The Englishmen and a Gene

 

When Prof Dawkins visited the Boston area on October 13, 2019, for a live conversation with the MIT physicist Max Tegmark at the Somerville Theatre, presented by the Center for Inquiry.

The Selfish Gene at Fifty

In 1976 a young Oxford ethologist published a book with a title so misleading that he would spend the next half-century apologizing for it. The Selfish Gene does not argue that people are selfish, nor that selfishness is admirable, nor that genes harbour anything so dignified as a motive. It argues something stranger and considerably more elegant. That the proper unit of natural selection is not the species, nor the group, nor even the individual lumbering about with its anxieties and its mortgage, but the gene. Organisms, on this view, are the vehicles genes build to ferry themselves into the next round. You are, in the most literal sense available to biology, your DNA’s idea of a good time.

I read it in 1986, ten years late, which troubled the argument not at all, since the argument had not aged a day. Dawkins offered no new fact. He offered a new camera angle, and from it patterns invisible at the level of the organism resolved into perfect clarity. Why does the worker bee immolate herself? Why does the bird shout an alarm that points the hawk straight at its own throat? From the organism’s ledger this is madness. From the gene’s, shared generously among relatives, it is shrewd accountancy. Hamilton had already done the mathematics. Dawkins did the thing mathematics cannot, which is make you feel it.

And then, in the closing pages, almost as a man emptying his pockets before leaving the room, he proposed that genes are not the only replicators. Ideas copy themselves from mind to mind, mutating, competing, surviving or perishing on their merits and frequently in defiance of them. He required a word and minted one. The Meme. He did not know he was handing the coming century its native tongue, nor that his coinage would end its days captioning photographs of cats. The history of science contains few prophecies so accurate or so undignified.

Fifty years on, the gene’s-eye view has suffered the worst fate an idea can suffer, which is total victory. It is no longer argued. It is simply assumed, breathed in by every undergraduate who has never heard the name attached to it. To stop being a thesis and become the air is the most a book can hope for.

The Blind Watchmaker at Forty

A decade later, in 1986, Dawkins took aim at a clergyman who had been comfortably dead since 1805. William Paley had proposed that a watch found upon a heath implies a watchmaker, and that the eye, being far cleverer than a watch, implies a far cleverer Watchmaker still. It is a genuinely good argument, which is why it required genuine demolition rather than mere mockery. Dawkins granted Paley everything except the conclusion. Yes, biology drips with the appearance of design. Yes, there is a watchmaker. He is simply blind. He neither plans nor foresees nor intends, being nothing more exalted than cumulative natural selection, and he is entirely sufficient to the task.

I read it in January 1987, while ostensibly preparing for my Secondary Examination. The examination received rather less of my attention than it had been promised, and I regret nothing. The book rearranged the furniture of my mind, and some of it has never gone back. The path had been cleared earlier by The Descent of Man and The Selfish Gene; this was the volume that turned the lights on. Two Englishmen, one bearded and Victorian, one clean-shaven and combative, had between them quietly relieved me of a worldview I had not realized was optional.

The load-bearing insight is that selection is not a single-step affair. The standard objection, that complexity cannot arise by chance, Dawkins concedes at once. Of course it cannot. A tornado through a scrapyard assembles no airliners. But evolution is not chance wearing a lab coat. It is chance filtered, generation upon generation, each modest improvement banked and built upon, until the wildly improbable becomes not merely possible but very nearly compulsory. His “methinks it is like a weasel” toy demonstrates the gulf between random shuffling and cumulative selection, and he concedes its one cheat, the fixed target, before any critic can reach for it. His biomorphs make the honest case, breeding unforeseen menageries of insects and spiders from a few recursive rules, design with nobody home.

The chapter on the eye remains among the finest expository prose in the language, deployed to answer the perennial taunt about the uselessness of half an eye. Five percent of an eye, Dawkins replies, is precisely five percent better than the alternative, and the creature that owns it will not be returning it for a refund. There is no chasm to leap, only a long and patient ramp.

