbelt, J. and Ceccaroni, L.
Poster in Agentcities.NET ID1, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2002. (PDF)

What if a wastewater treatment plant were a town of agents
Ceccaroni, L.
Proceedings of the workshop Autonomous Agents 2001 - W03: Ontologies in Agent Systems, Montréal, Canada, 2001. (PS)

CoastWatch 2001: the state of the coast in Catalunya, Spain
Ceccaroni, L. (editor)
Greenpeace report, Barcelona, Spain, 2001.

Sedimentary Flux of Biogenic Barium as a Proxy for Export Production in the Northwestern Ross Sea (Antarctica)
Langone, L., Ravaioli, M., Frignani, M., Giglio, F. and Ceccaroni, L.
Terra Antartica Reports 4, 149-158, 2000.

WaRP - A Reactive Planner integrated in an environmental decision-support system for Wastewater treatment plant management
Ceccaroni, L. and Robertson, D.
Proceedings of ECAI 2000, Berlin, Germany, 2000. (PDF)

WaWO - An ontology embedded into an environmental decision-support system for wastewater treatment plant management
Ceccaroni, L., Cortés, U. and Sànchez-Marrè, M.
Proceedings of the workshop ECAI 2000 - W09: Applications of ontologies and problem-solving methods, 2.1-2.9, Berlin, Germany, 2000.

Integration of a rule-based expert system, a case-based reasoner and an ontological knowledge-base in the wastewater domain
Ceccaroni, L.
Proceedings of the workshop ECAI 2000 - W07: Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (BESAI 2000), 8.1-8.10, Berlin, Germany, 2000.

Artificial intelligence and environmental decision support systems
Cortés, U., Sànchez-Marrè, M., Ceccaroni, L., R-Roda, I. and Poch, M.
Applied Intelligence 13 (1), 77-91, 2000.

Integrated management of wastewater treatment
Ceccaroni, L., Cortés, U. and Sànchez-Marrè, M.
Proceedings of the Catalan Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCIA 2000), Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, 2000. (PDF)

Sedimentary Flux of Biogenic Barium as a Proxy for Export Production in the Northwestern Ross Sea (Antarctica)
Langone, L., Ravaioli, M., Frignani, M., Giglio, F. and Ceccaroni, L.
Terra Antartica Reports 4, 149-158, 2000.

Reutilización de escorias de incineradora para la construcción: una crítica
Ceccaroni, L. and Visa, P.
Proceedings of the IV European Waste Forum, Milano, Italy, 2000. (PDF)

CoastWatch 2000: the state of the coast in Catalunya, Spain
Gonzalez, R. and Ceccaroni, L. (editors)
Greenpeace report, Barcelona, Spain, 2000.

Semi-automatic learning with quantitative and qualitative features
Comas, Q., R-Roda, I., Ceccaroni, L. and Sànchez-Marrè, M.
Proceedings of the VIII Conference of the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAEPIA-99), Murcia, Spain, 1999. (PDF)

Índex de qualitat de la costa: INCAS
Ceccaroni, L. and Marotta, L.
In González, R. (editor), Coastwatch 1999: the state of Catalonia coast, Greenpeace report, Barcelona, Spain, 1999.

Late Quaternary Fluctuations of Biogenic Component Fluxes on the Continental Slope of the Ross Sea, Antarctica
Ceccaroni, L., Frank, M., Frignani, M., Langone, L., Ravaioli, M. and Mangini, A.
Journal of Marine Systems 17 (1-4), 515-525, 1998.

Late Quaternary Fluctuations of Organic Carbon and Biogenic Silica Accumulation on the Continental Slope of the Ross Sea, Antarctica
Ceccaroni, L., Langone, L., Frignani, M., Ravaioli, M., Frank, M., Mangini, A., Basavaiah, N. and Giglio, F.
The Antarctic Region: Geological Evolution and Processes, 889-896, Terra Antartica Publication, 1997. ISBN 88-900221-0-8.

Paleoenvironmental inferences from the core Anta91-30 (Drygalski Basin - Ross Sea, Antarctica
Brambati, A., Ceccaroni, L., D'Onofrio, S., Fanzutti, G.P., Finocchiaro, F., Frignani, M., Langone, L., Melis, R. and Ravaioli,M.
Terra Antartica 1 (2), 335-337, 1994. (PDF)

resume English español

recommended references on ontologies and the semantic Web

ontology projects

prototipos

LSI mail

global warming

Ph.D. thesis

Greenpeace

Facultad de Informática de Barcelona (FIB) > 
    Master en Tecnologías de la Información (MTI) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2008
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, primavera 2008
    Master en Tecnologías de la Información (MTI) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2007
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2007
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, primavera 2007
    Master en Tecnologías de la Información (MTI) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2006
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2006
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, primavera 2006
    Estudios de Ingeniería en Informática (II) > Inteligencia Artificial, otoño 2005

There is a sharp difference between Harvard and MIT. Although one could safely characterize MIT as a more rightist institution, it is much more open than Harvard. There is a say around Cambridge that captures this difference: Harvard trains the people that rule the world; MIT trains those who make it work. As a result, there is much less concern with ideological control at MIT, and there is more space for independent thinking. This doesn’t mean that MIT is a hub of political activism. It still falls under an institutional role of avoiding a good part of the truth about the world or about society. Otherwise, it couldn’t survive very long if it taught the truth.

