My brother was murdered fifteen years ago. During this time, my mother has manifested less rage and fury towards the perpetrators than the New Atheists routinely aim in the direction of Chris Mooney.

Makes you think, doesn’t it…?

Probably.

Also explains ‘rock star behaviour’.

Most of all though it is more evidence – if more evidence is needed after the on-going shenanigans of the atheist wars (“Oh no, Chris Mooney is hosting a podcast!”) – that atheists, freethinkers (ha!), and the like, are no more rational than anybody else. (Probably).

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the kind of book that changes the way that people look at the world. Its importance is that it articulates a gene’s-eye view of evolution. According to this view, all organisms, including human beings, are ‘survival machines’ that have been ‘blindly programmed’ to preserve their genes (see The Selfish Gene, p. v). Of course, extant survival machines take a myriad of different forms – for example, it is estimated that there are some three million different species of insect alone – but they all have in common that they have been built according to the instructions of successful genes; that is, genes whose replicas in previous generations managed to get themselves copied.

At the level of genes, things are competitive. Genes that contribute to making good bodies – bodies that stay alive and reproduce – come to dominate a gene pool (the whole set of genes in a breeding population). So, for example, if a gene emerges which has the effect of improving the camouflage of stick-insects, it will in time likely achieve a preponderance over alternative genes (alleles) which produce less effective camouflage. There are no such things as long-lived, altruistic genes. If a gene has the effect of increasing the welfare of its alleles to its own detriment, it will in the end perish. In this sense, then, all long-lived genes are ‘selfish’, concerned only with their own survival – and the world is necessarily full of genes which have successfully looked after their own interests.

There are good reasons for seeing evolution as operating at the level of genes. Alternative theories are either unworkable (group selectionism) or unnecessarily complex (individual selectionism). However, despite the fact that the central message of The Selfish Gene has become scientific orthodoxy, the book, and the ideas associated with it, have gained something of a reputation for extremism. In part, this is because they been subject to sustained criticism by a number of high profile, often media friendly, people working in the sciences and humanities. On the science side of things, critics have included Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. On the humanities side, there have been, amongst others, David Stove, Hilary Rose and, perhaps most notoriously, Mary Midgley.

Midgley’s ‘Gene-Juggling’

Mary Midgley first turned her attention to Richard Dawkins’s ideas in her 1979 article ‘Gene Juggling’, published in the journal Philosophy. On the first page of the article, she had this to say about Dawkins and The Selfish Gene:

His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively self-interested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. (‘Gene Juggling’, pp. 439-440).

Unfortunately, as Andrew Brown – who, incidentally, is usually sympathetic to Midgley – points out in his book, The Darwin Wars, this is just about as wrong as it is possible to get about selfish gene theory.¹ It is wrong on a number of counts.

First: Dawkins makes it absolutely clear in The Selfish Gene that he is not using the word ‘selfishness’ – or its opposite ‘altruism’ – to refer to the psychological states, emotional or otherwise, of any entity. Rather, as he pointed out in his reply to Midgley (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’), he gives the word an explicitly behaviouristic definition:

An entity…is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity’s welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect. ‘Welfare’ is defined as ‘chances of survival’….It is important to realise that the…definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not concerned here with the psychology of motives. (The Selfish Gene, p. 4)

There are no grounds, then, for supposing, as Midgley did, that the central message of The Selfish Gene has anything to do with the emotional natures of man, animals or genes.

Second: the very idea that Dawkins might think that genes have an emotional nature is so bizarre that it is hard to know what to make of it. One would be tempted to conclude that Midgley didn’t really mean it, except that she started her article in a similar fashion:

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but…The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it… (‘Gene Juggling’, p. 439)

Whatever she meant, two things are clear: (a) no reputable biologist thinks that genes have an emotional nature; and (b) genes can be selfish in the sense that Dawkins – and other sociobiologists² – use the term.

Third: Midgley was confused about levels of analysis. It isn’t possible to make straightforward claims about the behaviour of organisms from the fact that their genes are selfish. There is no requirement for individual organisms to be selfish in the service of their genes. Indeed, one of the central messages of The Selfish Gene is precisely that it is possible to explain the altruistic behaviour of individual animals in terms of selfish gene theory.

These kinds of mistakes are typical of Midgley’s article as a whole. Dawkins, in his response, claimed that the article had ‘no good point to make’ and argued that the details of her criticisms were incorrect because they were based on a misunderstanding and misapplication of a technical language. This conclusion is echoed by Andrew Brown, who states: ‘It has to be said that by the end of Dawkins’s piece…any impartial reader will see that she misunderstood him.’ (Darwin Wars, p. 92) Indeed, Midgley herself has conceded that she should have expressed her objections to The Selfish Gene ‘more clearly and temperately’. (‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’, p. 365).

What’s Going On?

It is possible to tell a very complicated story in order to explain how it is that Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists, provoke the kinds of extreme reaction and misunderstanding characterised by Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’. At its most convoluted, this tale would include episodes dealing with: scientism; biological determinism; reductionism; metaphor; motives; moral theory; modes of explanation; levels of selection; and more. Happily, though, there is an alternative story to tell – less comprehensive, but with the advantage of clarity. It also gets to the heart of an important aspect of the worries that people have about sociobiological ideas. It is a story about moral and political commitments.

The proper starting point of this story is the constellation of ideas associated with what has become known as social Darwinism.³ The most general claim of the social Darwinists was that it is possible to make use of Darwinian concepts in order to understand society and the relationships that people have with each other. Specifically, they argued that societies progress because people aggressively pursue their own self-interest in competition with other people doing the same thing. They are competing primarily for economic success, and the ‘fittest’ – those people most adapted to the demands of competition – deservedly rise to the top. If a person is not successful, it indicates a lack of ‘fitness’, and, by extension, that they are not deserving of the rewards that fitness brings.

The nineteenth century social theorist Herbert Spencer is probably the best known exponent of social Darwinist ideas. In his view, social Darwinism translated naturally into a celebration of the individualistic, competitive ethos of laissez-faire capitalism. Spencer thought it quite natural that there were economic winners and losers under capitalism. He opposed social reform and government intervention to help those disadvantaged by the system, on the grounds that there should be no interference in what was a natural mechanism for sorting out the fit from the unfit. Not surprisingly, Spencer’s ideas were enthusiastically adopted by many capitalists at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the United States, as a means to justify their wealth and resist the call for social reform.

This kind of crude social Darwinism was relatively short-lived. Indeed, even by the first decade of the twentieth century, Spencer’s ideas were beginning to fall into disrepute. Nevertheless, social Darwinism remains a factor in the way in which people think about sociobiological ideas. Perhaps the major reason for this lasting impact is that the history of social Darwinism is tarnished by its association with some of the more shameful episodes of the twentieth century. Not only was it used to legitimate the painful consequences of untrammelled capitalism, it was also, for example: (a) implicated (though in a complex way) in the emergence of eugenics movements at the beginning of the century, something which led directly to compulsory sterilisation programmes in the United States and indirectly to Nazi concentration camps; (b) integral to ‘scientific racism’, which sought to ground racial discrimination in notions of biological superiority and inferiority; and (c) a contributor to an atmosphere of ‘war apologetics’ that was prevalent in Europe in the period leading up to the 1914-1918 war.

