Review
A Passion for Evolution
Houghton Mifflin, 263 pp., $24.00
Most science popularizers are not controversialists. Most see
their task as a simple explanation of science that already sits,
tedious and unread, in textbooks. The job of making science
appealing to the layman often encour-ages breathless tales of
high-tech adventure (a genome project, say) and almost always
entails a good deal of dumbing down. Richard Dawkins's work has
never fit this mold. His books on evolution have featured ideas
that were only then making their way into textbooks and he has
never hesitated to offer his own (sometimes radical) extensions
of these ideas. But most important, his books have emphasized
ideas, and they have been offered in their fullness, without
dumbing down. In the course of his work, Dawkins has also not
shied from controversy. He has publicly battled both fellow
scientists and religious leaders, and he has made enemies.
Although Dawkins is an extraordinarily popular and prolific
writer—his books include The Selfish Gene (1976), The
Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker
(1986), and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)—his shorter
pieces have never been collected until now. The thirty-two
essays bundled in A Devil's Chaplain appeared originally
in newspapers or magazines, or as forewords to books or as
eulogies; a few are previously unpublished. Because these essays
span nearly all of Dawkins's career so far— the earliest
appeared in 1978 and the latest in 2003—they provide a sort of
chronicle of his thinking. And because each group of related
essays is preceded by a short new introduction, we learn where
Dawkins now stands on a number of issues.
A Devil's Chaplain reveals several
things about Dawkins, some surprising and some not. Not
surprisingly, the book confirms his reputation as a superb prose
stylist, perhaps the best popularizer of science working.
Whether you agree with him or not, you are never unsure of his
meaning and his writing is, in places, stunning. Also not
surprisingly, A Devil's Chaplain includes hard-hitting
pieces that attack several of Dawkins's traditional targets:
pseudoscience (New Age crystals get it here), postmodernist
obscurantism (he's fond of Alan Sokal's Social Text
hoax), and religion.
As for the surprises, the biggest is Dawkins's breadth. For
those who know him only as a champion of Darwinism, it's news to
see that he has written a number of beautiful pieces on the
Africa of his youth, as well as passionate essays decrying
educational systems that sacrifice love of learning for test
performance. And his position on several controversial issues
may not be what you expect. Though Dawkins is sometimes viewed
as soft on sociobiology, A Devil's Chaplain includes a
superb polemic against the errors inherent in human genetic
determinism and another against the evils of social Darwinism.
The book also features several surprisingly moving eulogies to
departed colleagues, including one to Stephen Jay Gould, with
whom Dawkins often sparred.
Despite his breadth, Dawkins is surely best known for three
things: his defense of the selfish gene view of biological
evolution, his invention of the selfish meme view of cultural
evolution, and his animosity toward religion. A Devil's
Chaplain takes up each of these themes, some more
convincingly than others.
1.
Dawkins has spent much of his career defending a particular
view of Darwinism. This so-called selfish gene view grew out of
work in the 1960s by George Williams and William Hamilton. While
Darwin argued that evolution involves a kind of survival of the
fittest, Hamilton, Williams, and their heirs argued that it's
the fittest gene that matters, not the fittest organism.
To see what this means, consider an example. When a small bird
spots a hawk overhead it will often issue an alarm call, warning
its flock-mates of the predator's presence. The odd thing is
that this behavior—which we'll assume is instinctive, that is,
genetically based—is "altruistic." By sounding the alarm, a bird
may well save its flock-mates but it simultaneously calls
attention to itself, increasing the odds that it will be
attacked by the hawk. How could such a behavior evolve?