The lesson you learn in the socialization through education is that if you don’t support the interests of the people who have wealth and power, you don’t survive very long [example]. You are just weeded out of the system or marginalized. And schools succeed in the indoctrination of the youth by operating within a propaganda framework that has the effect of distorting or suppressing unwanted ideas and information. Facts that are inconvenient to the doctrinal system are summarily disregarded as if they do not exist. They are just suppressed.

If you are a teacher and you show too much independence and question the code of your profession too often, you are likely to be weeded out of the system of privilege. You have to keep quiet and instill your students with the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the interests of those who have real power. But schools are by no means the only instrument of indoctrination. Let’s take what we are fed by television. We are offered to watch a string of empty minded shows that are designed as entertainment but function to distract people from understanding their real problems or identifying the sources of their problems.

Noam Chomsky on MisEducation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)

My main research interests are in artificial intelligence, collaborative innovation, cognition, interaction, software agents and applications to the environmental sciences. More precisely:
• Adaptive, robust, effective, natural, software-based systems, which are able to function effectively in circumstances that 
    were not planned for explicitly when the systems were designed.
• Intelligent, integrated systems (cognitive systems) combining many aspects of human competence and based on     
    knowledge in several disciplines.
• Software agents that operate autonomously in teams or in cooperation with humans, for example, in exploration, in    
    emergency situations, in productivity improvement, in control, in delivering assistance.
• Technologies for /human–machine interaction/ based on a well-grounded understanding of sensor data and human 
    language, the ability to generate concepts and to translate across languages.
• Artificial systems that can:
    • achieve general goals in a largely unsupervised way and persevere under adverse or uncertain conditions;
    • adapt, within reasonable constraints, to changing service and performance requirements, without the need for external
        re-programming, re-configuring, or re-adjusting;
    • communicate and co-operate with people or each other, based on a well-grounded understanding of the objects, 
        events and processes in their environment, and their own situation, competences and knowledge.
• Fully integrated management systems, sharing data to monitor, warn and react to environmental risks, with special focus 
    on intelligent drainage-basin management.
• Forecasting methods and assessment tools for sustainable development taking into account differing scales of observation.

My friends, i must ask you an important question today: Where do you stand on God?

It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position.

This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking.

Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith.

Oxford is the capital of reason, its Jerusalem. The walls glint gold in the late afternoon, as waves or particles of light scatter off the ancient bricks. Logic Lane, a tiny road under a low, right-angled bridge, cuts sharply across to the place where Robert Boyle formulated his law on gases and Robert Hooke first used a microscope to see a living cell. A few steps away is the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here he lies, sculpted naked in stone, behind the walls of the university that expelled him almost 200 years ago – for atheism.

Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion.

Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?

Dawkins has been talking this way for years, and his best comebacks are decades old. For instance, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a variant of the tiny orbiting teapot used by Bertrand Russell for similar rhetorical duty back in 1952. Dawkins is perfectly aware that atheism is an ancient doctrine and that little of what he has to say is likely to change the terms of this stereotyped debate. But he continues to go at it. His true interlocutors are not the Christians he confronts directly but the wavering nonbelievers or quasi believers among his listeners – people like me, potential New Atheists who might be inspired by his example.

"I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism," Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. "The number of nonreligious people in the US is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million," he says. "That's more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we're in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes."

Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. "Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists," he says. "Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn't add up. Either they're stupid, or they're lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they've got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can't get elected."

When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Here is where Dawkins' analogy breaks down. Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

"How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?"

Dawkins is the inventor of the concept of the meme, that is, a cultural replicator that spreads from brain to brain, like a virus. Dawkins is also a believer in democracy. He understands perfectly well that there are practical constraints on controlling the spread of bad memes. If the solution to the spread of wrong ideas and contagious superstitions is a totalitarian commissariat that would silence believers, then the cure is worse than the disease. But such constraints are no excuse for the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign. Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them.

It is exactly this trip down Logic Lane, this conscientious deduction of conclusions from premises, that makes Dawkins' proclamations a torment to his moderate allies. While frontline warriors against creationism are busy reassuring parents and legislators that teaching Darwin's theory does not undermine the possibility of religious devotion, Dawkins is openly agreeing with the most stubborn fundamentalists that evolution must lead to atheism. I tell Dawkins what he already knows: He is making life harder for his friends.

He barely shrugs. "Well, it's a cogent point, and I have to face that. My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible" – and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes – "the 'sensible' religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side."

Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com)