THE DEVIL'S HARLEQUIN:

A Passion for Evolution: a review of A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
by Richard Dawkins (H. Allen Orr, February 26, 2004, NY Review of Books)

Dawkins has spent much of his career defending a particular view of Darwinism. This so-called selfish gene view grew out of work in the 1960s by George Williams and William Hamilton. While Darwin argued that evolution involves a kind of survival of the fittest, Hamilton, Williams, and their heirs argued that it's the fittest gene that matters, not the fittest organism. To see what this means, consider an example. When a small bird spots a hawk overhead it will often issue an alarm call, warning its flock-mates of the predator's presence. The odd thing is that this behavior—which we'll assume is instinctive, that is, genetically based—is "altruistic." By sounding the alarm, a bird may well save its flock-mates but it simultaneously calls attention to itself, increasing the odds that it will be attacked by the hawk. How could such a behavior evolve?

If you think of Darwinism in traditional terms—as competition among different organisms—the answer isn't obvious. A bird who sounds a call (and so perhaps gets eaten) is unlikely to have more offspring than a bird who keeps quiet (and so probably avoids getting eaten). And having more offspring is what Darwinism was supposed to be all about. But if you think of Darwinism in selfish gene terms— as competition among different genes —the answer is clearer. A gene that makes a bird emit an alarm may decrease the odds that the calling bird survives but it can increase the odds that the gene for alarm-calling survives. The reason is that the flock-mates who are saved by the alarm are, like all flock-mates, likely to be related to the caller; and relatives, by definition, tend to carry the same genes, including the gene for sounding the alarm. In effect, then, the alarm-call gene is warning—and saving— copies of itself. Those copies just happen to reside in other organisms. The counterintuitive conclusion is that a gene that sometimes causes an organism to sacrifice itself can increase its frequency by natural selection. The alternative kind of gene—one for not emitting an alarm call—can decrease in frequency, since such genes are on average less likely to be passed on to the next generation.

To Dawkins and other advocates of the selfish gene view, such examples reveal something deep about Darwinism: natural selection acts at the level of competing genes, not competing organisms. It is genes that are engaged in a struggle for existence and we can, therefore, expect them to "selfishly" do whatever they can to increase their representation in the next generation. (The quotes emphasize that genes are not consciously selfish; it's just that their dynamics look like those of consciously selfish agents.) In the end, the selfish gene view suggests that the properties we see in organisms are those that maximized the survival of genes, not the welfare of organisms. Taken to its logical conclusion, genes begin to seem like manipulators who build organisms in whatever way best serves the genes' "interests," whether or not these coincide with the organisms' interests. Indeed Dawkins spoke of organisms as mere "vehicles" for genes or as "lumbering robots" that were "blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." It was this view that he popularized in his first book, The Selfish Gene, and that he continues to defend, though in modified form, in A Devil's Chaplain.

A New Religion (David Stove)

Dolphins and some other animals have lately turned out to be more intelligent than was formerly thought, and present-day computers are capable of some amazing things. Still, if the question is asked, what are the most intelligent and all-round-capable things on earth, the answer is obvious: human beings. Everyone knows this, except certain religious people. A person is certainly a believer in some religion if be thinks, for example, that there are on earth millions of invisible and immortal nonhuman beings which are far more intelligent and capable than we are.

But that is exactly what sociobiologists do think, about genes. Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods.

Yet this conclusion seems incredible. Was not religion banished from biological science a long time ago? Why, yes. And is not sociobiology a part of biological science (even if a very new part, and a controversial one)? No. Sociobiologists really are committed to genes being gods, as I will show in a moment.

But first consider the following. We would all say, because we all know it to be true, that calculating-machines, automobiles, screwdrivers and the like, are just tools or devices which are designed, made, and manipulated by human beings for their own ends. Now, you cannot say this without implying that human beings are more intelligent and capable than calculators, automobiles, screwdrivers, etc. For if we designed and made something as intelligent and capable as ourselves, or more so, it would be precisely not just a tool which we could manipulate for our own ends: it would have ends of its own, and be at least as good at achieving those ends, too, as we are at achieving ours. Similarly, suppose someone says that human beings and all other organisms are just tools or devices designed, made and manipulated by so-and-so’s for their own ends. Then he implies that so-and-so’s are more intelligent and capable than human beings.

