THE DISSENT OF DARWIN
"I believe natural selection represents
a truly hideous sum total of misery...a process of misery that has given
rise to immense beauty."--Richard Dawkins
When zoologist
Richard Dawkins' The
Selfish Gene was published 20 years ago, it practically snuffed out
many readers' belief in God and in their own importance, for it described
in stunning and terrifying detail a world where all life was merely the
conveyor belt for the gene. Its mission: to replicate itself. DNA was the
fundamental and irreducible unit of life that spun itself endlessly into
the incredible diversity of flora and fauna. Everything we hold most dear--acts
of love, altruism, the painterly beauty of the peacock's tail, the birth
of a newborn--could, according to Dawkins, be explained by the gene's attempt
to survive, and to hitch a ride on the fittest organism possible, the one
most likely to mate and reproduce. Darwinian
natural selection was Dawkins' ruling theme. The gene looked like the
most purely selfish entity one could imagine, but it was more like the
Terminator--just programmed to survive.
Since that
time, Dawkins,
who was recently appointed the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public
Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has elaborated on his elegant
if chilling theory in the books The Blind Watchmaker, River Out
of Eden, and most recently, Climbing Mount Improbable. As Dawkins
once stated, `Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.' Like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, Dawkins is one of those
rare scientists who have captured the popular imagination. And his particular
world view has profoundly influenced our interpretation of nature, business,
love, medicine, and life itself. Even ideas, says Dawkins, are like genes.
The fundamental unit of meaning, which he calls the meme, may be able to
infect us like the renegade DNA of viruses. Does this mean that Nazism
was just a powerful meme, an epidemic of one nasty, highly infectious idea?
Of late there
has been an outcry against Darwin and Dawkins. Last summer, when Commentary
magazine published an essay, The
Deniable Darwin, by David Berlinski, it elicited a flurry of letters--from
scientists, businessmen, lawyers, chemists, biologists--so thick that the
published ones alone ran 37 pages. As one reader wrote, `You have fired
a shot in what is becoming a great moral revolution, and it will be heard
around the world.'
To get to
the heart of that revolution, we decided to host a debate between Dawkins
and the man who coined the term virtual reality, Jaron
Lanier. Lanier is a computer scientist and musician, a visiting scholar
at the Columbia University department of computer science, a visiting artist
at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and a provocative thinker
on evolution, morality, and ideas. Lanier and Dawkins met last year at
the New York City home of John Brockman, a writer who holds salons on science
and culture.
Lanier sees
himself as a Darwinist who has no basic quarrel with evolutionary theory,
but who doesn't believe it's the only or most apt metaphor for our lives.
According to Lanier, natural selection is only part of the human story,
and we are more than just the accidental result of a stream of digital
information encoded in our genes. In fact, what's best about us and civilization
may be our ability to thwart evolution. --Jill Neimark
JARON LANIER:
I'm worried that evolution is being used in the wrong way by all sorts
of people who otherwise have almost nothing in common. It's become a banner
for New Agers, and for many in the hard sciences. This annoys me no end,
because evolution is the only natural force that should be understood to
be evil. The evolutionary process that created us was cruel.
RICHARD DAWKINS:
Treating evolution as though it were a good thing is a point of view advanced
by English biologist Julian Huxley in the 1920s and 1930s. Huxley tried
to make evolution into a kind of religion. In contrast, his grandfather,
Thomas Henry Huxley, thought that evolution was a thoroughly bad thing,
and I agree with him. I would hold it up as an awful warning.
JL: Here's the
dilemma simply put: Most of us subscribe to the belief that it's not possible
to draw a clean line between people and the rest of nature. Then on the
other hand, we also believe that nature is amoral, that it doesn't revolve
around human ethical systems.
RD: Right.
JL: So it's
hard to figure out the basis of our morality. Either we find ways in which
we're different from nature, or we have to be willing to judge part of
nature as evil. I believe that as a civilization we've helped thwart evolution,
and that's good. Every time we help the needy, or make it possible for
a handicapped person to live and pass on their genes, we've succeeded in
defying the process that created us.
RD: I believe
natural selection represents a truly hideous sum total of misery. When
you look at something like a bounding lion, a sprinting cheetah, and the
antelopes they are bounding and sprinting after, you're seeing the end
product of a long, vicious arms race. All along the route of that arms
race lie the corpses of the antelopes that didn't make it, and the lions
and cheetahs that starved to death. So it is a process of vicious misery
that has given rise to the immense beauty, elegance, and diversity that
we see in the world today. Nature is beautiful. Even a cheetah as a killing
machine is beautiful. But the process that gave rise to it is, indeed,
nature red in tooth and claw.
However, you
go further when you call evolution evil. I would simply say nature is pitilessly
indifferent to human concerns and should be ignored when we try to work
out our moral and ethical systems. We should instead say, We're on our
own. We are unique in the animal kingdom in having brains big enough not
to follow the dictates of the selfish genes. And we are in the unique position
of being able to use our brains to work out together the kind of society
in which we want to live. But the one thing we must definitely not do is
what Julian Huxley did, which is try to see evolution as some kind of an
object lesson.