However, it is important to note that people tend now not to talk specifically about social Darwinism in relation to sociobiology. Rather, its impact is felt through people’s concern with a constellation of ideas which are linked by the fact that they are presupposed by social Darwinism. Of these, perhaps the most significant are: (a) the notion that the behaviour of human beings is solely determined by their biology (what is now called biological or genetic determinism); and (b) the idea that it is possible to invoke biology in order to justify particular social or political arrangements (as, for example, extreme right-wing political parties will, in order to justify their racist agendas).

Dawkins and Social Darwinism

Is it the case, then, that Richard Dawkins’s ideas in The Selfish Gene amount to a kind of social Darwinism? The answer to this question is a simple no. There is nothing in Richard Dawkins’s work which remotely adds up to social Darwinism. There are three main reasons why this conclusion is easy to draw.

First: Dawkins says clearly that he is not, unlike the social Darwinists, advocating any particular way of living. He puts it this way in The Selfish Gene:

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.… My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. (The Selfish Gene, p. 2-3).

What Dawkins is doing here is flagging up the ‘is/ought gap’; that is, the fact that it is not possible to derive moral statements about how things ought to be from statements about how things stand in the world. For example, if it turns out that we are genetically disposed towards murder, it does not follow that we should, therefore, go around murdering people. Biological facts do not entail moral facts – a point, incidentally, which is ruinous for social Darwinism.

Second: Dawkins explicitly disavows irrevocable ‘genetic determinism’; indeed, he has called it ‘pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale’ (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13). Genes affect behaviour. If you want to do Darwinian theorising, then you’ve got to look at the effects of genes. But there are no grounds for thinking that these effects are any more inexorable than the effects of the environment. Inevitability is not part of the equation. This is how Dawkins puts it in The Extended Phenotype:

Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some influences of both types may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent is applied. The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable than environmental ones. (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13).

Third: Dawkins’s work is rarely specifically about human beings. Rather, he is dealing with general questions to do with evolutionary theory, many of which are only marginally relevant for understanding human behaviour. Moreover, he is on record as saying that he has little interest in human ethics and does not know a great deal about human psychology. (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, p. 558) Of course, the argument here is not that Dawkins’s work never has implications for understanding human behaviour. Rather, it is that where it does, it is not usually because human beings are specifically his subject, but because humans are evolved animals, and evolution is his subject.

Politics, Morals and Biology

If the ideas of Richard Dawkins cannot be construed as a kind of social Darwinism, what has social Darwinism got to do with the extreme reactions and misunderstanding that his work provokes? The answer is that it is the measure against which many people assess the merits of those biological theories they judge to have implications for the understanding of human behaviour.⁴ To appreciate the significance of this point, it is important to recall that social Darwinism remains a factor in people’s thinking because of its association with the horrors of things like racism, war and eugenics. Consequently, for many of those people whose political and moral inclinations are structured by notions of equality and common humanity, social Darwinism is a wickedness to be sought out and then vigorously contested wherever it might be found.

The consequence of this injunction to combat social Darwinism has been the emergence of a mindset amongst certain sectors of the educated public that undermines the proper examination of sociobiological arguments. It is a mindset which subjugates science to political and moral commitments. It results in sociobiological texts being read from a default position of suspicion. Any perception that the arguments they contain might conceivably be co-opted for the purposes of articulating a social Darwinist agenda – however this is construed – is taken as confirmation that this is where the sympathies of the author lie. And the scientific merit of sociobiological arguments is assessed in terms of the extent to which they fit with a political and moral agenda governed by notions of equality and common humanity.

It is easy to point to instances where this mindset prevails. For example, it is involved:

(a) In Mary Midgley’s confusion about selfish genes and selfish individuals; in her accusation that Dawkins’s ‘crude, cheap, blurred genetics….is the kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred psychology’ (‘Gene-Juggling’, p. 449); and her statement that her main aim is ‘to show people that they can use Darwin’s methods on human behaviour without being committed to a shoddy psychology and a bogus political morality’ (‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’, p. 369).

(b) In Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin’s claim that ‘Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology’ (Not In Our Genes); and their argument that ‘…universities serve as creators, propagators and legitimators of the ideology of biological determinism. If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and the production workers.’ (Not In Our Genes).

(c) In Hilary Rose’s claims, in Red Pepper, that fundamental Darwinists, ‘with their talk of biological universals on matters of social difference are a political and cultural menace to feminists and others who care for justice and freedom’; that they are ‘obsessed by the desire to reduce organisms (including humans) to one determining entity – the gene’; and that sociobiology ‘has a history which varies from the dodgy to the disgusting on sexual difference’. (Red Pepper, Sept 1997, p. 23).

(d) In the furious reaction that greeted the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which saw: the American Anthropological Association debating a motion to censure sociobiology; a group of Boston scientists – including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin – forming ‘The Sociobiology Study Group’, and noting in The New York Review of Books that theories that attempted to establish a biological foundation to social behaviour provided an ‘important basis…for the eugenic policies which led to the establishment of Gas chambers in Nazi Germany’; and Wilson himself being drenched with water by protestors at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in early 1978.

Conclusion

Richard Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists, then, provoke extreme reactions and misunderstanding because their critics believe them to be in conflict with the moral and political commitments that they hold. This fact stands independently of any considerations about the merit of the kind of science that Dawkins, and his colleagues, are doing. Of course, it is not unusual for ideology to affect the judgements that people make about scientific theories, and where these theories have implications for understanding human beings it is especially commonplace.⁵ But what it has meant in the case of sociobiology is that the public space for the debate about evolutionary ideas has become polluted by the hyperbole that almost inevitably occurs when the politically engaged feel their baseline commitments to be under threat.

However, for those people who prefer their science to be driven by a desire to uncover the fundamental nature of things, and not by a desire to find spurious support for political and moral values, there is still some hope. For, according to Edward O. Wilson, the controversy surrounding sociobiology is essentially over. ‘The contrarians are ageing,’ he told Ed Douglas, in a recent Guardian interview. ‘No young scientists are joining. They are not handing on the torch but passing it around a smaller and smaller circle.’ If Wilson is right, perhaps there is hope for a future where articles like Mary Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’ don’t get published in reputable journals.

_______________________________________________________________________
Endnotes
¹ This is echoed by J. L. Mackie, whose original article in Philosophy, ‘The Law of the Jungle’, had motivated Midgley to write ‘Gene Juggling’. In a follow-up article he wrote: ‘Mary Midgley’s article is not merely intemperate but misconceived. Its errors must be corrected if readers of Philosophy are not to be left with false impressions, for it rests on a complete misunderstanding both of Dr Dawkins’s position and of mine.’ (‘Genes and Egoism’, p. 553).

