Gene-juggling
By Mary Midgley
Genes
cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous,
elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need
mentioning, but Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene has
succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr
J. L. Mackie.[1] What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins
is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism.
If this support came from Dawkins’s producing important new facts,
or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this
could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness
for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing - the one where the
player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck
at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations
as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the
first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into his a priori
biological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant
facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure
to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics
have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable.[2] I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with
it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant
to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that
his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic
device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them
must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it
is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is
essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. 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. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted
before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood.
Dawkins
does toy with egoistic explanations at the more ordinary level as
well as with metaphysical ‘gene’ selfishness, although it is not
clear why he thinks he needs to . When animals act, as they quite
often do, for each other’s advantage, Dawkins explains this, where
possible, as ‘reciprocal altruism’, that is, not altruism at all
but a bargain. It is only when this becomes too obviously unconvincing
that he shifts his ground, becoming equally ready to say either
that the individual is aiming to ‘increase his own genetic fitness’ - i.e. to prosper by having a lot of descendants and relatives - or that the real agent is not the individual at all but the
personified Gene. This is a mysterious entity riding in the individual
and apparently composed of the numerous genes in his cells, which
chooses to sacrifice him - and in some sense itself - for the sake
of its representatives, with which it somehow identifies, in the
descendants who outlive him. I shall discuss the two last alternatives,
which are extremely bizarre, later. The first and slightly more
respectable idea is the one which seems chiefly to attract Mr Mackie,
because it fits in with traditional egoism. Mackie approvingly cites
Dawkins’s exposition of it in terms of three imaginary genetic strains
in a supposed bird population. They are: Suckers, who help everybody
indiscriminately, Cheats, who accept help from everybody and never
return it, and Grudgers, who refuse help only to those who have
previously refused it to them. These ‘strategies’ are supposed each
to be controlled by a single gene, and the help in question is assumed
to be essential for survival. In this absurdly abstract and genetically
quite impossible situation, Dawkins concludes that Cheats and Grudgers
would exterminate Suckers, and Grudgers might well do best of all.
Mackie comments with satisfaction that ‘a grudger is rather like
you and me’ (p. 410), and reproves Socrates and Christ for supporting
Suckers in telling us to return good for evil. ‘As Dawkins points
out’, he goes on, ‘the presence of Suckers endangers the healthy
Grudger strategy… This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche’s
view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian
type’ (p. 464), though he more cheerfully concludes that such moralities
are mere words and will have no influence anyway.
Now
even if Dawkins’s calculations made genetic sense, the only way
in which they could provide support for Nietzsche or any other philosophic
egoist would be by showing that ‘reciprocal altruism’ or Hobbesian
prudential bargaining was the only source, or at least far
the most persistent and central source, of all animal altruism -
in which case we should indeed have good reason to suspect that
it was more important than appeared in the human case as well. But
the facts of animal life contradict this suggestion entirely. The
main source and focus of altruistic behaviour in animals is the
care of the young, which in most species will certainly never be
repaid.
Where
the young leave home at maturity, parents are lamentably bad Hobbists
if they take any notice of their children at all, apart from eating
them. Moreover, advanced social species show a great deal of casual
and uncalculating friendliness in their lives, and this often proceeds
from old to young, from the strong to the weak, even where there
is no blood relationship. Calculation about the future is an extreme
late-comer in evolution; what forges society is the emotions. Animals
are never guided in their lives by any such rigid, simple, games-theory
criterion as ‘did he do it to me last time?’ still less ‘will he
be able to do it back?’ They can certainly be angry, and to some
extent bear grudges. But these events form only one strand among
others in the very complex web of social relations which unites
them. Within their friendships, mutual help will indeed take place.
But the reason will not be the recognition of an insurance premium
falling due. It will be liking and affection.
All
this is to explain what I mean by calling Dawkins’s case absurdly
abstract. (It is significant that he could not find a real one.)
Dawkins supposes the help given to consist in grooming. But then
- at least in birds and mammals - the behaviour of ‘sucker’ is impossible.
Grooming occurs only in social creatures, and occurs there as part
of their social bonds. They groom their friends and relations; nobody
grooms all comers indiscriminately. This is not a fiddling point.
The advantage of being social does not spring from a chance collection
of isolated behaviour-atoms like hygienic grooming. It is only possible
as part of a whole complex way of life in which the outgoing emotions
- which egoism denies - constantly work for harmony. (Insects may
need to be understood differently, but then neither Mackie nor Dawkins
supposes that we are insects.) This disregard of the essential emotional
context reappears in Mackie’s idea that the undiscriminating ‘sucker’
behaviour is one recommended by Socrates and Christ. Neither sage
is recorded to have said ‘be ye equally helpful to everybody’. Both,
in the passages he means, were talking about behaviour to one narrow
class of people, with whom we are already linked, namely our enemies,
and were talking about it because it really does present appalling
problems. The option of jumping on one’s enemies’ faces whenever
possible has always been popular. In spite of its attractions, and
in spite of Nietzsche’s romantic power-worship, it has proved to
have grave drawbacks. Of course charity and forgiveness have their
drawbacks too, especially if they are unintelligently practised.
As Mackie rightly says, there are problems about reconciling them
with justice, and justice too has its roots in our emotional nature.
There are real conflicts here as both Socrates and Christ realized.
But since they are real they cannot be much helped by a dashing
gesture towards Nietzsche.
