Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

9: Sociobiology

… If we must marvel, let it be at our own presumption in imagining for a moment that we understand the many complex contingencies on which the existence of our own species depends.

Charles Darwin

Edward Wilson – The Rise of the Genes

In our story of evolution, its interpretations and the consequences of these interpretations on the way contemporary humans see themselves, we arrive now at the period which has devised the ideas in the books on the shelves of our favourite bookshop. These ideas shape our thoughts and become part of our lives. In essence, the contemporary ideas about evolution and the human species in it are the same that originated in Darwin’s time and were later known as “social Darwinism.” But the general attitude of biology has irrevocably moved away from anything connected with the non-material, and proclaims itself solidly founded on the rock of material reality.

Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was published in 1975. Like Darwin’s Origins in 1859 and Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis in 1942, Wilson’s book was the catalysis of a thought movement in search of a formulation. In the mid-70s a spate of books appeared about aspects of the central theme, the evolutionary roots of the human as a social being. Titles were e.g. Animal Behaviour: An Evolutionary Approach (John Alcock), The Evolution of Behaviour (Jerram Brown), Human Ethology (Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt) – all, fully or in part, about the behaviour of the human animal as fashioned by evolution.

Desmond Morris had shocked the world with the The Naked Ape in 1967; Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene will closely follow Wilson’s central opus in 1976, and Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within, by David Barash will contribute to the spreading of the glad tidings in 1980: “We humans are self-conscious animals. … Our builders are our genes. … The raison d’être of genes is purely self-propagation …”¹ And that we are no more than robots created by genes to accomplish their selfish ends.

Edward Wilson (born in 1929) was an entomologist who “modestly thought of himself as the world authority on social insects.”² He worked in the footsteps of a trio of famous ethologists: Karl von Frisch, who deciphered the dance of the bees, Konrad Lorenz, famous for imprinting his goslings, and Nikolaas Tinbergen, the theorist of animal aggression. This trio shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973. We know that along with the biological research in the laboratories and in the field there was also a branch of mathematical biology, originally based on the statistical method of Gregor Mendel. Mathematics applied of necessity to groups of organisms and flourished decades before the structure of the gene was discovered. But now it was discovered, in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, “an achievement that stands unrivaled in the annals of twentieth-century biology.”

Wilson, the student of bees, ants and wasps in vivo, resisted the abstract methods of the mathematicians. Till he read a seminal article by William Hamilton on kin selection: “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour.” This was the conversion which would lead to his theory of sociobiology. “I wanted to create a showcase for sociobiology using insects and, in so doing, demonstrate the organizing power of population biology. … I had no intention of extending my studies beyond the social insects. … [But then] I had a revelation. Vertebrates weren’t different at all.”³ Humans, who belong to the phylum of the vertebrates, were no different from ants and wasps, for all of them were the products of evolution and therefore subject to the same laws.

The philosophy supporting this view was gross materialism: all is matter because there is not and cannot be anything but matter. The material animal that is the human had descended from other material animals and consisted of the same material stuff. Not only the body but also the instincts, feelings and consciousness were formed by evolution and accordingly material. Like other animals the human had developed social characteristics which were explainable only through evolution. Wilson studied social insects; he discovered a mathematical theory which seemed to explain the social comportment of his insects; he undertook the huge step of applying his theory to all animals, including humans. Sociobiology was born.

As Wilson said: “Homo sapiens is after all a biological species.” In the present-day context biology should not be associated with its literal meaning ‘knowledge of life’, for it is purely materialistic. “History did not begin 10,000 years ago in the villages of Anatolia and Jordan. It spans 2 million years of the life of the genus Homo. Deep history – by which I mean biological history – made us what we are, no less than culture. … Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography and fiction are the research protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species,”⁴ to wit Homo sapiens. Zoology, ethology, anthropology, sociology – everything became part of a single encompassing field of knowledge: sociobiology.

“Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of social behaviour and the organization of societies in all kind of organisms, including human beings,” said Wilson.⁵ Mary and John Gribbin condense this definition: “Sociobiology is the study of all forms of social behaviour, including humans.” And they hammer it home again and again: “People are animals. … The only way to get a deep understanding of human behaviour is to apply to humankind exactly those rules that have proved so successful in explaining the way other animals behave. … We want to concentrate on animals, particularly mammals and specifically human beings.”⁶

In the previous chapters we have followed the fading away of anything super- or para-natural, accompanied by a parallel hardening of the materialist, positivist, reductionist standpoint, sometimes called ‘metaphysical materialism’. (This means a materialism that is not the consequence of experience, but a theoretical, a priori concept.) What is new here is the concept of the genes as the agents of evolution. In the history of science it is a common phenomenon that an important discovery is at once supposed to be determinant of everything else. (Examples are Newton’s gravitation and Einstein’s relativity.) This happened again when the structure of the DNA molecule, the double helix, was found out. With this discovery started the enormous expansion of microbiology which became the leading discipline in biology. “Molecular genetics took off.” In the ten years following the discovery of the structure of DNA were discovered the mechanism of DNA duplication, the role of messenger and transfer RNA, the genetic code, the mechanism of protein synthesis, and the general principles regulating this synthesis.