If you think of Darwinism in traditional terms—as competition
among different organisms—the answer isn't obvious. A bird who
sounds a call (and so perhaps gets eaten) is unlikely to have
more offspring than a bird who keeps quiet (and so probably
avoids getting eaten). And having more offspring is what
Darwinism was supposed to be all about. But if you think of
Darwinism in selfish gene terms— as competition among different
genes —the answer is clearer. A gene that makes a bird
emit an alarm may decrease the odds that the calling bird
survives but it can increase the odds that the gene for
alarm-calling survives. The reason is that the flock-mates who
are saved by the alarm are, like all flock-mates, likely to be
related to the caller; and relatives, by definition, tend to
carry the same genes, including the gene for
sounding the alarm. In effect, then, the alarm-call gene is
warning—and saving— copies of itself. Those copies just happen
to reside in other organisms. The counterintuitive conclusion is
that a gene that sometimes causes an organism to sacrifice
itself can increase its frequency by natural selection. The
alternative kind of gene—one for not emitting an alarm call—can
decrease in frequency, since such genes are on average less
likely to be passed on to the next generation.[1]
To Dawkins and other advocates of the selfish gene view, such
examples reveal something deep about Darwinism: natural
selection acts at the level of competing genes, not competing
organisms. It is genes that are engaged in a struggle for
existence and we can, therefore, expect them to "selfishly" do
whatever they can to increase their representation in the next
generation. (The quotes emphasize that genes are not consciously
selfish; it's just that their dynamics look like those of
consciously selfish agents.) In the end, the selfish gene view
suggests that the properties we see in organisms are those that
maximized the survival of genes, not the welfare of organisms.
Taken to its logical conclusion, genes begin to seem like
manipulators who build organisms in whatever way best serves the
genes' "interests," whether or not these coincide with the
organisms' interests. Indeed Dawkins spoke of organisms as mere
"vehicles" for genes or as "lumbering robots" that were "blindly
programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." It
was this view that he popularized in his first book, The
Selfish Gene, and that he continues to defend, though in
modified form, in A Devil's Chaplain.
Dawkins's defense was (and mostly still is)
against Gould. Dawkins and Gould engaged in an extended dispute
over "units of selection": Is the gene the fundamental unit on
which natural selection acts or can selection act at other
levels too? Gould championed "hierarchical selection," the idea
that selection can act at any level in the biological
hierarchy, from single genes to entire ecosystems. He was
particularly fond of "species selection," in which whole species
are the target of natural selection. (Species that split into
new species faster than, or become extinct slower than, other
species will become more common.) To Gould, there was nothing
particularly special about the gene level and any claim to the
contrary reflected a regrettable misunderstanding of Darwinism.
Though Dawkins and Gould disagreed about many other matters, the
units of selection debate was particularly protracted and noisy.
By the time of Gould's death, however, the debate had begun
to subside. To some extent, this reflected the fact that
evolutionists grew tired of it. To a considerable extent,
though, it reflected the fact that Gould grew less vague and
Dawkins grew less strident. Gould and his colleagues finally
offered a precise definition of species selection, and most
evolutionists now accept that natural selection can in principle
act at any level in the biological hierarchy. Dawkins admits as
much in A Devil's Chaplain (though in a roundabout way:
"Indeed it may, after a fashion..."). But no matter, Dawkins's
real admission came earlier, in The Extended Phenotype,
in which he rejected the claim that the selfish gene view
represents the right way to think about evolution and took up
the claim that it represents a powerful, though not necessarily
privileged, point of view. Though this may seem a retreat from
the selfish gene line—and in strictly philosophical terms I
suppose it is—in scientific terms, it is not.
Powerful new points of view are what science is all about.
Most scientists would trade a technically sound but
intellectually sterile point of view for a provocative and
fertile one any day. And on these more pragmatic grounds there
can be no doubt that Dawkins had the edge: the selfish gene view
has been exceptionally fertile, providing unexpected insight
into everything from the organization of insect societies to the
spread of "junk" DNA that has no function. Indeed selfish gene
thinking is now orthodox in evolutionary biology and, among many
evolutionists, represents a near reflex. It is certainly true
that Dawkins's early rhetoric was sometimes extreme. But it is
more true that selfish gene thinking has delivered a number of
important insights. The same cannot be said for hierarchical
selection, as Gould himself lamented in his final major
publication, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Indeed
while many of us suspect that higher-level selection occurs, the
evidence for it is, so far, frustratingly weak.
