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.

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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.

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.