JL: But if we
hope to separate ourselves from the awful history of evolution that created
us, we have a very difficult time defining exactly how we're different.
RD: You can
simply say that in humans there was a gradual emergence of certain qualities
that no other species has.
JL: Can you
name those qualities?
RD: One of them
is language. Another is the ability to plan ahead using conscious, imagined
foresight. Short-term benefit has always been the only thing that counts
in evolution; long-term benefit has never counted. It has never been possible
for something to evolve in spite of being bad for the immediate short-term
good of the individual. For the first time ever, it's possible for at least
some people to say, `Forget about the fact that you can make a short-term
profit by chopping down this forest; what about the long-term benefit?'
Now I think that's genuinely new and unique.
JL: Is survivability
the only principle that generated our attributes? What about the benefit
for a phenomenon as odd as testicles? It's as if a heavily armored tank
were being ridden by a driver in a balloon on the roof.
RD: Why do we
have them dangling outside ourselves, rather than safely cushioned inside?
JL: I'm familiar
with the conventional explanation, which is that it has to do with the
management of heat. [Sperm cannot survive long at body temperature.]
RD: And you
understand the implausibility of that explanation?
JL: The evolutionary
process has produced such spectacular mechanisms for managing problems
that would seem to be much more difficult than coping with heat. And we
have astonishing regulatory mechanisms for heat in our body already. I
mean, we protect ourselves from invading microorganisms and from extremes
of heat and cold.
If it just turned
out that it was impossible to pass along genes at a particular body temperature,
we could have evolved a different body temperature that was appropriate
to that process. So overall, testicles do seem very strange to me.
RD: That's what
I would have said. But are you familiar with Zahavi's handicap principle?
It sounds really way out, but I think the problem of the `vulnerable balls'
is well suited to this particular explanation.
Zahavi is an
Israeli biologist whose idea was ridiculed when he first put it forward
in 1975, but he has recently been vindicated by some clever mathematical
modeling by Alan Grafen at Oxford University. Zahavi and Grafen state that
in any encounter in animals where advertisement is important--and that's
very, very often--an advertisement is only believed if it's validated by
being costly.
Translated into
English, what the male is saying is, `Look how powerful a male I am, because
I can afford to wear my balls outside my body, in the most vulnerable position.
You'd better not mess with me because I am proving my strength and my ability
as a fighter.'
JL: That's a
sad thought, that advertising might overpower common sense, because of
a universal mathematical principle.
RD: The reason
it works is that all males, even the ones who are not strong, are forced
to wear the badge of being strong, and the badge of being strong is only
believed if it is genuinely costly.
JL: But, Richard,
if this explanation is correct, why didn't we come up with camouflaged
testicles or perhaps four testicles
with a couple of backups inside? And why aren't our hearts or lungs dangling
in bags without any armor around them? Why wouldn't evolution occasionally
choose to advertise some other body part?
RD: Why is the
bone of the skull so thick? Obviously to protect the brain. The weakness
of the Zahavi explanation is that you wheel it out when you need to. When
I'm asked questions like yours about testicles, the best strategy may be
to refuse to answer. Because if you allow yourself to exercise your ingenuity
in solving a particular question, then people come up with another one
that you just cant think of an answer to. We're not testing the ingenuity
of the human mind here.
JL: Agreed.
But a lot of people feel that if evolution can't explain something, why
should they accept it at all? Yet the whole theory doesn't have to be cast
into doubt if it can't explain every particular--such as the origin of
our dreaded dangling. Scientists don't know everything. They work with
utmost patience to test one idea at a time.
PT: Can we go
back to foresight for a minute? If natural selection didn't select for
foresight but allows us to escape its dictates, how does it survive?
JL: My answer
would be that our excess of foresight is like testicles. There are traits
we can't fully explain. It might be luck.
RD: I prefer
to think of foresight as something which natural selection gave us because
it was once useful for hunting buffaloes. We've been given big brains,
which were once useful for a versatile way of life in the plains of Africa.
But now, having moved out of the plains of Africa, those same brains have
taken off in directions which could never possibly have been visualized.
JL: By your
own logic, foresight has to initially have been a happy by-product
of something that resulted in immediate
survivability.
RD: You can
use foresight in order to help yourself and your children to survive. You
can say, `If I drink all the water in the well now because I'm thirsty,
then my children will die of starvation. So I can prepare for the future
and ration the water.' That's ordinary Darwinian survival, but it does
involve foresight.
JL: But humans
seem to have a capacity for foresight that is far beyond what could have
been useful with buffalos.
PT: In the last
five years, you, Richard Dawkins, have become the face, as much as there
is a face, of Darwinian theory. Is this something you're comfortable with?
RD: I am aware
that something like that may have happened in Britain, but I'm quite surprised
to hear you say that of the United States. If it were true, I don't think
I'd mind. I write books in order to educate people about how we came to
exist. As writer Hilaire Belloc said, `When I am gone, I hope it may be
said his sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'
PT: Do you think
the battle over Darwinism has become much more heated lately?