2.
Dawkins did not stop with biological evolution. At the close
of The Selfish Gene he pushed the idea of a selfish
replicator in a radical new direction: the Darwinian logic of
selfish genes may extend beyond genes. In particular,
Dawkins argued that cultural entities like ideas, tunes, and
fashions behave in a way that's analogous to genes: some of
these entities, which he called "memes," spread through a
culture faster than others. Certain advertising jingles, for
instance, are (annoyingly) catchy and spread among people at a
remarkably fast rate: I hear a jingle, I hum it; you hear me hum
it, you hum it; and so on. This jingle is therefore a fit meme:
it is good at propagating among minds and so can be thought of
as increasing in frequency in a population of brains by a kind
of cultural natural selection. (Note that a meme, like a gene,
can be fit whether or not it's good for the organism. A jingle
isn't fit because it does anything for me; it's fit because it
spreads fast. Note too that memes have no necessary connection
with biologi-cal fitness: a fit meme needn't boost your
production of children.) Dawkins boldly suggested that we might
think of cultural evolution as a struggle among replicating
memes in the same way that we think of biological evolu-tion as
a struggle among replicating genes.
The idea of memes is interesting and there's probably
something to it, at least when taken loosely, as a provocative
analogy between biology and culture. But A Devil's Chaplain
makes it clear that Dawkins takes the idea more seriously than
this. Though Dawkins seemed at one time to soften on memes, he
now insists that he is as enthusiastic as ever. Indeed he is
"delighted" that others are now making the meme "a proper
hypothesis of the human mind." Dawkins seems particularly fond
of the philosopher Daniel Dennett's suggestion that memes played
a key role in the evolution of the human mind.[2]
But this stronger version of the meme idea—the notion that memes
provide a basis for a real science of culture or mind—has been
sharply criticized.
One of the best-known criticisms is that the analogy between
genes and memes cannot be taken seriously since the gene is
digital while the meme is not. Genes are digital in the sense
that they are made of DNA, which is a string of chemical letters
called A, T, G, and C; computer code, by analogy, is digital
because it's a string of ones and zeroes. The digitalness of
genes helps them replicate with high fidelity: if you carry a T
at some position in your DNA, you can be 99.9999999 percent sure
that one of your parents did too. Memes, on the other hand, are
not digital; instead, they seem fairly fluid: ideas blend and
blur at alarmingly high rates as they pass through multiple
minds. (This is why we don't trust fifth-hand gossip.) Memes
thus seem to replicate with low fidelity. This is important as
natural selection works well only with high-fidelity
replicators. (Think how hard it would be to select for bigger
apples if in every generation most genes for bigness turned into
genes for smallness.) Memes would not, then, seem to provide
particularly good material for Darwinian evolution.
Dawkins now thinks he sees a way around this problem. Because
his attempted solution is important—indeed, it potentially
revives hopes of a serious science of "memetics"—it's worth
looking at in some detail.[3]
The key point is that memes might be copied with high
fidelity even though they're not digital. To show how, Dawkins
contrasts two games. In the first, a child copies a drawing and
a second child copies the first child's drawing, and so on. By
the time the twentieth child makes his drawing, it will probably
barely resemble the first. This is a low-fidelity meme. In the
second game, a child teaches a second child how to make a paper
origami, the second child teaches a third, and so on. In this
case, the origami made by the twentieth child will probably
closely resemble that made by the first. This is a high-fidelity
meme. Why the difference? The reason, Dawkins says, is that in
the first game the child is "copying the product" while in the
second he is "copying the instructions" for how to make the
product.