In
dealing with these problems Dawkins’s grossly simplified and distorted
scheme is no use at all. Suckers do not exist. A blank, automatic,
undiscriminating disposition to help everyone in sight would be
pathological in any animal. In a human being, it would certainly
not pass as charity or forgiveness but simply as loopiness. No doubt
this, along with the equal dottiness of ‘cheat’, is what gives Mackie
the impression that, by comparison ‘a Grudger is rather like you
and me’. Being a shade less simple he certainly is more so,
but the difference is trifling. We find him slightly less hard to
believe in because he seems to show signs of being able to distinguish
between friends, enemies and strangers. And we, like any other social
animal regard this as a paramount condition of normal life. But
the signs are deceptive because the Grudger is supposed to view
as enemies all those who have ever failed to return his help in
the past, and as friends all those who have returned it. This principle,
on which a man’s employer would usually be his best friend and his
children always his enemies, is unknown in the animal world. Altruism
is transitive long before it is reciprocal. No one who has heard
of evolution has any business to suppose, as Hobbes excusably did,
that calculating prudence is the root of all social behaviour. Now
that we know how complex the social life of other species can become
when their intelligence does not make calculation possible, we know
that there is no such single root. Ethological comparison strongly
confirms, what an unprejudiced view of the human scene has always
suggested, that motivation is complex. There is no short cut to
understanding it. In each case we have to look at the detailed evidence.
The
particular case which Mackie raises of the way in which the injured
treat their injurers is a good instance of the surprising complexity
which we find when we do this. In the species most like our own,
lasting resentment after injuries is by no means a prominent or
important motive. In some cases, of course, immediate fighting is
possible, but prolonged grudge-bearing is rare and trivial. Jane
Goodall notes with interest how in her chimps the usual effect of
an injury is something very different - a distressed approach to
the aggressor with a demand for reconciliation. What seems to be
most noticed is not the injury itself, but the failure of the social
bond:
A
chimpanzee, after being threatened or attacked by a superior, may
follow the aggressor, screaming and crouching to the ground or holding
out his hand. He is, in fact, begging a reassuring touch from the
other. Sometimes he will not relax until he has been touched or
patted, kissed or embraced (In the Shadow of Man, p. 221).
While
a male chimpanzee is quick to threaten or attack a subordinate,
he is usually equally quick to calm his victim with a touch, a pat
on the back, an embrace of reassurance. And Flo, after Mike’s vicious
attack, and even while her hand dripped blood where she had scraped
it against a rock, had hurried after Mike, screaming in her hoarse
voice, until he turned. Then as she approached him, crouched low
in apprehension, he had patted her again and again on her head,
and as she quietened, had given her a final reassurance by leaning
forward to press his lips on her brow (p. 114).
As
she points out, this reaction makes it possible to resume the relationship
as though the injury had never taken place. (A community of retentive ‘grudgers’ would by contrast be a terribly insecure one; no lapses
would be tolerated.) She rightly remarks, too, that small human
children do the same thing. It is only for adult human beings, with
their much stronger powers of memory, imagination and foresight,
that this simple reaction becomes impossible. The whole problem
then takes on another dimension of complexity.
Altogether,
I know of no evidence from the behaviour of other species to suggest
that prolonged grudge-bearing is anywhere a powerful motive. It
can hardly, then, be an important root of justice. By contrast,
readiness to fight back immediately in case of injury certainly
is such a root. Actual animal-watching shows that this tendency
is nothing like as strong or as common as has often been imagined.
Still, there are plenty of situations where it does occur, usually
either between individuals of roughly equal status, or between strangers,
or on occasions of exceptional outrage. But to grow into the emotional
raw material of justice, this capacity for instant retribution needs
another element. It has to become vicarious; that is, altruistic.
And it does so. Dominant animals often do attack middle-ranking
ones who are bullying their inferiors, and may take the inferiors
under their permanent protection. But this too is an outgrowth of
parental protectiveness; again it presents the problem of altruism.
In fact, the account that Mill gave of the matter is a fair one,
provided that it is understood, not as an analysis of the notion
of justice, but as an account of its psychological origins:
The
sentiment of justice appears to me to be, the animal desire to repel
or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom
one sympathizes, widened so as to include all persons, by the human
capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human conception of intelligent
self-interest (Utilitarianism, Ch. 5).
But
the fact that there are ‘those with whom one sympathizes’ at all
is ruinous to simple-minded egoism. ‘The human capacity of enlarged
sympathy’ certainly makes the point still more pressing, but the
simplest case of parental care in animals already presents it in
a damning form.
This
persistent difficulty in reducing parents to the egoist pattern
is just the kind of thing which makes Dawkins’s typical readers
- people with vaguely egoist leanings about individual human psychology
- willing to follow him in losing touch with the observed facts
of motivation altogether and taking off for the empyrean with the
Gene. Dawkins, however, does not even start from those facts. He
draws all his material from ‘sociobiological’ evolutionists such
as W. D. Hamilton, Edward O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith who
are not directly interested in individual psychology at all. (Incidentally,
his pages are virgin of originality except for a single suggestion
which I shall discuss in my last section.) These evolutionists’
main business has been to show how conduct which does not benefit
the agent can survive in evolution by benefiting his kin; they have
worked out the arithmetic of ‘kin-selection’. This way of thinking
actually makes any dependence on individual selfishness as a motive
unnecessary, and the term ‘selfish’ should not appear in their writings.
For some reason, however, they are still devoted to it. Even the
least romantic of them, W.D. Hamilton, has a paper called ‘Geometry
for the Selfish herd’, and Wilson takes enormous pains to show that
a great range of obviously uncalculated altruistic human behaviour,
such as impulsive rescuing, is really bargaining, and therefore
concealed selfishness.[3] They show a strong and
unexamined tendency to assume both that individual motivation must
actually, despite appearances, be selfish, and that it makes sense
to talk of entities other than individuals as being selfish. R.