RD: I suppose
that creationists are becoming more vocal in America. I feel a need to
do something about that, and I don't mince my words, so I may be contributing
to the heat.
JL: It's not
just a conflict between creationists and Darwinists. There's a large group
of people who simply are uncomfortable with accepting evolution because
it leads to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses
have no basis in nature.
RD: All I can
say is, That's just tough. We have to face up to the truth.
JL: That answer
is not good enough anymore. People are reacting against science. People
feel science is telling them they're less special, less responsible than
they once believed.
The problem
with a lot of evolutionary thought is that it goes beyond history to make
claims about who we are now, and why we do what we do. Calling people hulking
robots that deliver genes is no more informative or true than saying people
are mobile heat fins in the service of entropy. Human beings can be understood
in many ways. The genetic perspective alone can leave you feeling empty
and arbitrary. Maybe if science were presented in a more compassionate
and humble way, it could help fill the void many of us feel inside.
PT: What are
other perspectives science can offer?
JL: Well, I
think that competition for survival is just one of many self-perpetuating
processes. Look at music. It's everywhere, in all human societies, and
it's obviously not essential for survival. It might have begun as part
of a survival mechanism--in the animal kingdom, song attracts a mate--but
it has long since spun off on its own momentum. The same is true of love.
Love is a trust that breeds more trust. It perpetuates itself. Survivability
is not necessarily the sole determinant of genes.
PT: What's your
reaction to the book Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe? The author,
a molecular biologist, argues that Darwinian selection cannot explain the
incredible complexity that occurs on a molecular level. He offers an explanation
he calls `intelligent design,' which seems like a scientist's name for
God.
RD: The argument
of irreducible complexity is a very old one, and it's one that Darwin himself
faced when talking about things like the eye. Without any backup, this
argument states that something, some X, is irreducibly complicated, and
therefore it can't have evolved gradually and God must have made it. Behe
applies the identical argument at the molecular level.
I'm not a molecular
biologist. Behe is. Why doesn't he stop being so lazy? Instead of saying,
`I can't think of an explanation; therefore, God must have done it,' which
is the ultimate cop-out, why doesn't he actually go to the library and
work out the intermediate stages. By the way, he claims not to be a creationist,
which is ludicrous, of course. He is.
PT: What do
you make of the existence of a book like this right now?
RD: Nothing
very profound. What I make of it is that Michael Behe decided to write
it.
JL: I disagree.
As I said before, I think we're experiencing a moral crisis. A great many
people feel a threat to their most fundamental moral, ethical, and spiritual
sensibilities because they feel they are part of nature; but if nature
is amoral, how are they able to be moral?
RD: But you
can feel nothing but contempt for somebody who, because of their anxiety,
actually distorts scientific facts.
JL: Sometimes
metaphors are presented as scientific facts, when they're not. For instance,
I'd like to discuss your concept of `memes' [units of meaning, or ideas]
as being similar to genes. Ideas do everything that genes can't. We have
an ability to hold ideas on the basis of their long-term value, and not
their immediate survivability. Ideas can also influence each other without
being extinguished.
RD: I agree
with most of what you say. But if you look at my original suggestion of
memes, they were really almost a rhetorical device for telling people that
in spite of what they'd just read about the selfish gene, DNA was not everything.
Memes provided a way of saying, Look, genes aren't the only self-replicating
entities. Maybe ideas play that role. I'm not committed to
memes as the explanation for human culture.
JL: One thing
that just thrilled me recently, and gave me such a sense of awe that I
was just elevated for days, was the evidence of life on Mars. I was shocked
by how similar the chemistry of this apparent life was to our own. And
I was shocked by the blasé attitude in a lot of the scientific community.
It seems to me that this is an enormously big deal.
RD: It's a tremendously
big deal, if it's true. It completely revolutionizes our estimate of the
probability of life arising on a planet. We've assumed that the origin
of life was an improbable event, the kind of thing that may have only happened
once in the galaxy. If you suddenly find two separate evolutions of life
in one solar system, then immediately you know that life is simply teeming
throughout the universe. That's one reason it's a big deal.
The other reason
is that so far, when we think about the general phenomenon of evolution,
we have only a sample of one. We're resting a whole theory of life and
evolution on one sample. If that sample could be increased to two, even
if the second one was a few microfossils, then immediately you would have
a huge infusion of new information and ideas about life as a general phenomenon,
not just a parochial, terrestrial phenomenon.
JL: It means
that it's not unreasonable to think about contacting other life that would
be comprehensible to us.
RD: But the
trouble is that you are becoming too excited by the evidence, which a lot
of people are pretty skeptical about. I wish it could be true, but I must
say I'm not convinced.
JL: Neither
am I, but I'm still entranced by it. I think the sense of awe and wonder
is important to nurture as well.
RD: I absolutely
agree.
Jaron
Lanier