² It should be noted that Dawkins is on record as saying that he doesn’t much like the term ‘Sociobiologist’ (but he has also said that he is willing to stand up and be counted as one).

³ Social Darwinsim is something of a contested concept. Consequently, there will be those who disagree with the way in which I use the term in this article. There is also disagreement about the history of social Darwinism. For an alternative treatment of this phenomenon, see Robert Bannister’s ‘Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought’.

⁴ Mary Midgley makes the same point in her article ‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’ (pp. 366-367).

⁵ In this regard, the whole Lysenkoism affair in the Soviet Union is instructive.

References

Bannister, R., Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).

Brown, A., The Darwin Wars, (London: Touchstone, 2000).

Carnegie, A., The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1976).

Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, 2^nd Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1976]).

Dawkins, R., ‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 218 (1981), pp. 556-573.

Dawkins, R., The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Mackie, J. L., ‘The Law of the Jungle’, Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 206 (1978), pp. 455-464.

Mackie, J. L., ‘Genes and Egoism’, Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 218 (1981), pp. 553-555.

Midgley, M., ‘Gene Juggling’, Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 210 (1979), pp. 439-458.

Midgley, M., ‘Social Genes and Social Darwinism’, Philosophy, vol. 58, no. 225, pp. 365-377.

Rose, S., Kamin, L. & Lewontin, R., Not In Our Genes, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

Wilson, E., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).

This essay was originally published in 2002, and appeared in issue 2 of the journal Think.

Richard and Dan live in a society that is thoroughly and harmoniously religious. People are happy. They sing hymns together, burn incense, enjoy wearing robes and have a penchant for incantation. There exists little in the way of what we would recognize as education. Children are taught about God, sacred traditions, the importance of family and community, the truth of the Holy Scripture, but that’s about it.

Richard and Dan, however, do not share the religious sensibility of their fellow citizens. They were brought up by their parents – members of the renegade Enquiries at the Periphery – to be secular humanists. As teenagers, they were closeted away, and put through an intense educational program designed to teach them the overriding importance of science and scientific methodology. At first, Richard and Dan resisted the efforts of their teachers, preferring the simplicity of the beliefs of their early childhood, but the pressure from their teachers was relentless, and inevitably they came to embrace a scientific worldview.

However, their education has not made them happy. They are alienated from the society in which they live, and they find themselves wishing that they could be more like other people – that they could experience the exuberance of happy singing, the joy of worshipping the God they do not believe exists, and the togetherness engendered by a shared belief. But try as they might, they simply cannot believe. It is impossible. They know that their way of understanding the world is the right way, but they wish it were otherwise.

Richard and Dan live lonely, miserable, friendless lives. They are considerably less happy than they would have been had they not been born to proselytizing secular humanist parents. If you ask them about it, they’ll tell you that they were brainwashed as teenagers – that they were victims of a kind of abuse, which has left them unable to live as full members of their society.

***

The notion of brainwashing usually carries with it the idea that a victim has been forced or pushed to believe various things that are palpably false or absurd. The scenario above subverts this idea by asking us to consider whether it is right to describe as brainwashing the inculcation of a worldview that many people think is rationally justified. Richard and Dan are committed to the truth of secular humanism, but they claim that they cannot help but think that way – despite their desire not to do so – because of the nature of their upbringing and education. They have, in effect, been brainwashed.

A possible objection here is to insist that part of what defines brainwashing is that it involves employing specific psychological techniques – such as isolation and emotional manipulation – in order to ensure that people come to believe particular things. The trouble is that this definition seems to leave too much out. Consider, for example, that the scientist Richard Dawkins, and philosopher Anthony Grayling, and many others like them, have suggested that the normal religious education provided by churches, mosques and synagogues is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”.

Perhaps then what defines brainwashing is that it involves the passing on of beliefs that are presented as being unquestionably true. This allows in the teaching of religion as a kind of brainwashing. The trouble is that it also allows in an awful lot else. Just think about how history was taught for a large part of the twentieth century: facts and dates – no questioning, no dissent, and nothing to suggest that the details of history are contested. So was the teaching of history – and anything else taught in a similar fashion – a kind of brainwashing? Perhaps it was.

Maybe the only way to avoid the brainwashing charge is to cultivate a restless and questioning spirit in people through our educational practices. But here the case of Richard and Dan looms large again. They were both precisely taught to be restless and questioning, and it is their claim that they have been damaged as a consequence. For them, it is their inability to leave behind the legacy of their “enlightened” education that has left them isolated and estranged.

This is a reworking of a post that originally appeared on the Talking Philosophy blog.

‘This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine,’ says Dorothy Crawford, Robert Irvine Professor of Medical Microbiology at Edinburgh University. ‘It is really very irritating that the media tend to label every nasty illness a virus. Viruses are actually very different from bacteria. In fact, about the only thing which they have in common, apart from the fact that they cause illness, is that they’re very small. But even here, viruses are in fact much smaller than bacteria; for example, you can’t see viruses without an electron microscope, whereas you can see bacteria with an ordinary light microscope. Indeed, until the electron microscope was invented, people weren’t at all clear about what viruses were; they thought that they were probably just very small bacteria, but in fact they’re very different.

‘Bacteria are single celled organisms, which have the ability to exist independently of other organisms,’ Crawford explains. ‘They are able to metabolise and to reproduce on their own. Viruses, on the other hand, are obligate parasites; they are only able to reproduce within a host organism. They can’t do anything until they get inside a living cell. Once they’re there, they have mechanisms which enable them to take over the cell, and to use the cell’s organelles in order to reproduce themselves. They have nucleic acid – DNA or RNA – so they have inherited characteristics; but apart from that there isn’t really much to them.’

The fact that viruses do not produce their own energy and cannot reproduce without hijacking the cells of a living host raises the question as to whether they are alive or not. Does Crawford have a view about this?

‘Well, it’s a question which I sometimes ask my students,’ she replies. ‘It’s a good debate, but I’m not sure how much it matters. Ultimately it hinges on how life is defined. If life is about reproduction, then viruses are alive; but if it is about the ability to metabolise, then they’re not. I guess, if pushed, I’d come down on the side of viruses not being alive. They just don’t seem to have life-like characteristics.’

If viruses then are just sets of genetic instructions, how do they cause illnesses? Presumably it has something to do with the way that they hijack a host’s cells?

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Crawford confirms. ‘A virus is just a piece of genetic material which will replicate itself if it can. If it can’t, then it won’t survive, so, in that sense, reproduction is what viruses are all about. If a virus gets into a cell, and it finds all the material it requires, reproduction occurs automatically via biochemical reactions. The consequence is a lot of new viruses. This process upsets the host cell, and will very often kill it. So, if a flu virus, for example, gets in via a person’s nose, and infects their respiratory epithelium, then, if enough copies are produced, killing a lot of host cells, the infected person is going to feel pretty ill.

‘However, not all viruses work this way,’ Crawford says. ‘Other viruses, for example, go into a cell, and then stimulate it so that the cell replicates itself. The virus requires the enzymes which are found in the cell when the cell is growing. This process, if it is not checked, can result in a cancer; there is a breakdown in the normal checks on cell division, so unless the immune system notices what is going on, you can get a tumour.’