With that in mind, consider the following representative statements made by leading sociobiologists. Richard Dawkins, easily the best-known spokesman for this movement, writes that ‘we are . . . robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes', and again that we are ‘manipulated to ensure the survival of [our] genes’. The same writer also says that ‘the fundamental truth [is] that an organism is a tool of DNA’. (That is, of the DNA molecules which are the organism’s genes.) Again, Dawkins says that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA’. Similarly, E. O. Wilson, an equal or higher sociobiological authority, says that ‘the individual organism is only the vehicle [of genes], part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them…The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA’.

I will mention in a moment some other passages in which sociobiologists imply that genes are beings of more-than-human intelligence and power, but that implication should be clear enough already from the passages just quoted. According to the Christian religion, human beings and all other created things exist for the greater glory of God; according to sociobiology, human beings and all other living things exist for the benefit of their genes. The expression ‘their genes' is probably not perfectly orthodox, from the strict sociobiological point of view; being rather too apt to suggest that genes are part of our equipment, whereas (according to sociobiology) we are part of theirs. All the same, the religious implication is unmistakable: that there exist, in us and around us, beings to whom we stand in the same humble relation as calculators, cars, and screwdrivers stand in to us.

It must be admitted that sociobiologists sometimes say other things which are inconsistent with statements like the ones I have just quoted. Dawkins, for example, sometimes protests that he does not at all believe that genes are 'conscious, purposeful agents’. But these disclaimers are in vain. Of course genes are not conscious purposeful agents: everyone will agree with that. Where sociobiologists differ from other people is just that they also say, over and over again, things which imply that genes are conscious purposeful agents; and agents, at that, of so much intelligence and power that human beings are merely among the tools they make and use.

It is in Richard Dawkins’ book, The Extended Phenotype, that the apotheosis of genes has been carried furthest. Manipulation is the central idea of this book (as the author himself acknowledges), and more specifically, manipulation by genes. Genes are here represented as manipulating, in their own interest, not only the bodies and behaviour of the organisms in which they sit, but just about everything under the sun.

Genes manipulate external objects. For example, spider-genes (not spiders) manipulate webs, termite-genes (not termites) manipulate mud to make their mounds, beaver-genes (not beavers) manipulate logs and water to make a dam, and so on. Action at a distance, something which is usually considered to be difficult or impossible, is no trouble at all to genes. No job is too big for them, either: beaver-genes can easily build a lake miles wide. Genes also manipulate the behaviour of other organisms, and the victims of their manipulation need not at all be of the same species as the organisms which carry the manipulating genes.

For example, a certain kind of cuckoo deposits its egg among the eggs laid by a reed-warbler. Once the eggs hatch, the exceptionally loud begging-cry of the young cuckoo, and its exceptionally colourful 'gape’, induce the parent reed-warblers to give it more food than they give to their own young. According to Dawkins, this is a case of the genes of the cuckoo-parents manipulating the behaviour of reed-warbler parents, to the advantage of the former and the disadvantage of the latter.

Now, think what this kind of description commits the user of it to. Just as maternity implies parenthood but not conversely, so manipulation implies causal influence but not conversely. The moon causally influences the tides, but it cannot manipulate them. Even if causal influence results in some advantage to the influencing agent, that is still not enough to constitute manipulation. If you and I are competing to catch the greater number of fish from our boat, and I by accident knock you overboard, then I influence your behaviour but do not manipulate it, even though your mishap improves my chances of winning the competition. To constitute manipulation, there must be the element of intended purposeful causal influence.

Most biologists would see, in a case like nest-parasitism, nothing more than an extremely complex example of causal influence. They might ascribe to the genes of the cuckoo exactly the same causal influence as sociobiologists do. What distinguishes the sociobiologist’s description of the case is his insistence that those genes are manipulating the reed-warblers’ behaviour for their own benefit. Well, cuckoos do benefit, and reed-warblers lose, by nest-parasitism. But, as we just saw in the boat case, causal influence plus resulting advantage are not enough to constitute manipulation. The causal influence must also be purposeful or intended. But is that condition satisfied in this case?