The distinction is important because when a teacher folds the
paper slightly incorrectly, the student will typically figure
out that, say, the "instructor intended to fold all four
corners into the exact centre of a perfect square." The child is
smart enough, that is, to copy the "inferred instruction." This
inference makes all the difference as it ensures that accidental
deviations from the intended task don't get copied, yielding a
high-fidelity meme. Dawkins concludes that "these considerations
greatly reduce, and probably remove altogether, the objection
that memes are copied with insufficient fidelity to be compared
with genes."
But I'm not so sure. For one thing, the low fidelity of memes
is a simple observation: we all know that ideas change as they
pass through many minds. This brute fact is unchanged by clever
argumentation about how memes could be replicated with
high fidelity; the fact is they often aren't. To put it
differently, Dawkins's attempted fix is at best relevant to a
subset of memes: the existence of game two does not, after all,
make game one disappear. Moreover I suspect that most memes
behave like game one. When I hum a jingle, for instance, I'm not
copying the instructions for the jingle; I'm copying the
jingle. Finally, Dawkins's fix only seems to work because he's
smuggled in a battery of mental processes like inference,
intuition, and idealization: the child figures out the "inferred
instruction," intuits what the "instructor intended," and
correctly identifies certain "idealized tasks."
The problem is that it's all this inference, intuition, and
idealization that does the heavy lifting in Dawkins's scenario,
not memes. It's hardly surprising that if every child infers the
same implied task, all children will pass on instructions for
the same task. But this leaves wholly unexplained why and how
each child infers the same thing—and this is the source
of high-fidelity copying in Dawkins's scenario. While I wouldn't
claim that this objection is fatal, it at the least suggests
that, if you want to understand the mind, you're probably better
off trying to understand inference, intuition, and idealization
than memes.
But there's another problem, one that has little to do with
the gene-meme analogy but that's at least as serious: unlike the
selfish gene view, the selfish meme view hasn't led anywhere.
Where are the puzzling phenomena that have been explained by
memes? Dawkins provides no examples and I suspect there aren't
any. The truth is that the meme idea, though a quarter-century
old, has inspired next to no serious research and has failed to
establish a place for itself in mainstream cognitive science,
psychology, or sociology. Though laymen often have the
impression that scientific ideas die in decisive experiments,
far more often they die because they didn't suggest many
experiments. They failed, that is, to inspire a rich research
program. Though I could obviously be proved wrong, and while I
have no problem with the notion that some science of cultural
change may be possible, I'm far less confident than Dawkins that
memes will play an important role in any such enterprise.
3.
Dawkins's passion for evolution is perhaps matched only by
his hatred of religion. Indeed Dawkins has railed so often
against religion that his reputation as a God-basher may now
nearly rival his reputation as a science-booster. A Devil's
Chaplain leaves little doubt that the reputation is well
deserved. Arguing that those who have masked their contempt for
religion must speak out, Dawkins lets loose. He announces that
religion is a "dangerous collective delusion" and a "malignant
infection." Acknowledging that this position may seem
"contemptuous or even hostile," he insists that "it is both."
Asked why he is so hostile to organized religion, he answers
that he's not particularly fond of disorganized religion either.
Indeed: "I think a case can be made that faith is one of
the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but
harder to eradicate."[4]
I suspect most readers will remember A Devil's Chaplain
more for its broadsides against religion than for its defenses
of Darwinism. What readers may not realize is that Dawkins's
position on religion reflects another of his long-running
disagreements with Stephen Jay Gould. Gould believed that
science—in its frequent excursions into ethics and its vague
denunciations of religion—had overstepped its proper bounds. He
also believed that religion—in its sporadic pronouncements on
empirical matters— had overstepped its bounds. Gould's
solution, which he championed at book length, was simple: we
must distinguish the legitimate sphere of science (the physical
universe) from the legitimate sphere of religion (meaning,
value, and ethics) and we must ensure that neither intrudes on
the other.
I must admit that I didn't find Gould's defense of religion
entirely convincing.[5] To my
surprise, though, I find Dawkins's attacks on it even less so.
The problem is not that Dawkins's conclusion is necessarily
wrong; the problem is that the arguments that lead him there are
surprisingly shaky.