“By explaining life through chemistry, and the evolution of life up to the human species through Darwinism, the biological sciences claimed to complete the totality of all science as well as of its explanation of nature. As in the ideology of that time positivist knowledge constituted the ultimate goal of humanity, the new science, having become the all-round explication and the source of all truth, was supposed from then on to replace religion and morality,” writes André Pichot.⁷

Indeed, the attitude behind sociobiology grew virulently atheistic, even anti-theistic and generally anti-religious. In this it shared the spirit of the times. In 1970 the biologist Jacques Monod published Le hasard et la nécessité (chance and necessity), which would cause a worldwide sensation. Monod, a Nobel Prize winner in 1965, literally preached scientific atheism in a style and spirit borrowed from French existentialism. To him religion in any form was “animism.” He wrote: “All the animist systems have in various measures wanted to ignore, besmirch or diminish biological man, make people abhor him or be terrified by some traits of his animal condition. The ethics of knowledge, on the contrary, encourage man to respect and accept this heritage, knowing how to master it when necessary. … Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe where he has emerged by chance. … Man has to awake finally from his age-long dream to be confronted with his total loneliness, his radical strangeness. He knows now that, like a Gypsy, his place is in the margin of the universe, and that he has to live there. This universe is deaf to his music and indifferent to his hopes, as it is to his sufferings or his crimes.”⁸

Soon the physicist Steven Weinberg, another Nobel Prize winner, will write in The First Three Minutes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … The effect to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”⁹ Larry Witham quotes Weinberg as having said: “Whatever naturalism is, it is better than religion, which is tantamount to belief in fairies. … I am all in favour of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue.” “Science has tended to destroy religion and has allowed intelligent people to reject God,” asserts Weinberg, adding wryly: “We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”¹⁰ The chemist Peter Atkins, together with many others, joins the somber chorus: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”¹¹

Reinterpreting the World

“Basically, sociobiology is a radical doctrine,” states David Barash. The word ‘radical’ has several shades of meaning. Which one is applicable in this case? Ullica Segerstråle writes that Edward Wilson showed great zeal in making sociobiology “a truly predictive science, encompassing all of social behaviour,” and that his zeal was “closely tied to an old desire of his to prove the [Christian] theologians wrong.”¹² These are revealing assertions. For “a truly predictive science” reminds us of the pretensions of the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, who said that the future as well as the past of the entire universe could be known if all elements constituting the present were known. Wilson sought to establish mathematics as the basis of biology, and we find the reference to Laplace justified: “Wilson’s moral aim was a quantitative explanation of all aspects of human social behaviour. He was also interested in being able to formulate a trajectory of mankind’s future” as a substitute for divine prophecy.¹³ Barash has the reflection: “It seems increasingly clear that sociobiology will cause us to revise our own self-image, just as the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud have done.”¹⁴

“Wilson’s larger goal was to explain religion,” writes Segerstråle, and she refers to his “deadly ambition” (on a certain occasion acknowledged by himself: “Once again I was roused by the amphetamine of ambition”¹⁵). We find this attitude of his confirmed by the editors of Alas Poor Darwin: “Edward Wilson and other scientists have promoted the sociobiological model of human nature in popular books and magazines with missionary fervour, aiming to convert the unenlightened. … Their claims, their language and their style have striking religious overtones.”¹⁶

There is no doubt that Wilson was convinced to have found the method of explaining and interpreting the world and everything in it, including the human species; he also evaluated his method, sociobiology, as surpassing any other explanation and interpretation, including those of the religions, and that sociobiology should therefore become the new religion of humanity. Monod, one of his precursors, had already written: “In order to survive, vitalism [to Monod a form of “animism,” the chief scapegoat of his reductionism] needs that there remain in biology, if not real paradoxes, at least ‘mysteries’. The developments of the last twenty years in molecular biology have considerably reduced the domain of those mysteries, leaving only the field of subjectivity, of ‘consciousness’, open to the speculations of the vitalists. One does not run a great risk in predicting that, in this still separate domain, the speculations of the vitalists will prove as sterile as anywhere else where they have been applied.”