S. Trivers, closely followed by Dawkins, has inflated this bad habit
into a mythology. Before examining it, however, it is worth while
asking why dogmatic egoism exerts this powerful pull. At the quite
unthinking level, of course, it has two great attractions, both
of which it shares with Hedonism - its great apparent simplifying
power, and its swashbuckling style. But anyone who is so far intrigued
by these as to begin applying it in detail quickly finds that the
facts are too complicated for it. The first advantage is illusory.
The second, though very influential in accounting for Dawkins’s
success, cannot be the only factor determining his mentors; two
other more serious reasons come in.
The
first is an error that has always dogged this controversy, namely,
an unrealistic notion of altruism. People define altruistic behaviour
negatively, as activity which while helping others does nothing
for the agent, which he himself does not at all want, or which is
necessarily to his disadvantage. This negative conception seems
to destroy the possibility of motivation towards it. The word however
means something positive. Thy act is done for the benefit
of another. Helping him is the aim, one’s own feelings are
the inducement; one’s own disadvantage forms no part of the idea.
It is mere confusion to suppose that satisfaction taken in it, or
its happening to turn out useful to one, make it a selfish act.
Bishop Butler long ago nailed this error:
If,
because every particular affection is a man’s own, and the pleasure
arising from its gratification his own pleasure, such particular
affection must be called self-love, according to this way of speaking,
no creature whatever can possibly act but merely from self-love.
But then, this is not the language of mankind; or if it were, we
should want words to express the difference between the principles
of an action, proceeding from cool consideration that
it will be to my advantage; and an action suppose of revenge, or
of friendship, by which a man runs upon certain ruin, to do evil
or good to another (Sermon XI, Sec. 7).
Altruism,
in fact, is not a fantastic concept, but a descriptive one with
a use to distinguish some existing motives from others. Besides
this familiar difficulty, however, the evolutionary context adds
another, newer and more confusing factor. In natural selection,
many are born but few survive for long. We call this ‘competition’,
and the metaphor at once suggests the specific motive of
contentiousness. As we begin to grasp the scale of the phenomenon,
the strength of the motive involved seems to grow. Before Darwin
drew attention to it, nobody, probably, realized how many must die
early as the necessary condition of the life and development of
a few. My present business is not with the problems of theology
but with the confused way in which people have persistently attributed
to individual creatures the motives which seem needed in an imaginary
being who might actually understand, and will, this whole process
in which he is involved. Darwin, just because he was an exceptionally
humane man, was shaken by what he found, and often used terms like ‘war’ and ‘remorseless struggle’. Being a realistic naturalist,
however, he would never have made the mistake of supposing that
mice and mushrooms, pigs and pampas-grass were actually busy on
unscrupulous plots to destroy each other, still less that minute
scraps of their cell-tissues were so occupied. Only quite advanced
creatures are sufficiently conscious of each other’s existence to
‘compete’ in the full sense of the word - to know what they are
about and have the appropriate motives. (Even human beings do not
usually do so.)Predators, as their expressive movements show, do
not regard their prey with anger or cruelty or as a fellow-creature
at all, but just as meat. Remorse could not enter into the matter,
so ‘remorselessness’ in the true sense of determined callousness
cannot either. For the same reason, the milder notion of ‘selfishness’
is equally out of place. Among social birds and mammals we might
use it, though hesitantly, to describe an individual who constantly
grabbed more than his share. But for non-social creatures we could
not use it so, since no question of shares arises among them. Similarly,
a robin driving intruders off his territory cannot be supposed to
weigh up their claims, predict their subsequent starvation, and
decide in his own favour. He is not selfish; he just wants the place
clear. One cannot speak even of ‘unthinking selfishness’ in beings
incapable of the thought in question. Most selective competition
does not require competitive motives, nor any sort of motive involving
calculation of consequences, and much of it requires altruistic
ones. Absolutely none of it below the human level can proceed from
dynastic ambition. Moreover, dynastic ambition is not selfishness,
but a particular complex human motive which may well conflict with
self-interest. The further down the scale of creatures we go, the
more obvious all this becomes. Nobody attributes selfish planning
to a paramecium. What, then, can Dawkins mean by attributing it
to a gene?
Doing
his best for Dawkins, Mackie ignores this point, but it cannot be
ignored; as its title implies, the book depends on it. Dawkins brings
in gene motivation because his account of individual motivation
is a total failure; in fact, he switches from one to the other with
bewildering speed every time he gets into a difficulty. About individual
motivation he would like to be an egoist, but the facts of ethology
prevent it. He wants to relate the workings of natural selection
in a simple and satisfying way to those of motivation by finding
a single universal motive, and there is no such motive. Having picked
on selfishness for this role, he personifies genes in order to find
an owner for it. It may indeed seem that he must just be speaking
metaphorically, as he sometimes claims. But the trouble about these
admissions is that Dawkins seems to have studied under B. F. Skinner
the useful art of open, manly self-contradiction, of freely admitting
a point that destroys one’s whole position and then going on exactly
as before. When ruin stares him in the face, he withdraws into talk
of metaphors, but he goes on afterwards as if the literal interpretation
still stood. For instance, on p. 95 of The Selfish Gene.
If
we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they
had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate
our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to,
we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to
do? . . . ‘It’ is a distributed agency… A gene might be able to
assist replicas of itself which are sitting in other bodies…
In
short, because a gene cannot perpetuate itself but only likenesses
of itself, the language of selfishness is so crashingly wrong that
even Dawkins sees he will have to hide it under the table for a
bit, even from people who were willing to make a pet of his bogus
entity. But this by no means makes him go back and alter the flat,
unfigurative assertions which are everywhere essential to the book’s
argument or modify its opening manifesto:
[This
book] is not science fiction; it is science. Cliché or not,
‘stranger than fiction’ expresses exactly how I feel about the truth.
We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to
preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which
still fills me with astonishment (p. x).