His first argument is that religion is just
plain false. The events spoken of in sacred texts—six days of
Creation and three days to Resurrection—did not occur. So why
then do so many people believe them? Dawkins thinks he knows the
answer: religious beliefs are viruses. Religious ideas, like all
ideas, are memes; but religious memes, unlike many, are useless
"mind parasites." Religious beliefs exploit the fact that
children's minds are machines that copy—and believe—anything
they're told. So just as desktop computers can be infected by
computer viruses, young human minds can be infected by religion
viruses.
But if religious ideas are viruses, then why aren't
scientific ideas? After all, we foist all manner of scientific
ideas onto young minds and they soak them up with astonishing
efficiency. But Dawkins insists that scientific ideas are not
viruses. They are more like mental adaptations:
Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of
natural selection, and this might look superficially
virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize
scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are
exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless
self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out
in textbooks of standard methodology: testability,
evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency,
intersubjectivity, repeat-ability, universality,
progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on.
I confess that I find this argument astonishing. Why in the
world should conformity to scientific criteria decide what
counts as a "good, useful" meme? Why aren't good, useful memes
the ones that make you happy, or give you a sense of belonging,
or increase the odds of having cooperative friends about? If
anything, these criteria would seem more natural than Dawkins's.
But the deeper point is that there are no natural
criteria. The whole point of memes is that a good meme is one
that increases in frequency, period. Now we, as armchair
memeticists, are free to partition successful memes into those
that are "useful" vs. those that aren't, but someone has to
decide: useful for what? For describing nature? Science is a
useful meme. For building community? Religion is a useful meme.
In the end, Dawkins's religion-is-a-virus argument comes
perilously close to tautology.
Dawkins's second problem with religion is that it's the root
of much evil. A Devil's Chaplain is run through with the
murder and mayhem that follows on the heels of religion, and the
Crusades never seem far from his mind.[6]
But Dawkins's history seems curiously Victorian. In his drive to
show that religion is the source of so much evil, he must
obviously confront the awkward fact that the twentieth century
was largely a chronicle of secular evil. Stalin, Mao, and
Pol Pot were atheists and Hitler wasn't particularly pious.
Dawkins deals with the problem in an especially simple way: he
ignores it. Except for a mention of Hitler, he sidesteps what is
arguably the key lesson of the twentieth century—that secular
ideologies, including atheist ones, can inspire atrocity and
genocide as readily as any religious creed. And Dawkins's
treatment of Hitler is remarkable: arguing "please don't trot
out Hitler as a counter-example," he notes that Hitler never
renounced his Roman Catholicism and quotes from an obscure
speech in which the future Führer emphasized that he was a good
Christian boy. Dawkins's normally robust skepticism seems to
fail him here and he's silent on the obvious interpretation—that
Hitler knew how to manipulate a Catholic crowd.
The point is not that religious views don't sometimes lead,
directly or indirectly, to evil. Of course they do. The point is
that they have no monopoly: nationalist views (Italian fascism),
economic views (child labor), and even scientific views
(eugenics) have all had horrid consequences. Now in the last
case Dawkins would surely argue that it was the abuse of
science that led to acts of evil (forced sterilization, racist
immigration policies). And I would agree. But if you allow this
kind of move for science, it's a bit unclear why you don't allow
it for religion too: Did Jesus really intend the Crusades?
Though he's less explicit about it, Dawkins's
third problem with religion seems to be that it's been a thorn
in the side of science; it has stood in the way of truth. He's
fond, for instance, of pointing to the Galileo affair and he
never tires of ridiculing Rome's late reconciliation with
Darwin. But these jabs are potentially misleading. The popular
impression of long warfare between Church and science—in which
an ignorant institution fought to keep a fledgling science from
escaping the Dark Ages—is nonsense, little more than Victorian
propaganda. The truth, which emerged only from the last century
of scholarship, is almost entirely unknown among scientists: the
medieval Church was a leading patron of science; most
theologians studied "natural philosophy"; and the medieval
curriculum was perhaps the most scientific in Western history.[7]
There were of course some skirmishes between Church and science
(the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, the Galileo affair) and the
Church made a number of stupid decisions, but it's not entirely
clear that these were more egregious than those made by secular
institutions (e.g., Lysenko's suppression of Mendelian
genetics).