We keep in mind that, according to sociobiology, an offspring of social Darwinism, it is evolution which has produced everything we humans consist of. The active and determining elements of evolution are the genes. What we are – including our brains, of course, and therefore our consciousness – has been gradually developed in what preceded us in the evolution, more directly in the primates, the australopithecines and the various subspecies of Homo. Anything we are and do is subject to the Darwinian prime law that every organism “maximizes its fitness.” Taking all this in consideration, and recalling the ideologies of race superiority and eugenics which were the fruits of social Darwinism, it is no wonder that the new ideas provoked an inimical reaction.

Sociobiology was accused of being racist, genetically deterministic, abolishing free will, robbing the human being of its dignity, sexist, reactionary, and explaining injustice away.¹⁷ The animosity against Edward Wilson, especially by American extreme leftists, reached the news desks in February 1978, after he had given a lecture at a symposium in Washington. A group of demonstrators had invaded the podium and “a young woman behind me picked up a pitcher of water and dumped the contents on my head.” The audience had given him a standing ovation, writes Wilson, and he had proceeded with his lecture.¹⁸ Yet, the sociobiology story was far from finished.

Richard Dawkins – The Triumph of the Genes

Richard Dawkins (born in 1941) is undeniably the most famous biologist alive. His books are sold in great numbers, he is a darling of the media, and he has a vocal following among scientists. Recently voted one of the world’s three leading intellectuals, he is a superstar. Professionally Dawkins is an ethologist, i.e. expert in animal behaviour, trained at Oxford by Nikolaas Tinbergen, his “old maestro”, and a student of the feeding habits of chickens. His formative years were marked by the upsurge of neo-Darwinism and the spectacular breakthrough of molecular biology.

Behind the scientific formation, however, one senses the character of an enthusiast who might easily turn into a zealot. “I care passionately about what is true and I never say anything that I do not believe to be right.”¹⁹ Hamilton’s mathematical population genetics had for Dawkins “a visionary quality,” but he found the way in which it was expressed “not full-throated enough.” Adding this to the confession that “as an over-romantic graduate” he had been captivated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man and the Omega Point, one will not be surprised by the tone of Dawkins’ prose and the radicalism of his reasonings. This is one of several characteristics he has in common with Edward Wilson.

Another marked influence on him was scientism, more specifically the mentality of the nineteenth century reconditioned by the mind of Bertrand Russell, who wrote: “My view of religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. … Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”²⁰ Moreover Dawkins seems to have assimilated the thought of Jacques Monod, whose Le hasard et la nécessité (1970) became an international bestseller and whom he had heard lecture. At times Dawkins’ words take existentialist Monodian overtones, for instance: “The universe that we observe has precisely the proportions we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,”²¹ reminiscent of the human being pictured by Monod as a lonely Gypsy lost in the margin of the universe.

Dawkins has been called “the ultimate ultra-Darwinist.” He sees himself as “an enthusiastic Darwinian … a real-life Darwinian.” Edward Wilson calls him “Darwin’s most ardent representative on Earth.”²² Major Darwinian elements in Dawkins’ thinking are, firstly, his stance against eighteenth century theological naturalism, of which William Paley had become the figurehead,²³ and which is the central theme of The Blind Watchmaker. Secondly, Dawkins sticks stubbornly to the theory of gradualism as a fundamental mechanism of evolution; in its defense he wrote another of his books, Climbing Mount Improbable. The agnosticism and atheism of Darwin’s background might be taken as a third tie with the glorified master, but Darwin’s hesitant and soul-rending inner struggle differed considerably from Dawkins’ barnstorming anti-theism.

He sparked a furore with The Selfish Gene, the book that made “the gene’s eye view” popular. In this way of explaining and evaluating a living organism the role of agent of life and its evolution, no longer being God, an animist force, or the phenotypal organism itself, is conferred on the genes, whose importance since the discovery of the double helix has taken on gigantic proportions. It is the genes which now determine all aspects of life, acting from a single, all-pervading motive: the selfish urge of self-replication and propagation. “From the selfish-gene point of view, we are robot survival machines,” declares Dawkins, “and because genes themselves can’t pick things up, catch things, eat things, or run around, they have to do that by proxy, they have to build machines to do it for them. That is us. These machines are programmed in advance.”²⁴

Genes consist of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. The novel doctrine teaches that an organism is just DNA’s way of making more DNA. “The argument of this book [The Selfish Gene] is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes,”²⁵ states Dawkins as his chief premise. The animal is a robot. A human animal is a “lumbering robot,” “a large vehicle or ‘survival machine’ built by a gene cooperative for the preservation of copies of each member of that cooperative.”²⁶ Jacques Monod had already declared the cell to be a machine. Edward Wilson had written in his Sociobiology: “The individual organism is only the vehicle [of the genes], part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them with the least possible biochemical perturbation.” Machine, device, robot: life’s riddle was finally solved – a few residual problems notwithstanding, for instance how the genes had originated, where they had their irresistible urge to replicate from, and how they managed to produce their astonishing replicating machinery, living nature.