Not
a word of caution about metaphors follows. On p. 210, Dawkins has
the gall to write, ‘Throughout this book, I have emphasized that
we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents’. These
disavowals do occur now and then, but, like the paternosters of
Mafia agents, they have no force against his practice of habitually
relying on the literal sense. On p. 48, too, he takes a very different
line. Resisting people who might say that he has ‘an excessively
gene-centred view of evolution’, he makes the quite proper and moderate
reply that study of genetic causes is useful. Then, evidently concluding
that genes have been shown to be the only reality, he suddenly adds:
At
times, gene language gets a bit tedious, and for brevity and vividness
we shall lapse into metaphor. But we shall always keep a sceptical
eye on our metaphors, to make sure they can be translated back into
gene language if necessary.
This
seems to mean that not only the talk of conscious motives, but also
all talk of whole organisms and their behaviour, is only a metaphorical
way of describing the behaviour of genes. Anyone who can talk like
this has a deeply confused view of metaphor, and a few words on
this topic seem called for.
To
understand how metaphors can properly be used in scientific writing,
we must get straight a fundamental point about the relation between
metaphors and models. Every metaphor suggests a model; indeed, a
model is itself a metaphor, but one which has been carefully
pruned. Certain branches of it are safe; others are not, and
it is the first business of somebody who proposes a new model to
make this distinction clear. Once this is done, the unusable parts
of the original metaphor must be sharply avoided; it is no longer
legitimate to use them simply as stylistic devices. For instance,
the familiar model of mechanisms in biology has long ago
been pruned of its original implication that a mechanism needs an
inventor or maker. Anyone writing about a ‘biological mechanism’
knows that he must keep such inventors out of his explanation. He
must somehow manage to use the language of purpose and adaptation
without this reference; figurative speculations about the inventor’s
character and history will damage and confuse his reasoning. He
may want to do theology, but if so, he must do it explicitly, not
by loosely extending the language of ‘mechanisms'.
Just
so Dawkins, in officially discussing the merely physical action
of genes, constantly uses the language of conscious motive and depends
entirely on it to create the impression that he is in a position
to say anything about human psychology. Calling genes selfish is
indeed a metaphor. Whatever may be deemed to be the usable part
of this metaphor, which might fit it to become a model, everyone
will agree that the attribution of conscious motive belongs to the
unusable part. Yet that attribution is the only thing which makes
it possible for him to move from saying ‘genes are selfish’ to saying
‘people are selfish’.
If
anyone has any doubt about this, it may be best dealt with by moving
on to examine the supposedly safer branches, to ask ‘what then,
ignoring the figurative flourishes, is the literal sense which the
metaphor is there to convey?’ Shorn of its beams, it turns out to
be a point about the ultimate ‘unit of selection’:
‘The
fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is
not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual.
It is the gene, the unit of heredity (p. 12, cf. p. 42).
Genetically
speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust
- storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations.
They are not stable through evolutionary time [whereas the gene]
does not grow senile… It leaps from body to body in its own way
and for its own ends...The genes are the immortals (p. 36).
The
suggestion seems to be that, in order to understand the behaviour
of larger units or ‘temporary aggregations’, all that we need is
to understand the behaviour of genes. This looks like a simple recommendation
to go and do some genetics. Dawkins, however, is no geneticist,
and when we ask for further information on how genes do behave,
he invariably returns to what was supposed to be merely a metaphor:
Can
we think of any universal qualities which we would expect
to find in all good (i.e. long-lived) genes?…There might be several
such universal properties, but there is one which is particularly
relevant to this book at the gene level, altruism must he bad and
selfishness good . . . Genes are competing directly with their alleles
for survival… The gene is the basic unit of selfishness (p. 38 -
39).
The
reason why he cannot get off this subject is not that he knows no
genetics, but that all the genetics which he or anyone else knows
is solidly opposed to his notion of genes as independent units,
only contingently connected, and locked in constant internecine
competition, a war of all against all. (In spite of some words in
the last quotation, he cannot really mean that it is just war between
each gene and its own alleles; this would allow co-operation over
the rest of the field and destroy his case entirely.) What he needs
is a ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ situation, in which each unit operates
alone, and does it in the same way whatever the others may do. What
he has got is a situation of the utmost causal complexity, in which
genes probably always vary their workings according to context,
always depend on each other, and in many cases may produce a totally
different effect when different ‘modifier’ genes accompany them.
It
is time to turn to the genetic realities. As I have suggested, Dawkins’s
crude, cheap, blurred genetics is not just an expository device.
It is the kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred psychology. For selection
to work as he suggests by direct competition between individual
genes, the whole of behaviour would have to be divisible into units
of action inherited separately and each governed by a single gene.
Something like his simple sucker/cheat model would have to be adequate
right across the board. One gene must govern each ‘strategy’ if
their ‘interests’ are supposed to be always in competition. To convince
us that this is so, Dawkins brings up once more the case of Rothenbuhler’s
Hygienic Bees, creatures which have been appearing in suspicious
isolation as a stage army in all such arguments for some time, and,
as if it were both well proven and typical, he airily adds, ‘If
I speak, for example, of a hypothetical gene "for saving companions
from drowning" and you find such a concept incredible, remember
the story of the hygienic bees’ (p. 66) . Actually, not only does
the bees’ case stand alone, but it is certainly not proven. To show
that even the simple behaviour it involves is really governed by
only two genes would take something like seventy generations of
outbreeding experiments to ensure that the effects described are
not due to the close linkage of genes at a whole series of adjacent
loci, and even this would not show that these genes affected nothing
else.[4] (By Dawkins’s account, Rothenbuhler has studied
two generations.) Those are the standards to which geneticists work.