Viruses, of course, can cause huge numbers of deaths. For example, the influenza pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have killed 20 million people. However, most viruses do not have this kind of impact. Is there something about what it takes for a virus to be successful which makes really high casualty figures relatively unlikely?

‘The key thing is how the body responds to a virus,’ Crawford answers. ‘The 1918 flu virus was completely new, so nobody was immune to it. Generally speaking, the human body is not prepared for completely new infections, so you get a worse illness the first time a particular virus comes around. In evolutionary terms, those who are most susceptible to new viruses die out; therefore, they don’t produce offspring, which means that populations become more resistant to specific viruses over time. This would likely be the case with the SARS virus. If it keeps turning up, then eventually people will have more resistance to it. But, of course, there is such a long time between generations of humans that it would be more than a century before any significant resistance emerges.’

What about an illness like Ebola fever; isn’t it just too deadly to be a major threat?

‘Probably that’s true,’ Crawford confirms. ‘If you’re infected with Ebola, then you’re too ill to move anywhere, so whilst it’s an explosive outbreak, it doesn’t spread very far. Also, in the case of Ebola, its method of transmission goes against it. It is spread by close contact, whereas the viruses which result in pandemics are spread through the air. Having said that, though, something like HIV is very successful, because it is so insidious; it is possible to be infected and not to know it. It also exploits a sure-fire mechanism for going from one individual to another. So whilst it is slow spreading, compared say to flu, it is extremely difficult to eradicate.

‘The other point to make is that part of the danger of viruses is that they can be unpredictable. For example, when the H5N1 avian flu first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, it wasn’t clear how it would develop. Although it killed quite a high proportion of the people it infected, it turned out in the end that it wasn’t very infectious; it wasn’t able to spread very quickly. The authorities in Hong Kong were quick off the mark, and by killing thousands of chickens they were able to prevent it from running out of control. It re-emerged in Hong Kong and the Far East in 2003. Again, it killed large numbers of chickens but not many humans. Thankfully it looks as if it isn’t the kind of virus which is going to cause a pandemic. But this wasn’t clear at first, and for a while it was quite frightening. Of course, the chances are that someday a new strain of flu will emerge which does have the potential to cause a pandemic, but we now have very sophisticated monitoring mechanisms in place, so just maybe we will be able to do something to stop it spreading.’

Given the dangers which influenza poses, and given the length of time that the virus, in one form or another, has been around, what has prevented us from developing a vaccine which is effective against all its strains?

‘The flu virus changes the whole time, it’s constantly mutating, and the changes which occur can be very large; that’s gene swapping, rather than just single base pair swapping,’ replies Crawford. ‘This means that all you can really do is to second guess which particular strain is going to appear twelve months down the line. The World Health Organisation (WHO) produce a vaccine based on what they think will be the most prevalent strain of flu. But, of course, if a completely new strain turns up, then it takes time to create a new vaccine, by which point it may well have spread a long way. The policy we have at the moment is a sensible compromise; we vaccinate on the basis of what we think is likely to be around, and we target old people and people with chronic illnesses, because they’re at most threat from the virus.’

The threat posed by viruses such as influenza has been exacerbated in recent times by the huge growth in international air travel. The outbreak of SARS which occurred at the beginning of 2003 illustrates this point nicely. The illness was largely confined to areas in East and Southeast Asia. However, there was an outbreak in Toronto, Canada, which it proved possible to trace to one woman – Sui-Chu Kwan – who had contracted the disease during a visit to Hong Kong.

‘International travel does have a huge impact on the potential for a virus to spread,’ Crawford confirms. ‘But the speed with which the authorities responded to SARS was pretty impressive. Also, it is likely that the effects of globalisation will be somewhat mitigated by the monitoring processes which are now in place. But, in the end, a lot of this comes down to chance; sometimes you can just be unlucky.’

If there is an outbreak of a disease such as SARS, what kind of strategy is it best to pursue in order to keep it in check?

‘Well, it partly depends on whether you have a vaccine or not,’ Crawford replies. ‘In Toronto, for example, if there had been a vaccine for SARS, then they could have vaccinated all the people who had had some contact with the first victim. The idea is to ring-fence the infection in an attempt to stop it spreading. However, there is always some dispute about what kind of policy is most likely to be effective. For example, during the recent foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the UK, there was a huge amount of debate about whether vaccination was appropriate; whether it would make the problem worse or better. After the outbreak was over, they looked at the issue using some very sophisticated mathematical models; and what the models suggested was that if they had ring-fenced the infected farms, and used targeted ring vaccination around them, then that probably would have cut the duration of the epidemic. But the problem is that if an epidemic springs up very quickly, it is only really possible to do this kind of modelling after the event.’

There has, of course, been some success in combating viruses. In 1980, for example, the WHO declared that the smallpox virus had been eradicated from the world. Are the advances in molecular genetics likely to bring more of this kind of success? Presumably the more that we know about how viruses work, the easier it is to develop the means to combat them?

‘That’s right,’ Crawford replies. ‘Viruses are so small that they were among the first entities to have their genomes sequenced. We’ve learnt a huge amount; we know, for instance, that certain genes have specific roles to play in the way in which viruses transform the cells which they attack. The big hope in virology is for the development of antivirals which work like antibiotics. There has been tremendous success with HIV, for example. We now have something like fifteen drugs which we can use to keep the illness under control; and from the time of the first generation drugs, these have been developed on the basis of knowing which genes are required for particular functions of the virus, and then blocking them in various ways. This has been very effective. Almost certainly there will come a time when we can treat viruses with antivirals just as we treat bacterial infections with antibiotics.’

Although it is undoubtedly the case, as we have seen, that increased understanding of the workings of viruses will bring benefits in terms of our ability to treat a variety of illnesses, it also brings with it a number of new problems. Particularly, there are issues to do with the possibility that genetically modified viruses might be employed as terrorist weapons.

‘This is a very real threat,’ Crawford says. ‘Just think about the flu virus for a minute. If somebody produced and released a new strain of flu, then there is a good chance that we’d get a pandemic as a result. It is possible that it wouldn’t kill huge numbers of people, but it would certainly cause massive disruption and lay a lot of people low for a while. But what about if somebody produced something just a little bit more lethal than flu, but which spreads in the same way; that could be devastating.

‘If there are people with skills like mine, who are also bioterrorists, then they can do this kind of thing. They could manipulate a virus and produce, for example, some kind of hybrid between Ebola and smallpox, and that would be horrific. It is a real possibility. I’ve never really been able to understand why people talk so much about Anthrax as being the great threat. Although I’m not a bacteriologist, it does seem that it is rather hard to infect large numbers of people with it. But this just wouldn’t be the case with a virus; smallpox on its own, for example, could be devastating.’

Perhaps the other major concern facing microbiology at the present time has to do with bacteria, rather than viruses, and the fact that the shelf-life of the current crop of antibiotics might be coming to an end. The problem has been caused by the fact that bacteria have evolved resistance to the antibiotics currently in use (in part as a result of the overuse of antibiotics). Is this something that we should be worried about?