“The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory,” affirms Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, “expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would immediately have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism.”²⁷ (Elsewhere in the same book he writes: “Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin, if he read this book, would scarcely recognize his own original theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it.”²⁸) In the previous chapters has been shown how tentative and defective Darwin’s original theory was, and how ‘Darwinism’ was ‘invented’ step by step by Weismann, de Vries, the mathematical biologists and the neo-Darwinists. If one finds any truth in this historical review, Dawkins affirmation must sound frenzied, and his admission “I wrote The Selfish Gene in something resembling a fever of excitement”²⁹ does not surprise.

There are more startling aspects to the Dawkins phenomenon. In The Extended Phenotype, “the book that, more than anything else I have achieved in my professional life, is my pride and joy,” Dawkins goes beyond the simple selfishness of the genes. He develops a theory which says that, in order to achieve their selfish aim of maximal replication, genes collaborate not only within the cell and the organism, but with other conglomerates of genes in other organisms and even in their physical environment. (The genotype, it may be remembered, is the genetic basis of an organism, the phenotype its concrete realization as a physical organism.) “Certainly in principle, and also in fact, the gene reaches out through the individual body wall and manipulates objects in the world outside, some of them inanimate, some of them other living beings, some of them a long way away. With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting at the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power. And an object in the world is the centre of a converging web of influences from many genes sitting in many organisms. The long reach of the gene knows no obvious boundaries. The whole world is crisscrossed with causal arrows joining genes to phenotypic effects, far and near.”³⁰

No doubt, Dawkins is of the opinion that the genes are gifted with magic powers. Aware that the one-gene-one-effect doctrine became increasingly unsatisfactory, he switched more and more to groups, clusters or conglomerates of genes acting magically (in any case inexplicably) in unison to realize their common goal. But, according to scientific materialism, is there anything in the universe able to act towards something, can evolution be intentional, can matter be teleological? Of course not. Anyone who admits even a glimmer of such pre-scientific animism, supernaturalism or mysticism steps automatically outside the bounds of academic science. Therefore Dawkins declares sternly: “Selfish genes have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind replicators.”³¹ Which is not what his extended phenotype theory seems to mean or suggest.

And he goes further. He maintains that his view of the selfish gene and the extended phenotype “applies to living things everywhere in the universe,” and thereby founds Universal Darwinism. “It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is shaped by Darwinian natural selection which also endows it with an overwhelming illusion of ‘design’. I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”³² Celebrities may believe and voice anything that pops up in their head, but that does not make it science, even if they are professors of the public understanding of science.

“If I were God,” said Dawkins in an interview, “I wouldn’t do it by evolution! I would do it directly.”³³

The Cultural Animal

Whatever the intentions behind the common effort of scientific materialism to put the human “in his place,” the impression that humans are something more or special was too obvious to be completely disregarded. After all, humans write books about science, play the violin, and sell sandwiches. What makes humans different from other primates, biologically speaking, is their bipedalism, which means that they walk upright on two legs, their exceptionally big brain, their ability to speak, and their ‘neoteny’. (Neoteny means that the human species retains in adulthood the characteristics of very early childhood compared to the physical development of the other primates.) “On the one hand we are obviously animals comparable with any other. On the other hand we behave quite differently from other animals.”³⁴

“Up to the human being, the creation works or is realized by communication of the genetic information, something which we have discovered in the middle of the twentieth century,” writes Claude Tresmontant. “But from the human being onwards the creation changes its regime, for from the moment when a being appears in the universe that is capable of knowing itself, the new creative information is no longer communicated to its genes. It is communicated to its thought, its intelligence, its mind, its liberty. This is the change of regime. The human being is a creation of another order.”³⁵ Owen Gingerich writes: “With the invention of language, humanity crossed the Lamarckian divide from Darwinian evolution, in accordance with which instincts are coded into DNA, to cultural evolution, in which the human brain can begin to store more information than the chromosomes. It is this crossover that makes us distinctly human and uniquely different from the rest of the animal kingdom, the kingdom of which nevertheless we are so much a part.”³⁶

However much he may have tried, the “divide” remained unlevelled in Richard Dawkins’ thinking too. In his dreary landscape crowded with “machines like you and me,” lumbering robots and hordes of genes rushing in their blind selfish effort towards the triumph of replication, suddenly appears a vulnerable humanist. “There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being,” he writes.³⁷ One could all the same observe that, if Darwinism and the values of a human being are two different things, Darwinism cannot be the complete and universal scientific explanation of life Dawkins wants us to believe it is. (In the previous paragraph Owen Gingerich has already associated the theory with nine lives, Lamarckism, with the cultural side of humanity, and no less an authority than Stephen Gould will do as much.)