Genetics is that complicated. It is so because - as is well known
- genes are essentially co-operative; they are linked together in
the most complex and hierarchical ways and affect each other’s working
to an incalculable extent. The idea of a one-one correlation is
not genetics at all. As Dobzhansky put it, tracing the history of
his subject in 1962:
The
original conception of simple unit-characters had to be given up
when it was discovered that the visible traits of organisms are
mostly conditioned by the interaction of many genes and most genes
have pleiotropic, or manifold, effects on many traits . . . Although
geneticists no longer speak of unit-characters, others continue
to do so… The academic lag goes far to explain why so many social
scientists are repelled by the idea that intelligence, abilities
or aptitudes may be conditioned by heredity (Mankind Evolving,
p. 33).
This
refers to work done before 1920. Since that time, the emphasis on
interdependence among genes has steadily grown. In his offhand way,
Dawkins acknowledges some of this in Chapters 3 and 4. But this
in no way embarrasses him when he writes of ‘the grudger gene’ (p.
199) nor when he repeatedly assumes in those same chapters that
each gene is a quite independent force wielding enormous individual
influence. Thus, in considering how sexual reproduction arose, he
writes that this would indeed be hard to understand in terms of
advantage to the individual or even the increase of his posterity:
But
the paradox seems less paradoxical if we follow the argument of
this book, and treat the individual as a survival machine built
by a short-lived confederation of long-lived genes. ‘Efficiency’
from the whole individual’s point of view is then seen to be irrelevant. Sexuality versus non-sexuality will be regarded as an attribute
under single-gene control, just like blue eyes versus brown eyes.
A gene ‘for’ sexuality manipulates all the other genes for its
own selfish ends (p. 47, my italics).[5]
Occurring
in a student’s genetics essay, the italicized sentence would just
be a bad mistake. It cannot be turned into something else here by
the metaphorical context, because this point is not part of the
metaphor; it is what the metaphor is meant to convey as literal
fact. The context does, of course, make a difference, because what
in a student would be simple ignorance is here being used to bail
out an unworkable thesis. The same open disregard for consistency
surrounds the questions of the gene’s credentials as a unit. Its
unity and permanence are, as the quotations just made show, supposed
to be its great merits. Dawkins however cheerfully acknowledges
what is well known; that the word ‘gene’ is used in various senses
by geneticists for varying sections along the DNA, and that none
of them is immortal. In fact the word may be used to indicate different
lengths of DNA within the chromosome depending whether a unit of
mutation, function or recombination is being referred to. These
are so far different that Dawkins’s danger is like that of someone
analysing language, who insists that we must find its fundamental
elements, but talks as if it did not matter whether we take those
elements to be letters, words or sentences. Aware of trouble here,
he hastily adopts a general definition for 'gene’ which he attributes
(rather surprisingly and without reference) to George Williams.
A gene is now defined as ‘any portion of chromosomal material which
potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural
selection’ (p. 30). This, he claims with relief, is the end of his
search for ‘the fundamental unit of natural selection, and therefore
the fundamental unit of self-interest. What I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot help being right.’ That is: in physical terms, what he says is tautological and meaningless;
he might be talking about any section of the DNA, though obscurely.
In psychological terms, it is both meaningless and absurd, since
he has linked the notion of self-interest quite gratuitously to
a kind of subject for which it can make no sense at all. The only
possible unit of self-interest is a self, and there are no selves
in the DNA.
When
the mountains of metaphor are removed, in fact, what we find is
not so much a mouse as a mare’s nest, namely the project of finding
a unit which will serve for every kind of calculation involved in
understanding evolution; a ‘fundamental unit’ at a deep level which
will displace, and not just supplement, all serious reference to
individuals, groups, kin and species, and which (for some unexplained
reason) will also be the unit of selfishness or self-interest. Dawkins
is not the only person to be impressed by the idea of a universal
unit, but it is vacuous. To see how vacuous, we might ask the parallel
question, ‘what is the fundamental unit of economics?’ A coin? If
so how large and of what country? A single worker? A factory? A
complete market exchange? A minimal investor? For various purposes
and from different angles, we might need to count any of these things.
The decision which to count, and how finely to divide them, would
depend entirely on the particular problem which we wanted to solve,
and for most purposes we would refer to all of them, and would rightly
not expect to have to reduce one to another. The reason which Dawkins
gives for electing genes to this strange position in evolution is
that they are less changeable than the entities of which they form
part. But as far as this goes, physical particles are in a stronger
position still. Dawkins sometimes does toy with this thought, calling
them too ‘selfish replicators’; why stop at genes? The reason can
only be that our understanding of genes does a special job in explaining
evolution. This is true, but, since genes are not on view, it is
a limited job, entirely dependent on a direct understanding of the
more obvious entities in their own terms. Moreover, physical particles
can exist without organisms; genes cannot. They survive only if
their owner belongs to a species, and one which has not fallen below
the critical frequency for further breeding. Members of a population
within a species probably have as many as 70—80 per cent of their
genes in common (ignoring ‘neutral alleles’ whose results (allozymes)
make no difference and are therefore ‘invisible’ to selection).[6] And these genes are hierarchically linked in such a way that
any serious disturbance of the group will not give rise to a viable
organism at all. (This is why hybrids are usually sterile.) Genes
are units indeed for some purposes of calculation, but they are
not independent, privateering units. If a gene were a conscious
planner, it would have to reckon its interests as including those
of a mass of other genes on which it is dependent, as well as all
such genes in all possible mates for its owner’s descendants, and
all necessary ancestors for those mates - in short, everything needed
for the gene pool - in short, since any gene pool can fall into
trouble, everything needed for the whole species, and indeed for
the eco-system. No biological unit can he both ‘fundamental’ in
the sense of lasting, and also independent. But this is no tragedy,
since there is no sort of need for such a unit. Physics itself no
longer looks, as it used to, for ‘atoms’ in the strict sense of
unsplittable units, permanent and unchangeable billiard-balls, at
the end of its analysis. There is no point at all in other sciences
dressing up in its old clothes and inventing such units.