‘Definitely,’ replies Crawford. ‘In a way, this is more worrying than something like SARS. Although SARS hit the headlines, it wasn’t a big epidemic, and it was very efficiently dealt with. But MRSA, for example, has been in our hospitals for quite some time, and it isn’t something we’ve been able to deal with properly.

‘There are various things we should be looking at here. First, we need to control the free sale of antibiotics across the counter, and to regulate which antibiotics are used with which particular diseases. There are good data which show that where you get the free sale of antibiotics, you get more resistance developing in bacteria in the community. Second, we need to look at the issue of animal feed. This is a particular problem in the USA, where the gene pool of bacteria is being affected by the fact that antibiotics are given to animals for no good reason. And, of course, the other thing we have to do is to develop new antibiotics.’

One moral of the story of increasing bacterial resistance is that it is the nature of evolution that we’re always likely to be involved in a battle – an arms race, if you like – with infectious agents like bacteria and viruses. Does Crawford see a day when we might win this battle once and for all?

‘The first thing to say is that we’re always going to be in a catch-up situation with respect to microbes,’ she replies. ‘Their short replication time means that they can mutate very rapidly, whereas it takes us much longer to adapt to them. HIV, for example, changes very quickly, so although there is an immune response at first, in the end the immune system isn’t able to cope.

‘In terms of the general point about whether we are ever likely to live in a microbe free environment, the idea might be that because we’ve managed to eradicate one virus, in the end we’ll eradicate all viruses. But I doubt that this will ever happen; not least there will always be new mutations which will mean that viruses which in the past were not able to infect us, will become infectious.

‘Also, it is not entirely clear it would be a good idea to live in a microbe free environment,’ Crawford says. ‘For example, there is the possibility that by eradicating a virus you will create a space which other entities will come to fill. So whilst it was a good thing that we got rid of smallpox, there is the chance that monkey pox will take over where smallpox left off. It isn’t entirely clear how much sense this idea makes, but it is certainly something we have to think about.’

Aren’t there also some radical types who argue that because viruses are a life form they should be preserved?

‘Yes, but I don’t have any sympathy with that view,’ Crawford responds. ‘I would have pressed for the complete elimination of the smallpox virus. Of course, whether that would have been a good thing is now complicated by the terrorist issue.’

How much threat are human beings under from microbiological agents of illness? There is an argument that the genetic diversity of the human species will afford us a certain amount of protection against even the most devastating of pandemics.

‘Yes, this is my view,’ says Crawford. ‘In any pandemic, it is only a proportion of the people who get infected who get ill. It’s what we call the iceberg effect. With any virus, there will likely be a varying proportion of people that you would never know were infected unless you did an epidemiological study. It is certainly the case with flu, and is massively the case with polio. So yes, I think that human beings are genetically diverse enough to be able to deal with the threat from microorganisms.’

Extracted from What Scientists Think (Routledge) by Jeremy Stangroom.

Pro-Vivisection March

In May 2004, the British Government announced that it was establishing a new national centre which would fund work directed towards the aim of replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals in scientific research. Lord Sainsbury, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation, marked the announcement by insisting that whatever the ultimate aim of the centre, it was clear that animal testing was currently necessary for proper scientific research. In this, he was echoing a statement which he had made some months earlier, reaffirming the commitment of the British government to animal research undertaken within existing regulatory frameworks.

However, this claim that animal experimentation is necessary for scientific research is not universally accepted. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is most keenly contested by the animal rights lobby. The National Anti-Vivisection Society, for instance, argues that ‘the fundamental flaw of animal-based research is that each species responds differently to drugs and chemicals, therefore results from animal tests are unreliable as a means of predicting likely effects in humans. Thus, animal experiments are unreliable, unethical, and unnecessary.’

Whilst this view might justifiably be regarded as being rooted in the hyperbole of a pressure group, the animal rights lobby is not alone in suggesting that the issues surrounding animal experimentation are difficult. For example, in a BMJ article titled ‘Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?’ (February 28, 2004), Pandora Pound et al noted in their first sentence that: ‘Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.’ As a result of this claim, the UK media reported that scientists were beginning to doubt whether animal research was useful at all.

‘It was completely predictable that that phrase would become a kind of rallying call for the animal rights movement, and it is very unfortunate,’ says Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council (nb. Blakemore relinquished this position in 2007), when I mention the article to him. ‘But it is possible to counter the claim with the fact that the Royal Society has recently published a pretty comprehensive study which says that virtually every medical advance in the last century has depended on the use of animals in research at some point; or with the statement from the Department of Health, in its evidence to the House of Lords committee on animal experimentation, that the National Health Service could not operate without the foundation of the knowledge which animal research has built. The overwhelming view of the scientific establishment, and I’m not using that expression in a pejorative way, is that animal research is necessary for progress in medical science.

‘Also, it is important to point out that there has been some misinterpretation of the data which Pound et al analyse in their paper. They found, and I think they’re right about this, that the transition between animal research and clinical application often lacks rigour in terms of a proper review of evidence. The eagerness of some scientists or drug companies to try out new treatments can lead to the misinterpretation or over-interpretation of data from animal research. But they only examined six areas of research, out of the many hundreds where it is well documented that animal experimentation led to clinical applications. Specifically, they looked at six comprehensive reviews of animal evidence and the associated attempts at clinical application.

‘In one of these cases, they found that despite clear evidence from the work of people like Michael Marmot that human health is linked to social status and responsibility, there is no analogue of this phenomenon amongst primates. But this isn’t surprising; it doesn’t work this way in primates. Marmot was looking at the civil service, which is not exactly the kind of environment you can easily imagine being mimicked in primate groups.

‘The other five cases were situations where clinical trials, or the preliminary treatment of human beings, had started on the basis of a cursory examination and often very optimistic interpretation of previous animal research. In every case, it turned out that the clinical technique did not work. In retrospect, when the animal research was thoroughly and systematically reviewed, it turned out that the results from the animal experiments didn’t justify the clinical application. So far from showing a mismatch between animal and human results, it showed a perfect correlation. The failure was in the transition between the animal results and the clinical studies.’

What then of the criticism that the small differences in the makeup of complex systems such as animals and humans can make a lot of difference in terms of how they respond to chemicals and drugs, and that, as a result, extrapolation from animals to humans is necessarily unreliable?

‘There are probably only two or three properly qualified people in the world who hold this position,’ Blakemore replies. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of physicians in the United States say that it is essential to use animals in medical research; and more than ninety-five per cent of British physicians say the same thing. So whilst it is important to listen to maverick opinion, it is clear we shouldn’t put too much weight on it when one considers that the American Medical Association, the Royal Society, the British Medical Association, and the General Medical Council all state that animal experimentation is necessary.’

Presumably then it must be possible to give specific examples of the importance of animal research which will settle the issue?