“Dawkins’ dramatic alternatives – human decency or naked Darwinism – are not posed for effect. He needs the gap between them, because he wants humans to be special. … The buzz of controversy that surrounds Dawkins in public has obscured the curious likelihood that on questions of evolved psychology, his sympathies may be closer to those of the humanities graduate with whom he shares the op-ed pages than to those of his fellow sociobiologists. … If not from God or from nature, from where can we derive our sense of how we ought to live? Dawkins is unsure. His ardent moral certainty is not all it appears.” (Marek Kohn³⁸) Hard as he tried, Dawkins was not able to discard completely the humanistic tradition at the roots of the British academic tradition in which he was educated. Besides, even Bertrand Russell became a public paragon of humanism (and ended with ideas to found a religion).

“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators,” writes Dawkins in The Devil’s Chaplain. The selfish replicators are the selfish genes. (The concept of the “replicator” is one of Dawkins’ rhetorical tricks to circumvent the fact that the function of the genes became increasingly more complex and therefore more difficult to use responsibly in his pseudo-Darwinian scheme.) And on the same page we read the astonishing words: “As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.”³⁹ The versatile Dawkins is also a study in ambiguity.

Already in the eleventh chapter of The Selfish Gene, in which he reveals his theory of the “meme”, Dawkins had written: “I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think that Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. The gene will enter my thesis as an analogy, nothing more.”⁴⁰ He wrote this after the glorification of the genes, the legions of blind little gods who create all life on Earth and in the universe. Isidore Nabi will not have been the only one to comment ironically: “In The Selfish Gene Dawkins had said that we are ‘robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,’ but now he told that we may have to fight against our genetic tendencies. It is really very vexing. Just as I had learned to accept myself as a genetic robot and, indeed, felt relieved that I was not responsible for my moral imperfections, Dr Dawkins tells me that I am not as manipulated as I thought.”⁴¹

After the revolution initiated by Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins, like a second Darwin, proudly proclaims his “new revolution” and produces some of his “purple passages” to match the occasion. “Stand tall, Bipedal Ape.” This is you. “The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gift of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against the implications; the gift of foresight – something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection – and the gift of internalizing the entire cosmos.”⁴²

Even though The Selfish Gene was published only one year after Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology, and both works shared the same inspiration and apparently propagated the same doctrine, the dominant stresses and their whole outlook were quite different. “It is hard to regard Wilson’s sociobiology as being similar to Dawkins’,” writes Ullica Segerstråle. “The core of sociobiology (as we now know it) was articulated in The Selfish Gene rather than in Wilson’s Sociobiology. Wilson’s book was called ‘the new synthesis’, but for practicing sociobiologists the ideas presented in Dawkins’ book became the synthesis-in-use. And the concept that helped delineate and solidify the new sociobiological paradigm was the gene’s eye view.”⁴³ Wilson, with his all-pervading scientism, could not accept the “divide” between the physical realm of the genes and the cultural realm of the ‘memes’, each with analogous but parallel mechanisms. “Wilson could not really ‘afford’ to leave [as Dawkins did] the cultural realm as a separate one, sitting on top of the genetic one, even if he entertained this as a theoretical possibility: materialism had to be guaranteed.”⁴⁴

Memes – The Gremlins of the Mind

The “memes” are another road-side attraction in the Dawkinsian wonderland. The origin of the idea has been sketched in the previous section and is a certainly a valid topic of reflection and eventual research, even if it is grotesque that scientism has to make an effort to recognize that the human being belongs to a category of its own. “Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes,” declares Richard Dawkins.⁴⁵ The problem with him and his ideological brothers-in-arms, however, is their usual “full-throated” affirmation of what is most often no more than a vague intuition, while on the next page or in their next book one will find a negation or the contrary of their own ‘scientific’ novelties.