Now you might argue that this is all beside the point anyway.
You might argue that what conflicts did occur between science
and religion were due to misunderstandings of one or the other.
Indeed you might argue that Dawkins's belief that science and
religion can conflict reflects a misconstrual of the nature of
religious belief: while scientific beliefs are propositions
about the state of the world, religious beliefs are something
else—an attempt to attach meaning or value to the world.
Religion and science thus move in different dimensions, as Gould
and many others have argued.
Dawkins is dead set against this argument. It is, he claims,
a popular trick among theologians and amounts to nothing more
than evasion, a cynical and "dishonest" dodge designed to
sidestep the findings of science. Dawkins also believes the
different-dimensions move is a modern invention:
Don't fall for the argument that religion and science
operate on separate dimensions.... Religions have
historically always attempted to answer the questions that
properly belong to science. Thus religions should not be
allowed now to retreat from the ground upon which they have
traditionally attempted to fight.[8]
But, again, I'm not sure Dawkins has his history right.
Theologians didn't concoct the view that there are different
dimensions to dodge Darwin's evolution or Hubble's cosmology.
The view (or something close to it) dates at least to Aquinas in
his adjudication of the proper roles of theology vs.
Aristotelian philosophy, including natural philosophy. And the
Church fathers early on rejected the idea that the Bible could
be read as a scientific document describing empirical events:
Augustine, in the fifth century AD, forcefully argued against
such literalism.[9]
In the end, Dawkins's refusal to grapple seriously with the
different-dimensions view is perhaps the least satisfying aspect
of his treatment of religion. For one thing, it's unclear why a
scientist (as a scientist) should be bothered by those who
surrender all pretense of describing the physical world.
(Conversely, it is clear why he should be bothered by
idiotic creationists or by those who merely feign such
surrender.) For another, Dawkins runs some risk of sounding like
a man who denounces novels because they're all made up. When
told that novels present a different kind of truth, one that
doesn't depend on a story's literal factuality, he smells
sophistry. Now I'm not sure this analogy holds well enough to
sustain a different-dimensions defense of religion. But I do
suspect that matters are considerably more complex —and
considerably more subtle—than Dawkins's arguments admit.
Notes
[1] This explanation of alarm
calling is not universally accepted, but it captures the essence
of the selfish gene argument.
[2] Dennett contended that the
mind is an artifact created by the activity of memes, all
struggling to shape a better habitat for their own propagation
(Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown, 1991).
[3] Dawkins's solution is
closely related to one suggested by Susan Blackmore in The
Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999). Indeed his
essay first appeared as the foreword to her book.
[4] Richard Dawkins, "Is
Science a Religion?," The Humanist, January/February
1997.
[5] See my review of Gould's
Rocks of Ages (Ballantine, 1999) in The Boston
Review, October/November 1999.
[6] Dawkins sometimes claims
that religion is only a convenient label for dividing "us" vs.
"them," thereby facilitating violence; at other times he implies
that religion is a more direct cause of evil.
[7] See David C. Lindberg,
The Beginnings of Western Science (University of Chi- cago
Press, 1992); God and Nature: Historical Essays on the
Encounter Between Christianity and Science, edited by David
C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (University of California
Press, 1986); and Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern
Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press,
1996).
[8] Dawkins, "Is Science a
Religion?"
[9] Aquinas argued in Summa
Theologica that theology and philosophy have largely
non-overlapping domains of competence; in rare instances of
overlap, disagreement is impossible unless an error is made.
Augustine dismissed biblical literalism in his The Literal
Meaning of Genesis; see especially Book 1.