‘Yes, almost everything is an example,’ says Blakemore. ‘Every drug, every form of advanced surgery, nearly every antibiotic, nearly every vaccine; the development of all of them has at some stage involved animal testing. What more evidence is there? By law, every drug has to be tested on animals before it can be used on humans; you cannot get a prescription for a drug which has been developed in the last one hundred years which hasn’t been tested on animals. So when you ask for examples, just about everything is an example: every pain killer; every treatment for heart disease, kidney disease and cancer; chemotherapy; radiotherapy; surgical techniques; bypass surgery; open heart surgery; you name it, animals were involved in the research.’

So what are the motivations of the people who argue that animal research is unreliable and unnecessary? Are they just pursuing a particular moral agenda?

‘I’m not sure,’ Blakemore answers. ‘I know that Ray Greek, for example, has argued that his is not a moral position; he doesn’t object to the use of animals in medical research on moral grounds. He has said, much to the consternation of his own supporters, that if it took the death of 10,000 chimpanzees to find a cure for AIDS, then he would be in favour of it. His argument then is a factual one; that animal research doesn’t work. But I would be extremely critical of the evidence he cites to support his view. Mainly he makes use of excised quotations, which seem to suggest that eminent researchers doubt the value of animal research. But if you go back to the source of the quotations, you find that they are being used out of context, and that the thrust of the papers they appear in contradicts the argument the quotations are being used to support. I don’t call this evidence.’

Perhaps the area of animal research which causes most controversy is that which involves primates. In the UK, this issue became headline news at the beginning of 2004, with the announcement by Cambridge University that it had axed plans to build a new multi-million pound centre for primate research. The BBC reported that the decision to abandon the project was based in part on the spiralling cost of satisfying the requirements of animal welfare legislation and the need for security to protect against the threat of attack from animal rights activists. The decision was greeted with regret by many people in the scientific community. For example, Mark Matfield, director of the Research Defence Society, called it a ‘serious blow for British medical research’ and argued that ‘the government needs to bring in tougher legislation to tackle extremist campaigns, otherwise they will remain a threat to all medical science that depends on animal research.’

What is the importance of primate research? It accounts for only a tiny percentage of the total of animal research, so presumably there are some quite specific reasons for doing it?

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Blakemore confirms. ‘To get a licence for primate research requires that a very special case be made; not only that animals are necessary for the research, but also that it must be primates, that no other animal will do. Moreover, particular attention is paid to the question of suffering; it is much harder to get a license where primates might suffer than it is in the case of say mice. Also, the number of animals to be used, and the objectives of the research will be taken into account. What this means is that research with primates will be of great strategic importance in terms of its potential to deliver results, and it will be work which simply cannot be done with other species. We’re talking here primarily about three main areas of research: endocrinology, where for many of the hormone systems, the monkey is the only model which has the required likeness to human beings; neuroscience, because of the similarity between the organisation of the primate and human brain; and some areas of vaccinology, particularly, for example, in attempts to develop AIDS vaccines.’

The specific worry about primates has largely to do with their cognitive abilities; particularly, there is the possibility that they are self-aware; self-conscious, rather than simply conscious. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, in his book In Defence of Animals, asks why we are willing to lock up chimpanzees in primate research centres and subject them to painful experiments when we would never think of doing the same thing to a retarded human being who had lesser mental abilities. Singer concludes that it is only speciesism which explains this difference. What does Blakemore make of this kind of argument?

‘I know the arguments, and would keep an open-mind on the nature of the evidence about something like primate self-awareness,’ he replies. ‘But I think it is very important to hang on to one strong moral principle, which is that there is a clear distinction between our responsibilities to our own species and our responsibilities to other species. Most people, given the choice between saving the life of a human or an animal, will think that their primary obligation is to the human being. I’m very fond of animals, I have kept pets all my life, but if it came to a choice between my cat, which has lived with us for some seven years, and is very much a part of the family, and the life of one of my daughters, I would not have the slightest hesitation in saying that the life of my daughter should have priority; and I think that most people would feel the same way. They might love animals, but they see that human beings are just different.’

The response which somebody sympathetic to the Singer view would likely offer to this argument is that at least part of what leads us to the thought that humans are different from animals might be present in a primate and absent in a severely disabled human being.

‘Yes, the idea that all that matters is sentience,’ says Blakemore. ‘But we need a firmer foundation than this to base our judgements upon. In the end, all it amounts to is an anthropomorphic claim about what it must be like to be a monkey. However, this can lead to serious errors of judgement, such as that of Peter Singer himself, when he argues that there is a line to be drawn in terms of sentience somewhere between rats and fish. But why? Just because we can’t get ourselves into the mental life of a fish, doesn’t mean that a fish is not sentient. The correct starting position is that it is possible that all living animals with a nervous system have some kind of experience. Therefore, we have a responsibility to all species to minimise suffering, but on top of this we have a primary obligation to our own species. This is a very normal, biological principle. You see it in virtually every species; they treat their own species differently from other species.’

So when Singer talks about speciesism, would Blakemore be happy to accept that as his position?

‘Yes, that is exactly my position,’ he confirms. ‘But I don’t accept that “speciesism” is a pejorative term; I’m quite happy to defend the position. In the end, you have to draw a line; you couldn’t walk down the street if you really believed that to kill any living thing was a sin or immoral because you’d be worried about the small insects under your feet. There is an extreme version of Buddhism which holds to that position, but taken to its logical conclusion it is ridiculous; you’d end up never moving because you’d be worried about hurting microbes. So it is necessary to draw the line somewhere. The only firm line on genetic and morphological grounds is between our own species and other species. But the fact that we’re justified in treating our own species differently doesn’t mean that we have a kind of Cartesian license to treat other species in any way that we want; because of our own moral status, we have an extended moral obligation towards the rest of the world. It is just that this moral obligation doesn’t entail that we have the same responsibilities to other species as we do to each other. So I’m a speciesist, and I would defend that position.’

At the end of 2003, it was reported that Blakemore had been turned down for a knighthood because of his support for vivisection; and that, as a result, he was considering his position as the head of the Medical Research Council. ‘It has nothing to do with whether I particularly deserve an honour, that is neither here nor there,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘The mission statement of the medical research organisation which I now run includes a specific commitment to engaging with the public on issues in medical research. How can I now, in the present circumstances, go to MRC scientists and ask them to take the risk of being willing to talk about animal experimentation with this indication that doing so will reduce their standing and their reputation in the eyes of the government?’

Was he reassured by the government’s response to this situation that it fully accepted the need for animal research, and that it admired and supported those scientists who had been on the front line in the struggle against animal rights extremists?

‘Yes, I was,’ he replies. ‘But actually, what was almost more important was the widespread support that came from the scientific community and the media. The support from the media, in particular, was quite extraordinary and a big surprise; virtually the entire spectrum made strong statements about the importance of animal experimentation. So the debate served a useful purpose; it produced a kind of national solidarity, which was much needed. This is also reflected in public opinion. The latest opinion poll shows ninety per cent of the population in support of animal research. It is significant that there is no other major issue where you get this kind of consensus; we still treat the issue of animal research as if it is highly controversial, as if the public haven’t made up their mind; but they have made up their mind.’