Once more we find the seed of a Dawkinsian venture in Jacques Monod. “Though the abstract realm transcends the biosphere even more than the biosphere transcends the lifeless universe, the ideas have retained certain properties of the organisms.” (Here Monod bases his thought clearly on the three traditional realms of “lifeless” matter, life, and mind, which he calls “the abstract realm.”) “Just like the organisms, the ideas tend to perpetuate and to multiply their structure; like the organisms they are able to fuse, to recombine, to segregate their contents; like the organisms they evolve, and in this evolution [natural] selection doubtlessly plays an important role.” Monod compares the realm of the mind to the realm of the living organisms, and sees in both an identical or at least an analogous way of evolving. He concludes: “I would not be so bold as to propose a theory of [natural] selection of the ideas, but one could at least try to define some of the principal factors which play a role in it.”⁴⁶

Where Monod feared to tread, Dawkins rushed in at the end of the book that would make him famous, The Selfish Gene. The last chapter of the original edition was titled: “Memes: the new replicators.” It may be recalled that “replicator” is the abstract term used by Dawkins to evade the increasingly difficult definition of the gene and its functions. “A replicator is a piece of coded information that makes exact copies of itself,” explains Dawkins. “The archetypal replicator is a gene, a stretch of DNA that is duplicated nearly always with extreme accuracy, through an indefinite number of generations.”⁴⁷ It may be noted that in the first sentence the piece of coded information copies, or replicates, itself, while in the following sentence it is “duplicated,” which is the correct statement. According to Denis Noble one should “avoid saying that genes do anything at all; it is more that genes are used.” We will have to come back to this important and generally misunderstood point.

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture.” Thus writes Dawkins in his baptismal oration of the memes. The soup metaphor is used in analogy with the origin of life, the first evolution; the “new soup” is the mother-broth of the second evolution, that of the mind, when the siblings with the big brains appeared among the primates. “Recently” means here from one to two million years ago, a short time-span in evolution.

“We need a name for the new replicator,” continues Dawkins, “a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. … It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm 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. … When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”⁴⁸

Dawkins’ idea of the meme has already parasitized a considerable number of brains, contaminating them with the meme virus and the fever to write articles and books about it, thus passing it on. It has also succeeded to invade the Oxford Dictionaries, where we find its definition, “a cultural or behavioural element passed on by imitation or other non-genetic means.”⁴⁹ Other definitions are e.g. “the fundamental unit of cultural transmission … a mental item that is borrowed from one person and passed on to another … a replicator that jumps from one brain to another … whatever it is that is passed on by imitation … a unit of cultural inheritance… a unit of information, with a definite structure, residing in the brain …” The last two definitions are by Dawkins himself.

“Both genes and memes are replicators and must obey the general principles of evolutionary theory and in that sense are the same. Beyond that they may be, and indeed are, very different,” writes Susan Blackmore. “They are related only by analogy.”⁵⁰ The moon and the face of the beloved, termite nests and skyscrapers, vaulting poles and redwoods, children and angels – all are easy to relate by analogy, but less easy to relate by science. The analogy at the core of the meme idea is the one quoted above: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body, via sperm and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.” But genes are very material structures of DNA molecules, memes are invisible because immaterial . Genes are transmitted by intercourse. How are the jumping memes caught? A gene pool is the conglomerate of the genomes of a group of organisms. What is a meme pool? A meme is said to have a definite structure. Which one? The questions are many and remain unanswered, or unanswerable.

Susan Blackmore, who wrote a book “to lay the foundations for a science of memetics” (Richard Dawkins wrote the preface), recognizes that there are problems with memes. She mentions three. “1. We cannot specify the unit of a meme. – I have heard people dismiss the whole idea of memetics on the grounds that ‘you can’t even say what the unit of a meme is’. Well that is true, I cannot. And I do not think it is necessary. 2. We do not know the mechanism for copying and storing them. – No we do not. … We may get a long way with the general principles of memetic selection without understanding the brain mechanisms it relies on. We can also make some educated guesses about these mechanisms based on what little we know. 3. Memetic evolution is ‘Lamarckian’. – Lamarck believed in all sorts of things that have been rejected. … The whole idea of Lamarckian inheritance is irrelevant. … My conclusion about Lamarck is that the question ‘Is cultural evolution Lamarckian?’ is best not asked.” (The author warns us: “To start to think memetically we have to make a giant flip in our minds”. And she takes us into her confidence: “A book may seem very much like a [meme] vehicle, but my pumpkin soup does not. I am not at all sure where to draw the lines here.”⁵¹)

“The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes,” asserts Daniel Dennett. Dennett is a nowadays widely read philosopher whom Gould has called “Dawkins’ lapdog.” It is true that Dawkins has spent affectionate praise on him. It stands to reason that scientists of the Dawkins trend like a philosopher who proffers statements like the one just quoted, or: “The physics and chemistry of life are now understood in dazzling detail,”⁵² which is at least slightly exaggerated.