There
is however a perfectly good controversy carried on among evolutionists
about the ‘unit of selection’, one dealing with a real but much
more limited issue. We ask: what is it that natural selection
selects? Now there is an obvious and perhaps conclusive sense in
which we must answer ‘individuals’. Organisms are born and die as
wholes; each does not directly involve another, but it does involve
all its parts. The notion of ‘group selection’, however, was invented
to account for the fact that some ways of behaving seem adapted
rather to preserve the group than the individual. (This thought
arose not so much about altruistic behaviour as about population
mechanisms which look like devices to stabilize the size of a group.)
But the phrase ‘group-selection’ is confused, because
what is selected ought to be items out of a set .And it does not
normally happen that many distinct groups compete without mixing.
Instead there is usually gene-flow between them, and group-stabilizing
characters spread throughout the species. ‘Group-selection’ is a
bad term if it is taken to mean something parallel and alternative
to individual selection. All the same. the point raised is a
real one, and draws attention to a confusion in the notion of ‘selection’ itself. Organisms are selected as individuals, but what are
they selected for? The term ‘select’ leads people to hope for a
simple, positive answer to this question, a single, isolable purpose.
We would like to say, ‘just as an employer choosing workers selects
simply the ones who will maximize profits, so evolutionary pressures
select simply those who will maximize something specific like their
own life-span’. But neither employers nor pressures can really act
so simple-mindedly. The idea of an ‘economic man’ whose sole
aim is to maximize profits cannot be made coherent. This is
not only because, if he is a man as well as being economic, he will
be moved by non-economic considerations like not wanting to go to
jail or work himself to death. It is because we do not know, and
economics cannot tell us, at what time the profits are to
be counted. Security for next year, or for some such slice of the
future, normally counts as a condition to be satisfied before profits
start to be reckoned; indeed, the notion of ‘profits’ is normally
understood against a background of this condition and many others,
such as not murdering all possible rivals. But in principle one
could decide to aim at absolute maximization in six months followed
by suicide, or alternatively, as misers do, to live in penury with
a view to maximizing at the end of the longest possible life-span.
Quite different policies would follow these decisions. Puzzles remarkably
like this infest the attempt to find a single aim for natural selection.
Sociobiological thinkers are inclined to hope they can solve them
by substituting ‘maximum genetic fitness’ for maximum life-span’
as the aim of selection. But this is mere word-spinning. ‘Maximum
genetic fitness’ means having as many surviving relatives as possible,
and this simply is ‘being selected’ - it is not the aim or
condition of it. Just as with economics, the degree of ‘success’
achieved will seem to vary with the time when one decides to do
the audit. Changes long after an individual’s death can bring his
hitherto unwelcome genes into sudden demand; webbed feet or a silent
habit become necessary in new circumstances. But they might not
have done, and it is idle to say ‘then he was fitter than we supposed’;
after all, we might have to reverse the judgment again later on.
It
is probably necessary, for evolution as for economics, to think
not of one single aim, but of a number which converge, and particularly
to notice a number of negative conditions which must be met. No
sensible economist supposes that his subject lays bare the ultimate
structure of human life and reveals its deep determining purpose.
Evolution, however, is a much larger and more complex thing than
human life, less likely still to yield to formulation in such simple
terms. Even if we confine ourselves to asking what is needed for
an individual to be ‘selected’ - to survive and leave descendants
- we shall not find one goal which he has to reach, but rather a
great many disasters which he has to avoid. His own qualities can
only account for sonic of them. Some are outside anyone’s control,
some - a great many in social species - lie in the control of con-specifics.
Mutual aid and protection can be quite essential to him, and they
are more often transitive than reciprocal. Because they largely
occur among kin, this point has been expressed by talking of ‘kin-selection’,
which means the development of kin-profiting behaviour by the selective
advantage which it gives to those kin-groups which practise it.
This is a reasonable idea, though again it is not actually an alternative
to individual selection. As with larger groups, the picture
is not one of isolated kin-groups competing, but of protective behaviour
spreading through the advantage it confers. Since kin-groups are
normally not exclusive, this spread will eventually go beyond them. ‘Kin’ in fact is not the name of a super-entity which replaces
individuals in the selection process, but a pointer to the necessarily
social character of some behaviour. This social character can have
various ranges. Parental care helps chiefly one’s kin. The mobbing
of predators helps chiefly one’s group. Migration and colonization
may help chiefly one’s species. In all these kinds of case, the
reason why the behaviour can develop is that it helps to build up
the supportive background needed by all individuals rather than
directly helping the agent.
Thus
the notions of kin- and group-selection each have a point, but it
is one which can be expressed compatibly with the obvious truth
expressed by the notion of individual selection. Real empirical
issues remain, about just how the mechanisms involved work, both
socially and physiologically, but a blank clash of polarized views
is unnecessary. Gene-selection, however, which Dawkins puts forward
as winning candidate for this somewhat unreal race, is a much more
obscure idea. Because of the genetic complications I have mentioned,
it is hard to give it any meaning at all. As Stephen Jay Gould sensibly
puts it:
No
matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is
one thing that he cannot give them - direct visibility to natural
selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them
directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary… Bodies cannot be
atomized into parts, each constructed by a single gene. . . Parts
are not translated genes, and selection doesn’t even work directly
on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms . . . The image
of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival,
bears little relation to developmental genetics as we understand
it (‘Caring Groups and Selfish Genes’, Natural history, Vol.
86, Dec. 1977).