The opinion poll which Blakemore refers to here was couched in a particular way; specifically, people were asked for their opinion about animal research on the assumption that certain criteria had been met. For example, one question asked whether people could accept animal research for medical purposes, where there was no other alternative. But, of course, it is precisely the claim of the animal rights lobby that there are alternatives to animal research.

‘Well, if there are, let’s see them delivered by those people who claim that there are,’ Blakemore responds, when I put this to him. ‘I have faced the whole range of arguments from those who are opposed to animal research. I have enormous respect for people who simply say that they don’t care about the range of benefits which are the result of animal experimentation; they don’t deny that there have been these benefits, but they don’t want any part of them because they think that animal experimentation is wrong. It is very difficult to maintain this position, because we all do well as a result of advances in medical techniques; for example, we all benefit from the fact that people are vaccinated, and from our knowledge of the importance of public health. But I understand and respect this position.

‘However, I have very little respect for people who say that animals are so very different from human beings that animal research has no relevance for understanding humans; or that all treatments which have been developed on animals are dangerous to humans; or that animal researchers enjoy what they’re doing, that they’re basically sadists, and that anyway, it is only really about filling the pockets of the drug companies. This is not a parody of the kinds of arguments which are made; and I have no time for them. They are rationally indefensible. If there are alternatives, let’s see them. We want them. I don’t know of a single person who uses animals in their research who wouldn’t rather use an alternative. Moreover, there is a great paradox here: the alternatives to animal research which do exist have been developed by researchers who have previously experimented on animals. I’ve had grants to develop alternatives, I’ve done a lot of work on tissue cultures, and I use computer simulations for a lot of my work, yet I’m accused of being a villain because I’ve also experimented on animals.’

Extracted from What Scientists Think (pub. Routledge) by Jeremy Stangroom.

Daniel Dennett

When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness. It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people could believe about Blair. He wasn’t a child, his leadership was anything but childlike, and he lacked the requisite number of legs to be a baby deer. Not discouraged, the Sun was at it again in 2001, this time when Iain Duncan Smith became leader of the Conservative Party. In what was probably a desperate attempt to establish his man of the people credentials, it started to call him ‘Smithy’. A quite absurd conceit, given his double-barrelled name and former career as an army officer. Needless to say, this nickname didn’t catch on either, and almost universally in the UK media, Duncan Smith came to be known as IDS.

None of this is surprising. If your aim is to coin, ex nihilo, a name or epithet which quickly gains widespread public acceptance, the chances of success are not great. Even the media, with its ability to talk daily to massive audiences, fails as often as it succeeds. Thus, for every ‘Slick Willy’, you’ll find that there is a ‘Bambi’, for every ‘loony left’ a ‘Doris Karloff’.

This is a comforting thought for a secularist at the present time. For a rather unfortunate meme has lately infected the minds of some leading exponents of a naturalistic worldview. It is a meme which says that it would be a good idea if people without belief in things supernatural started to call themselves ‘brights’.

The meme started with two people from Sacramento, California. Though atheists, Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell did not want to be referred to as being ‘godless’, so they came up with the word ‘bright’ to better describe their naturalistic worldview. Their hope is that other nonbelievers will also use the word, and that it will become an umbrella term for the whole range of naturalistic philosophies (i.e., atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc.). They have setup a website, The Brights Net (www.the-brights.net), to this end, and have attracted a number of high profile advocates, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both of whom have written articles supporting the idea.

It is easy enough to understand the efficacy of this meme. The naturalistic philosophies of the non-religious do not play the same kind of high profile role in political and civic life as do the supernaturalist ideas of their religious counterparts. This is the case particularly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, where, for example, assorted bishops get to sit on various ethics committees simply because they are bishops. Given this situation, any intervention which promises to raise the profile of naturalistic thinking is bound to be attractive at first sight. The trouble is that it doesn’t take too many more sights of the brights idea to realise that it is badly flawed.

First, ‘bright’ is just the wrong word. How it was chosen in the first place isn’t quite clear. It seems to have had something to do with the fact that it is a ‘positive’ and ‘memorable’ word; and also that it is sufficiently puzzling or enigmatic when used as a noun – ‘I am a bright’ –that it invites the response, ‘What’s a bright?’, thereby allowing a person to talk about their naturalistic worldview. But there are major problems with the word.

The first is that its enigmatic quality is indicative of a fundamental arbitrariness in its relationship to the phenomenon that it names. It’s the let’s call Tony Blair ‘Bambi’ problem. Dawkins imagines that a bright might have a conversation which goes like this:

‘”What on earth is a bright”? And then you’re away. “A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements….”

“You mean a bright is an atheist?”

“Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some freethinkers. But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.”’

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The future looks bright’, The Guardian, June 21^st 2003)

All very nice, except that the conversation is far more likely to go something like this:

‘What on earth is a bright?’

‘A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements.’

‘Right. So why the word “bright” then?’

‘Err. Well it’s a positive word. And memorable.’

‘So is the word “truffle”, but you wouldn’t call yourself a truffle. So why “bright”?’

‘Well, it’s what this couple from Sacramento came up with… and it is a very cheerful word!’

The arbitrariness of the choice of the word ‘bright’, though undermining its potential as a meme, would not matter so much were it not for the fact that one of the established uses of the word is as an adjective meaning ‘clever’ or ‘intelligent’. The problem here is that in the absence of an obvious reason to explain how it is that the word ‘bright’ designates a person who espouses a naturalist worldview, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that what is being suggested is that it is more intelligent to embrace naturalism than it is to embrace supernaturalism.

It must be said that the supporters of the brights idea are quite clear that the word should not be taken to be an adjective in this way. However, this does not make the problem go away. It should be obvious why it does not. For starters, there is the trivial point that you cannot strip a word of its associations simply by denying that you intend them. [1] Nor can you do so by using the word in a slightly strange way (i.e., as a noun). If someone announces that they’re a bright, then likely it will occur to their audience that what they actually mean is that they are bright. The fact that they will also be unable to explain why the word ‘bright’ is appropriate as a label for someone with a naturalistic worldview will do nothing to allay this suspicion.

There is also a slightly more complex point to be made here. To be an atheist in the United States – and also in some ways in the United Kingdom – is to set oneself against the dominant culture. There is, therefore, a tendency to associate atheism with a certain kind of intellectual independence. This is reflected in the names of the groups with which many atheists associate themselves (e.g., freethinkers; skeptics; etc). And it also underpins the anti-intellectual sentiment of much of the religious sermonising characteristic of Christian fundamentalism. The problem with the word ‘bright’ is that it is too easily seen as confirming this link between atheism and intellectuality. Or to put this more precisely, if people with no belief in god begin to self-identify as brights, they run the risk of apparently confirming what many religious people already suspect about them, that they consider themselves to be better or more intelligent than people who believe in a god.