The same Dennett writes: “The prospects for elaborating a rigorous science of memetics are doubtful, but the concept provides a valuable perspective from which to investigate the complex relationship between cultural and genetic heritage.”⁵³ And: “At this time the contributions of the concept of the meme are still largely conceptual – or philosophical.”⁵⁴ This suggestion that the philosophy of the meme is an activity practiced in the clouds would have had Aristophanes’ consent. It is rather puzzling to learn in Dawkins’ preface to Blackmore that Dennett has become “the philosophical mentor of all meme theorists.”⁵⁵

It should however be realized that the intuition at the origin of the meme theory is a valid one. It rests on the indelible awareness that the human being is not just an animal but a thinking animal, whose mind puts it in a category apart. This obstinate fact cannot be accepted by scientific materialism to which mind is nothing but an aspect, or effect, or ‘epiphenomenon’, of matter. Dawkins has tried to integrate the mind and its functions into the materialistic doctrine. But materialistic science, despite it being a mental exercise, does not possess the ideological instrumentation to do so, with the result that Dawkins meme theory is for the most part tentative and high-stilted verbiage.

The critics of memetics point this out, for instance Alister McGrath, a theologian with a PhD in molecular biophysics. He writes: “1. There is no reason to suppose that cultural evolution is Darwinian, or indeed that evolutionary biology has any particular value in accounting for the development of ideas. 2. There is no direct evidence for the existence of ‘memes’. 3. The case for the existence of the ‘meme’ rests on the questionable assumption of a direct analogy with the gene, which proves incapable of bearing the theoretical weight that is placed upon it. 4. There is no necessary reason to propose the existence of a ‘meme’ as an explanatory construct. The observational data can be accounted for perfectly well by other models and mechanisms.”⁵⁶

“No significant body of empirical research has grown up around the meme concept,” writes Robert Aunger, “nor has memetics made empirically testable propositions or generated much in the way of novel experimental or observational data. In fact, the memetic literature remains devoted almost exclusively to theoretical antagonisms, internecine battles, and scholastic elucidations of prior writings on memes. This is typically the sign of a science in search of a subject matter. … I predict that memetics is unlikely ever to become an empirical science, because when we define memes in a manner precise enough to start making testable predictions, we find that we have largely defined them out of existence.”⁵⁷

A Devil’s Chaplain

The response to Dawkins’ selfish gene theory has been sensational. The reason of its ready acceptance is quite obvious: selfishness, or ego, is evident as the root of most behaviour in the realm of life. His ‘memes’ have been received more cautiously, although this thesis too has already spawned a considerable literature. But he is most famous among the general public for his direct and sustained attack on religion and the concept of God. The subtitle of The Blind Watchmaker (1986) is “Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design,” with natural theology as its main target. The collection of his essays in A Devil’s Chaplain (2003) takes up the cause against a creator or a creative intelligence behind evolution. In The God Delusion (2006) he bundles his arguments in a direct attack on a Supreme Being and any form of religion.

Richard Dawkins is a famous man, even more so than the late Carl Sagan, the glamour boy of exobiology (extraterrestrial life). Dawkins is called “the best popularizer of Darwinism around” and “the number one public intellectual in England.” Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi has funded a special chair for him in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He has been made a fellow of the Royal Society, although “it is noteworthy that Dawkins’ election to the Royal Society was for his contribution to the public understanding of science, not for his contribution to science itself.” (Alan Grafen) No TV programme, no conference, no seminar, no panel of importance about the relation of science and religion, or science versus religion, without the presence of Professor Dawkins. All this, added to his articles, books and remunerative awards, makes him one of the most distinct voices in the choir of public science. “It’s all sex or money or genes. A simple and dramatic theory that explains everything makes good press, good radio, good TV, and best-selling books. Anyone with academic authority, a halfway decent writing style, and a simple and powerful idea has easy entry to the public consciousness,” ponders Richard Lewontin.⁵⁸

Dawkins is also called “prophet of science,” “chief gladiator against religion” and “the world’s most high-profile atheist polemicist.” Alister McGrath notes that “one of the most melancholy aspects of The God Delusion is how its author appears to have made the transition from a scientist with a passionate concern for truth to a crude anti-religious propagandist who shows a disregard for evidence.”⁵⁹ As this are the words of a Catholic theologian, bias may be surmised. In this case it should not be. “I have never heard such hard-line, aggressive promotion of atheism under the guise of science as I have heard from the Darwinists,” writes Denyse O’Leary. – Remember: Dawkins is considered “Darwinist-in-chief.” – “It is, at best, amusing to hear Darwinists charge that the creationists have an underlying religious agenda, when the Darwinists’ own anti-religious agenda is pretty obvious.”⁶⁰