Forty years on, the molecular biology has galloped past anything available in 1986, and every stride has confirmed him. Intelligent design arrived in the 1990s in fresh packaging, found Paley’s watch already inside, and had nothing to add to it.

How I Came to Believe in Nothing, Politely

If the books are a celebration, the reader owes some honesty about what they made of him. They made me an atheist, but a domesticated one, house-trained out of the adolescent variety that mistakes a syllogism for a personality.

The militant phase is, I suspect, a rite of passage one ought to pass through quickly, like teething. For a year or two the newly deconverted treats his absence of belief as an achievement and his neighbour’s faith as a personal affront. I was spared the worst of it, perhaps because the same Darwinian lens that dissolved my theism also explained, with embarrassing thoroughness, why theism was there in the first place. You cannot spend long with the gene’s-eye view and still imagine that a behaviour universal across every human culture, surviving every purge and outlasting every empire, is merely a mistake people keep making. Things that ubiquitous and that durable are not bugs. They are load-bearing.

Religion, viewed through that lens, is one of the great technologies of social evolution. It bound strangers into cooperating tribes long before contracts or constables existed to make them. It underwrote trust between people who would never meet again by installing a witness who saw everything. It organized grief, marked time, restrained the powerful with commandments they could not simply repeal, and gave the dying something to hold that pharmacology still cannot supply. To stand in a cathedral or hear a muezzin and feel only the absence of evidence is to be tone-deaf in a concert hall, technically correct and missing the entire point. I do not believe a word of it. I would not dream of pulling it out by the roots, having some idea of what those roots are holding up.

Which leaves the harder and more interesting suspicion, the one I hold lightly and would defend only over a long dinner. I have come to think that belief and unbelief are, in some meaningful fraction, a matter of wiring rather than of argument. The proportion is genuinely up for debate; that there is a proportion seems to me increasingly difficult to deny. The capacity for transcendence, for sensed presence, for the felt certainty that the universe is addressed to you personally, varies between brains the way perfect pitch or face-blindness varies, and it varies along axes that no amount of reasoning seems to shift. We flatter ourselves that we argued our way to our metaphysics. More often the metaphysics arrived first and the arguments were recruited afterward as a respectable honour guard. The devout person did not lose a debate to me, and I did not win one with him. We were each, to a degree neither of us chose, running different firmware on receivers tuned to different stations.

This is not a comfortable thing for an atheist to believe, since it quietly demotes his own position from a triumph of reason to an accident of architecture. I find I can live with the demotion. It has made me a far better conversationalist at the kind of dinner where these things come up, and considerably less tedious at the kind where they shouldn’t.

A Lifelong Debt

What began as two books read in neighbouring years became a habit I never shook. A standing appreciation of Dawkins as both scholar and stylist, which are separate gifts that rarely share a desk.

As a scholar he has the now-unfashionable discipline of building his opponent’s case to its full height before knocking it down, on the sound principle that demolishing a strawman impresses no one worth impressing. Paley, Lamarck, and Gould, each gets his best suit before he gets the bill. As a stylist he is a writer of the first rank who happened to file his work under science, and it was the prose, frankly, that kept me returning through River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and The Ancestor’s Tale. He plunders Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the King James Bible to argue against everything the King James Bible stands for, which is either impudence or homage and is probably, knowing him, both. Against the charge that science unweaves the rainbow and murders our wonder, he answered for a lifetime that Keats had it backwards. The rainbow explained is the more astonishing object. Mystery is merely ignorance with better lighting.

That is the inheritance, then. The freethinking these books opened was never the grey diminishment its critics advertise. It was wonder relocated. Off the watchmaker and onto the watch, off the designer and onto the staggering fact that the watch assembled itself from the parts up with no one watching and no one to thank. Fifty years for the one book, forty for the other, and the view from the spot where they left me standing remains, by some margin, the best in the house.

Thoughts?