Why,
finally, does all this matter? There are many aspects of it which
I cannot go into now, and I concentrate on the moral consequences
which Dawkins and Mackie draw. Egoism, when it is not just vacuous,
is a moral doctrine. It has, as Mackie sees, always a practical
point to urge. Aristotle used it to tell us to attend to our own
personal and intellectual development. Hobbes used it to urge citizens
to treat their government as accountable to them generally, and
particularly to make them resist religious wars. Nietzsche, non-political
and often surprisingly close to Aristotle, did on his egoist days
preach self-sufficiency and self-fulfilment as a counterblast to
the self-forgetful and self-despising elements in Christianity.
But he is only a part-time egoist. Any attempts to use him as a
signpost here would, as usual, be frustrated by his equal readiness
to denounce bourgeois caution and exalt suicidal courage, or ‘love
of the remotest’. He hated prudent bargaining. His egoism is confused,
too, by contributions from his personal terror of love and human
contact. Still, against the wilder excesses of Christianity he certainly
had a point, and he was able to make it without any reference to
genes. Is there any way in which reference to genes could become
relevant to disputes about it? Dawkins makes the connection as follows:
The
argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines
created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes
have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly
competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities
in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected
in our genes is ruthless selfishness . . . Let us try to teach generosity
and altruism, because we are born selfish (pp. 2—3, my italics).
He
contends, that is, that the appearance of ‘a limited form of altruism
at the level of individual animals’ including ourselves, is only
a deceptive phantom. The underlying reality, as he often says, is
not any other individual motivation either, but the selfishness
of the genes. Yet he just as often talks as if this established
that the individual motivation were different from what it
appears to be - as here, ‘we are born selfish’. His thought
seems to be that individual motivation is only an expression of
some pro-founder, metaphysical motivation, which he attributes to
genes, and is bound therefore to represent it. And he has arrived
at his notion of gene-motivation by dramatizing the notion of competition.
Even as drama, this fancy is gratuitous. All that can be known about
our genes from the fact that they have survived is that they are
strong. If people insist on personification, the right parallel
would no doubt be with a situation in which a number of travellers
had, independently, crossed a terrible desert. It might happen that
in doing so they had unknowingly often removed resources which would
have saved the lives of others - but this could tell us nothing
about their characters unless they had known that they were doing
so, and scraps of nuclear tissue are incapable of knowledge. We
could be sure only that such travellers were strong, and to make
a parallel here we must examine the concept of gene ‘strength’.
This strength is not an abstract quality, but is relative to the
strains imposed at the time. The fact that people have survived
so far shows only that they have had the genetic equipment to meet
the challenges they have so far encountered. Human pugnacity had
its place in this equipment. But since people are now moving into
a phase of existence when that pugnacity itself becomes one of the
main dangers to be faced, new selective pressures are beginning
to operate. In this situation telling people that they are essentially
Chicago gangsters is not just false and confused, but monstrously
irresponsible. It can only mean that their feeble efforts to behave
more decently are futile, that their conduct will amount to the
same whatever they do, that their own and other people’s apparently
more decent feelings are false and hypocritical. On the other hand,
to tell them (what is quite different) that they have actually no
motives at all and no control over their actions, that they live
in a permanent state of post-hypnotic suggestion, helpless pawns
in the hands of powers over whom they have no influence, is melodramatic
and incoherent fatalism. The unlucky thing is that people enjoy
fatalism, partly because it promotes bad faith and excuse-making,
partly because the melodrama has a sado-masochistic appeal - an
appeal which gets stronger the nastier the powers in question are
supposed to be.
Dawkins,
however, claims innocence of all this. H says he is merely issuing
a warning that we had better resist our genes and ‘upset
their designs’:
Be
warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals
co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you
can expect little help from biological nature… Let us understand
what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least
have the chance to upset their designs… (p. 3).
He
does not explain who the ‘we’ are that have somehow so far escaped
being pre-formed by these all-powerful forces as to be able to turn
against them. He does not even raise the question how we are supposed
to conceive the idea of ‘building a society in which individuals
co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good’, if
there were no kindly and generous feelings in our emotional make-up.
He does however see some difficulty in accounting for the diversities
of human conduct. This so far disturbs him that he produces for
once an idea of his own, not derived from Trivers, Hamilton, Wilson
or anybody else - the idea that cultural evolution is a process
on its own, taking place in units called memes (short for
mimemes):
Examples
of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways
of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves
in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,
so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain
to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called
imitation (p. 206).
These
memes, equally with genes, are selfish and ruthless:
When
we look at the evolution of cultural traits, and at their survival
value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about . .
. A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply
because it is advantageous to itself… Once the genes have
provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of
rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not
even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation (pp. 214-215).
So,
apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking
what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves.
We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs
they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other
satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs
cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why
dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather
then elephants or octopuses. This is not an easy question to handle
for dances, but it will be still harder for scientific theories.
Dawkins explicitly includes them as memes, so that the proper way
to enquire about them seems to be, not to investigate their truth
or any other advantage which they might have for the people using
them, but to study the use they make of people. Here, to be frank,
Dawkins blathers, and no wonder. The idea of memes is meant to save
human uniqueness, to avoid producing the sense of insult which readers
often feel on being told that their traits are inherited, and which
they have a right to feel ten times more strongly after the account
which Dawkins has given of inherited traits. But it is still an
explanation of the only kind which (apparently) Dawkins can conceive,
namely a metaphysical one in terms of autonomous, parasitical, non-human
entities. Again it is unrelated to the facts, and on top of that
this time it fails still more obviously and resoundingly in the
job of providing ‘units’ .A meme is meant to be ‘a unit of cultural
transmission, or a unit of imitation’. In the case of genes, Dawkins
has insisted very firmly on the permanence, distinctness and separability
needed for such units, and because the general public does not realize
that genes do not have it, he has more or less got by. In the case
of ‘memes’ the simplest observer can see that no such standards
can be met. Consequently, even if - absurdly - imitation were the
essence of culture, it could not have units and the whole conception
falls to the ground. Besides this, of course, the theory not only
fails to give a proper, workable account of human freedom but sets
up another, apparently impenetrable, barrier in the way of supposing
that we are free at all. No wonder, then, that Dawkins hurries past
his half-finished meme-construction to advise us in peroration,
to save ourselves from ‘the worst excesses of the blind replicators’
including memes. We are to do this partly by improved calculations
of self-interest, but also, he says, partly by ‘deliberately cultivating
and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism something that has no
place in nature, something that has never existed before in the
whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured
as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators.’ Why it should be imagined that Dawkins and his disciples, beginning
this enterprise now, could succeed when everyone else in recorded
and unrecorded history who has tried it has managed only to become
infested by memes (including scientific theories), does not emerge.