If the nest-parasitism of cuckoos is a case of manipulation, it is certainly a staggeringly-clever one: far too clever for cuckoos, in particular, to be capable of. Can a cuckoo have a purpose as complicated as that of it-feeds-its-own-young? That must be extremely doubtful. Still, let us suppose that a cuckoo is clever enough for that. He would need to be cleverer still, to be able to think up a way of achieving this purpose. In particular, could he think up a way of achieving it which did not involve any cuckoo’s ever going even within a mile of a reed-warbler? No: there is no one who will credit cuckoos with so great an intellectual feat. Yet even if a cuckoo could manage that part too, the hardest job would still lie ahead of him. For he would need, not just to have this brilliant idea, but to be able to implement it. But how is a cuckoo to do whatever engineering is required? He has no hope. Manipulative ability of any kind is not highly developed in birds, and cuckoos are distinctly below the bird-average in this respect. After all, hardly any of them can even build a nest.

But the feat of manipulation in question would not only be too hard for cuckoos: it would be too hard for us.

Demons and Dawkins (D. C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales)

DAWKINS MORE THAN once assures his readers that when he says genes are selfish, he is not nonsensically attributing to them a certain psychological or "subjective" character. He does not mean, he says, that genes are "conscious, purposeful agents." Applied to genes, the language of selfishness is "only a figure of speech." But he finds it a help in conveying to his readers, what he believes to be literally true, that organisms are simply vehicles which genes design, build, and manipulate, as part of the longer term process of increasing the number of their own copies. Anyway, he says, calling genes "selfish" cannot be importantly wrong, because it is dispensible. We could always "translate [it] back into respectable terms if we wanted to."

The sense in which he uses the word "selfish," Dawkins writes, is one which is standard in biology, and which is "behavioral, not subjective." It is this. "An entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another entity's welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behavior has exactly the opposite effect. 'Welfare' is defined as 'chances for survival'..."

It is true that this is the standard sense in which neo-Darwinian biologists use the words "selfish" and "altruistic" respectively. It is also true (as we saw in Essay VI) that it is a problem or worse for neo-Darwinism (as for Darwinism) how altruistic behavior could survive and spread in any population of animals. But let all organisms be as selfish as the extremest neo-Darwinian cares to suppose: that would still not justify anyone calling genes, as distinct from organisms, selfish.

Yet Dawkins says he uses the word "selfish" in the behavioral sense (as we have just seen), and he will have it that genes are selfish. But what connection is there, between selfishness in the behavioral sense, and that feature of genes on which everything in The Selfish Gene turns: their self-replicatory propensity? To justify his calling genes selfish in the behavioral sense, Dawkins would need to show that self-replication increases the self-replicators chances of survival. But how on earth could he, or anyone, possibly make that out?

My identical twin, or a laboratory-made replica of myself (as I pointed out earlier), is not a possible object of my selfishness, in the ordinary psychological sense of "selfishness." But suppose that I am myself Superscientist, and that I manufacture my own replica or twin. Have I then done something selfish, even in the behavioral sense of "selfish"? Have I improved my own chances of survival at the expense of the chances of others?

It is perfectly obvious that I have not. The coming into existence of a perfect copy of myself might, just conceivably, tickle my vanity. But it would not remove one year or one second from my age, or lighten, by however little, the burden of my present or future illnesses or other affliction. My age, health, wealth, and prospects would be just what they were before I conjured up my replica. Any rational insurance company, and any rational person, would tell you the same thing. And since I have not increased my own chances of survival, I have certainly not done so at the expense of anyone else's chances.

Equally plainly, the same is true for genes. By making a copy of itself, a gene certainly does not gratify its selfishness in the ordinary sense of the word, since (as I said earlier) genes cannot be selfish in that sense. But neither does it do anything selfish in the behavioral sense. Self-replication would even seem (to a layman such as myself) rather to worsen a gene's chances of survival, since it must use up a sizable part of its limited energy store. But even if that is merely a layman's misunderstanding, it seems obvious enough that a gene, by self-replicating, does not improve its own chances of survival. (Its replica is not going to look after the parent gene in its old age, for example.) Which is to say, that the self-replication of a gene is not selfish, even in the sense in which Dawkins says he is using that word.

At this point, however, Dawkins would remind me that "the selfish gene... is not just one physical bit of DNA... it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world." What a gene does by self-replicating, he says, is to benefit "itself in the form of copies of itself." "The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies" of itself.

There: you have just witnessed how Dawkins made out the case on which his whole book depends. How he managed, that is, to represent the self-replication of genes as being selfish in the behavioral sense. Well, there is nothing to it, really, once you have seen how the thing is worked. All you need to do is to talk about things which exist in the form of other things, and more specifically about things which exist in the form of copies of themselves; and the job is done.