Does this matter? Yes it does, if one is interested in convincing people of the merits of a naturalistic worldview. To start with, there is the obvious point that people are more likely to be receptive to new ideas if they feel that they are being treated with respect. But perhaps more worryingly, a movement which self-identifies as a movement of brights makes itself a hostage to rhetorical fortune. It is extremely easy – and, it must be said, very tempting – to parody the whole idea of a brights movement. And, of course, this is exactly what the enemies of a naturalistic worldview will do should the idea take off. The brights movement will find itself transmogrified into a ‘We’re smarter than you’ movement. And, at that point, protesting that the word was chosen simply because it is ‘warm’ and ‘cheerful’ will just result in more parody and more laughter.

‘Bright’, then, is the wrong choice of word to designate a person with a naturalistic worldview and as an umbrella term for a movement. But substituting a different word won’t make the brights idea a good one because it is muddle-headed for other reasons. Perhaps the most interesting of these has to do with what appears to be an unspoken assumption about people with a naturalistic worldview.

The assumption seems to be that the rejection of supernaturalism is enough to qualify someone as a person without religion. This claim is only unproblematic if one defines religion as involving supernatural beliefs. However, there is at least an argument that the sphere of the religious can be extended to include aspects of the secular world. It is an argument inspired by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. He claimed that the realm of the sacred is distinguished by the separateness of its objects from those of the world of the profane, and by the system of interdictions which prevents them from being denied. [2] If one accepts this conception, then there are secular phenomena which qualify as sacred. So Durkheim talks of ‘common beliefs of every sort connected to objects that are secular in appearance, such as the flag, one’s country, some forms of political organisation, certain heroes or historical events’, which are ‘indistinguishable from beliefs that are properly religious’; and he notes that ‘Public opinion does not willingly allow one to contest the moral superiority of democracy, the reality of progress, [or] the idea of equality, just as the Christian does not allow his fundamental dogmas to be questioned.’

It is easy to understand what Durkheim is getting at. It is only necessary to attend a meeting organised by a group like the Socialist Workers Party to become very quickly aware that people can hold secular beliefs to be every bit as inviolable as religious beliefs often are for the religious. Of course, this point is already well understood. For example, in a review of Steven Rose et al’s Not in Our Genes, Richard Dawkins, commenting on their arguments against ‘genetic determinism’, has this to say: ‘The myth of the “inevitability” of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology, and has everything to do with Rose et al’s paranoiac and demonological theology of science. [my italics]’ (Richard Dawkins, New Scientist 24 January 1985).

What this means for the brights idea is that the criterion of a naturalistic worldview is no guarantee that people will be free of the kind of thinking which is quite reasonably described as ‘religious’. Or to put this another way, it is no guarantee that people will not be committed to beliefs, or sets of beliefs, which are beyond rational scrutiny in the same way as are many of the beliefs which are associated with theism. Possibly the supporters of the brights movement will not deny this, but rather claim that it does not matter too much, that their expectation has never been that they will create a movement of absolutely rigorous thinkers, each one holding up their beliefs to the light of reason. Fair enough. Except for two further points.

First, there is just a suggestion in some of the writings of the supporters of the brights idea that they see themselves as the true inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition. Well, it just isn’t this clear-cut. First off, the belief in a deity, in and of itself, does not rule out an attitude towards this world which is entirely consistent with the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and the progress of human knowledge. But perhaps more significantly, many people who qualify as brights would have a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the products of the Enlightenment. Just consider, for example, that many Marxists would agree with Rose et al that ‘science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.’ (Not in Our Genes). And that from amongst the whole caboodle of postmodern thinkers, at least some will be prepared to commit to agnosticism, and will no doubt claim something like ‘that progress in social thought is not possible without a thorough critique of the Enlightenment, whether for its justification of the domination of nature, or its authoritative support for belief systems like scientific racism or sexism, or for the monocultural legacy of its assumptions about rationality.’ (Andrew Ross, The Sokal Hoax).

Which thoughts lead on to the second point about the kind of movement the brights idea is likely to foster. It is certainly going to contain some odd bedfellows. Scientific atheists and Marxist atheists will be united in thinking that there is definitely no god, but they’ll fight like cats and dogs over the fate of the bourgeoisie. The agnostics will irritate both groups by sitting on the fence, whilst freethinkers drive themselves crazy trying to find a viewpoint unique to themselves. The skeptics will watch the whole thing from afar with slightly cynical smiles, and the postmodernists will talk past themselves, as per usual. As for the rest of the world? They won’t see past the name. And laughter and parody will be the result. Therefore, one can only hope that the ‘bright’ meme fails on its evolutionary journey.

Footnotes
[1] The observant reader will notice that there is an echo here of the criticism that some people have made of the language of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. For the record, I think the criticism is misplaced in the case of The Selfish Gene.
[2] There’s obviously a lot more to Durkheim’s argument than this mere bald assertion. See his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; and also, for a summary of the argument I’m making here, J. C. Alexander’s The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Routledge, 1982), pp. 242 -250.

This article was originally published at ButterfliesandWheels.Com.

Until Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, it was hard to see how the natural world could have been anything other than designed. The significant point here is its complexity. As William Paley famously argued, it seems almost unimaginable that something as complex and highly wrought as the human eye could possibly have emerged purely by natural mechanisms. The eye just appears too precisely specified to be anything other than the creation of an intelligent entity (by which just about everybody means God). Darwin’s importance is that he showed exactly how this kind of “design” could have occurred without a designer.

Darwin was influenced by Thomas Malthus’s famous essay on population, in which Malthus argued that the capacity of a population to sustain itself tends not to keep up with its rate of growth. The lesson that Darwin took from this is that the living world is necessarily thoroughly competitive (“red in tooth and claw”, as one of his disciples later put it). Life is characterised by a struggle for existence – or, more exactly, for reproduction – since any species will tend to produce more individuals than can be sustained. It was this insight that led Darwin to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Every species manifests some variation in the inherited traits of its members. Take foxes, for example: some foxes will be able to run faster than other foxes; some will have better eyesight, better hearing, sharper teeth, and better camouflage. Variations that give an individual a competitive advantage (e.g., sharper teeth and better eyesight) will tend to be passed on more often than variations that put an individual at a disadvantage (e.g., a birthmark that makes its bearer a sitting target). Therefore, given enough time, helpful variations will come to be much more numerous than less helpful variations. So long as there are always new variations for natural selection to operate upon, then evolution will carry on in this way indefinitely.

This is a hugely powerful idea. It answers Paley’s challenge to explain how the eye could have emerged naturalistically: by means of tiny, incremental steps, each one beneficial in its own right. In Darwin’s day, the mechanisms of inheritance, and the source of the variations upon which natural selection works, were not known. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century, with the rediscovery of the ideas of Gregor Mendel, that this became clearer. One hundred years later, we now know that genes are the units of inheritance; and that, every so often, they mutate to produce new characteristics in an organism, which are then subject to Darwinian selection.

Darwin’s importance simply cannot be overstated. He was the founder of modern biology; the person who, in Huxley’s phrase, put the world of life into the domain of natural law.