Nor is it clear whether Mr Mackie is going to welcome this new enterprise.
Over
memes there is, of course, a nightmare possibility of developing
Dawkins’s case. In a sufficiently depressed mood, a psychologist
might really feel moved to describe the history of human thought
in terms of its progressive infestation by conscious, self-interested,
parasitical bad ideas. For the time, that might seem to him
the only way of explaining the confusion he sees, the chronic waste
of human speculative intelligence, the contentiousness, the showing-off,
the neglect of obvious facts. In this project, he might well find
his most convincing examples in theories of motivation, and specially
in those (like Dawkins’s) which simplify it by reduction and trade
on fatalism. This topic is, of all important human enquiries, perhaps
the hardest to approach impartially, the most prone to distortion
both by oversimplification and bad faith. Modern specialization,
too, has made it even more vulnerable to bad theories by dividing
the critics who should provide immunity against them. There is now
no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except
talking bad philosophy to scientists. Should we then (he might wonder)
resign ourselves to enduring all such manifestations, including The Selfish Gene, as impregnable alien life-forms, a kind
of mental bacillus against which no antigen can ever be developed?
Emerging finally from his bad mood, however, he would find strength
to resist this idea. Entities (he would remind himself) ought after
all not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Spooks should not be
encouraged; less superstitious explanations are not hard to find.
Slapdash egoism is not really a very puzzling phenomenon. It is
a natural expression of people’s lazy-minded vanity, an armchair
game of cops-and-robbers which saves them the trouble of real enquiry
and flatters their self-esteem. No non-human intervention is needed
to account for it; it is a commonplace, understandable disorder
of human development, like obesity or fallen arches. It is no subject
for science fiction; ordinary care and attention are enough to remedy
it.[7]
University
of Newcastle upon Tyne
References
1 J. L. Mackie, ‘The Law of the Jungle’, Philosophy 53 (October
1978).
2
The attempt which he has eventually made to answer some of these
criticisms may be read in Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 47 (1978), 61—76. Apart from some minor disputes, it simply intensifies
the conceptual blunders which I discuss here. Dawkins always answers
opponents who point out that ‘genes’ as scientists normally conceive
them cannot possibly play the role which he assigns to them by retreating
still further from the facts to a more general metaphysical position
where ‘genes’ are classed as ‘replicators’. Unless he either learns
to do metaphysics or retreats out of sight entirely, this is not
going to do him any good.
3
See Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1975), 120. He
adds, however, ‘Human behaviour abounds with reciprocal altruism
consistent with genetic theory, but animal behaviour seems to
be almost devoid of it’. He accounts for this (as I do) by the
lack of calculation in animals, but seems not to see that, since
these ‘animals’ are the subjects we are dealing with for almost
the whole of evolution, any ‘genetic theory’ inconsistent with their
capacities will have to be revised. Dawkins, in his ‘Grudger’ story,
ignores Wilson’s reasoning here, as he does most other things that
do not suit him.
4
For an example of such work fully carried through, see Kyriakou,
Burnet and Connolly on heterozygote advantage in the mating behaviour
of Drosophila (‘The behavioural basis of over-dominance in
competitive mating success at the ebony locus in Drosophila
melanogaster’). Animal Behaviour 27 (1979) (in press).
5 Contrast with this confident and startling pronouncement a typical
passage from the Preface to John Maynard Smith’s thoughtful book The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge University Press, 1976): ‘I am under no illusion that I have solved all the problems that
I raise. Indeed, on the most fundamental questions - the nature
of the forces responsible for the maintenance of sexual reproduction
and genetic recombination - my mind is not made up. On sex, the
relative importance of group and individual selection is not easy
to decide… It has struck me while writing that the crucial evidence
is often missing, simply because the theoretical issues have not
been clearly stated.’
6 See R. S. Singh, R. C. Lewontin, and A. A. Felton on ‘Genetic Heterogeneity
within Electrophoretic "Alleles" of Xanthine Dehydrogenase
in Drosophila pseudoobscura’, Genetics 84 (1976), 609-629.
7 For a fuller discussion of sociobiological ideas in their more
modest, Wilsonian form, see my book Beast and Man (Cornell
University Press, 1978; Harvester Press, 1979), Chapters 4-8. Up
till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary
to break a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackie’s article is not
the only indication I have lately met of serious attention paid
to his fantasies. What this shows is that, in the absence of a serious
and realistic psychology of motive, people will clutch at straws.
Moral philosophers, in particular, have so thoroughly and deliberately
starved themselves of the natural facts needed to deal with their
problems that many of them are reduced to a weak state in which
they lack resistance to even the most obvious absurdities. Anti-naturalist
diets must be altogether given up if this sort of thing is to be
avoided.
I
would like to acknowledge invaluable help over the scientific side
of this paper, given by my colleague Dr A. L. Panchen of the Zoology
Department of the University of Newcastle.
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