“… To be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled,” assures Dawkins.⁶¹ “For Dawkins, Darwin was a revelation. Dawkins was a zoologist, and ethologist, and then suddenly Darwin got to him, and he thought, My God, this is the truth, and everybody should know this truth! He became something like a preacher.”⁶² In The Devil’s Chaplain, Dawkins did indeed declare: “Darwin’s achievement, like Einstein’s, is universal and timeless,” and we have already expressed the opinion that behind his scientific formation the character can be sensed of an enthusiast who might turn into a zealot. “For Dawkins,” writes McGrath, “Darwin’s theory of evolution is more than a scientific theory. It is a worldview, a total account of reality. Darwinism is a ‘universal and timeless’ principle, capable of being applied throughout the universe.”⁶³

“Personal incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientific brain centres,” Dawkins exclaims⁶⁴ – incredulity in religious, supernatural and paranormal matters, that is. According to McGrath, who has written The Dawkins Delusion to countermand The God Delusion, four interconnected grounds of hostility may be found throughout his writings: 1. a Darwinian worldview makes belief in God unnecessary; 2. truth is grounded in explicit [scientific] proof; 3. religion offers an impoverished and attenuated vision of the world; 4. religion leads to evil.

In an interview, Dawkins happily declares himself to be a zealot for his conviction. “I like to think of myself as a creative force in the field [of ideology] … We do something creative, we change people’s minds. My zealotry comes from a deep concern for the truth. I’m extremely hostile towards any sort of obscurantism, pretension.”⁶⁵ In the opening pages of The God Delusion we read: “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”

“Some of the most spirited and vocal defenders of evolutionary theory, such as Richard Dawkins, use their stature as scientific spokesmen as a bully pulpit for atheism,” regrets Owen Gingerich, who is a religious scientist.⁶⁶ Other such spokesmen are many. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, addresses the readers somewhere in the middle of his Dawkinsian book as follows: “Dear reader, if you have come this far and found your faith undermined – as I hope …”⁶⁷ Another kindred author is Daniel Dennett, who wrote Breaking the Spell – Religion as a Natural Phenomenon “to get his readers to think and not just to feel.” His central policy recommendation is “that we gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives.”⁶⁸ At last the world re-educators have come, but that “gently, firmly” may make some feel uneasy. “Edward Wilson and other scientists have promoted [the sociobiological] model of human nature in popular books and magazines with missionary fervour, aiming to convert the unenlightened. … Their claims, their language and their style have striking religious overtones. Some sociobiologists like Richard Dawkins pride themselves on being materialist, reductionist and overtly anti-religious. But they offer theories proclaiming the evolutionary basis of human behaviour as explanations for virtually everything and as the basis for the unification of knowledge. Scientists promoting genetic explanations use a language replete with religious metaphors and concepts such as immortality and essentialism – indeed, the gene appears as a kind of sacred ‘soul’. And as missionaries bringing truth to the unenlightened, they claim their theories are guides in moral action and policy agendas. They are part of a current cultural move to blur the boundaries between science and religion,” writes Dorothy Nelkin.⁶⁹

In the same essay she continues: “The language used by geneticists to describe the genes is permeated with biblical imagery. Geneticists call the genome ‘the Bible’, ‘the Book of Man’ and ‘the Holy Grail’. They convey an image of this molecular structure as more than a powerful biological entity: it is also a mystical force that defines the natural and moral order. And they project an idea of genetic essentialism, suggesting that by deciphering and decoding the molecular text they will be able to reconstruct the essence of human beings, unlock the key of human nature. … Such images fuel popular narratives of genetic essentialism – a picture of the gene as the essence of the person, the locus of good and evil, the key to ‘the secret of life’.”⁷⁰

But sometimes the muzzle comes off. “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented,” warns Dawkins. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”⁷¹ (Dawkins also spoke the often quoted words: “If you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane – or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.” More recently he added: “I don’t withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under ‘insane’ but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed.”⁷²)

Yet Dawkins is not the only scientist to tilt his lance against religion and God. Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg, for instance, has said: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”⁷³ It has been referred to in the previous chapters that the gradual downslide of religion among the brightest minds is a Western phenomenon, countering the centuries of dogmatic tyranny by the Catholic Church, followed in this by the principal Protestant churches. This is the reason why the God under attack is without exception the Judeo-Christian God – most of the anti-theists have no idea of any other. A concordant reason of their aggressive stance is the twentieth century American brand of Christian fundamentalism and creationism, causing the trials about which world interpretation should be taught in the schools.