One of the reasons that Darwinists are so enjoyable to observe in action is because in their ceaseless quest to deny intelligent design they are always forced to analogies that specifically rely upon the functioning of intelligence, only they attribute such intelligence to Nature itself, rather than to a Creator.

MORE:
Stove's Anti-Darwinism (James Franklin, Royal Institute of Philosophy)

[I]t is uncontroversial to assert that Darwinism is a logically complex theory, and that its relation to empirical evidence is distant and multi-faceted. One does not directly observe chance genetic variations leading to the development of new species, or even continuous variations in the fossil record, but must rely on subtle arguments to the best explanation, scaling up from varieties to species, and so on. The strength or otherwise of these arguments, individually and collectively, is a purely logical question. It is therefore no answer to Stove's attack on Darwinism to sermonise, as Blackburn does, about how disgraceful it is for philosophers to delve in matters that do not concern them. Marxists, or Freudians, or astrologers, or phrenologists are not allowed to 'answer' philosophers' doubts about the relation of their theories to the evidence by saying, 'Trust me, I'm a doctor'. Evolutionists have no such rights either.

Stove's article listed ten propositions that were, he claimed, asserted by Darwinians, and indeed were characteristic of Darwinian theory, but were obviously false. The statements are all universal generalizations - 'every organism has as many descendants as it can'; 'all communication is manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender'; 'in every species child-mortality is extremely high', and the like. To answer Stove, it would be initially natural to claim that the 'all' in these statements was not seriously meant. But, obviously, that would be to fall into Stove's trap, since his claim is precisely that Darwinians save their theory by weakening contentful assertions they appear to have made. If they don't mean 'all', why do they say it, if not to dress up a logically flabby theory as much more falsifiable than it is?

Yet this is exactly the strategy Blackburn uses in attempting to refute Stove. The problem is most evident in his answer at the point where he thinks Stove has most grossly misrepresented the Darwinians. Stove listed as one of the 'Darwinian falsities':

…no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but ... everyone will sacrifice it (for) more than two brothers, or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins.

Blackburn points out that the original quote began, 'To express the matter more vividly, in the world of our model organisms, whose behaviour is determined strictly by genotype, we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but that everyone ...' He is then much scandalized at Stove's omission of the phrase 'in the world of our model organisms', and treats this correction as a full answer to Stove.

But this does not help the Darwinian evade Stove's attack. What is the point of 'model organisms' unless they model organisms? As Blackburn himself says, 'Hamilton went on to apply the model to solve a famous problem for Darwinian theory: how it can be that in species of hymenoptera, sterile workers exist?' If Hamilton is speaking about a purely mathematical world of model organisms, then he has said nothing about biological evolution, while if real organisms satisfy the assumptions of the model, then there can be no objection to taking the predictions of the model as literally asserted of the organisms. It was a point not lost on Stove, who wrote:

It is true I have omitted a qualification which Hamilton prefixed to the words just quoted: namely, '... in the world of our model organisms, whose behaviour is determined strictly by genotype .'. But Professor Hamilton could hardly object to this omission. For his disciples such as Dawkins constantly do the same thing: that is, read off the results of Hamilton's 'model', as being true descriptions of biological reality. No doubt the reason is, that they believe that the proviso - behaviour being determined strictly by genotype - is satisfied everywhere in fact.

If Stove is to be criticized for omitting the words of others, it is fair to ask that others criticize him only after having all his own words on the subject to hand.

Of course, it is perfectly true that models do not fit real cases perfectly, and a degree of looseness of fit has to be allowed to any theory. But there is little comfort for Darwinians in this line of thought. To the extent that organisms do satisfy the model, to that extent failure of the predictions tells against the theory; and to the extent that organisms do not satisfy the model, to that extent Darwinians are asserting something apparently contentful, then withdrawing it under pressure. And this particular model would be ill-advised to compare itself with respectable mathematical models. In a case like Newton's theory of gravity, there is a clear sense of numerical approximation, and the predictions of the theory can be measured to be true to within so many percent. Nothing could be further from the situation that obtains with Hamilton's 'prediction'. It is not as if the model predicts that animals will sacrifice themselves for 8 first cousins, whereas observation shows the true figure is 8.3. The truth is more, as Stove says, that a robin red breast cannot tell the difference between his first cousin and a bit of red wool on a wire.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2004 8:10 PM