Richard Dawkins
Reg Naulty considers one of the most controversial scientists of today
Richard Dawkins is not at all the misanthrope, thinking poisonous thoughts about humanity, which some people suppose. On the contrary; he loved his parents, his boyhood in Africa, Oxford, science, poetry, music and many of his colleagues. He had fond parents. His father, a botanist who had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, was a good family man. His mother was kind, considerate and devoted to her children. They made sacrifices for his education. He scraped into Oxford, but the education he received in the Zoology Department was, technically anyway, beyond praise, and filled him with enthusiasm for zoology and science.
One wonders, though, what the wider views of his mentors were like. The one who influenced him most as an undergraduate, Niko Tinbergen, ‘didn’t like anything that suggested humanity was an intelligent species.’ Another of his mentors, and one of his most significant ‘others’, Mike Cullen, wrote, as a comment, on what later appeared as the fundamental idea in The Selfish Gene that it was lovely stuff. The lovely stuff is that ‘we are survival machines – robot machines blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes’.
The Selfish Gene was published in 1976 when Dawkins was thirty-five. It became an international bestseller, which surprised him. The book was aimed at other evolutionary scientists, who, he argued, misunderstood evolution. These people were ‘Panglossians’, named after the optimist satirised by Voltaire. They thought that natural selection selected species, not individuals, and they thought there was something ‘farsighted’ about evolution.
Rubbish, says Dawkins: ‘Natural selection has no foresight… [it] can only favour short-term gain.’
Moreover, the gene is the unit of natural selection. That is the level at which natural selection really works, he says, and it is that which makes Dawkins a neo-Darwinian: [The genes] ‘are the replicators, and we are their survival machines. When we have served their purpose [!] we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever’. That is interesting and puts genes in a new context, but he goes on to make an extravagant generalisation, which was bound to attract enemy fire: ‘And the best way to explain everything that an organism does is to assume that it has been programmed, by the genes that ride within it.’ That may well be true of growth, re-growth, recovery from wounds, etc., but it cannot explain events like the construction of Westminster Abbey. Presumably, the beliefs and desires of its builders had something to do with that. And what of the writing of The Selfish Gene? Didn’t Dawkins’ understanding of the subject matter contribute something?
Concerning the view that we are robot vehicles programmed to preserve our genes, Dawkins writes: ‘This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.’ It astonishes other people, too. In zoology, Dawkins went to great pains to collect, sift and interpret evidence. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to seek evidence for God. There is no shortage of instructions on how to do it. Thus Socrates: ‘If you make the experiment of doing service to the gods to see whether they will be willing to advise you about events concealed from human foresight… you will discover that the divine nature is so infinitely great and potent…’ (Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates).
It would probably be psychologically impossible for Dawkins to follow such advice now. But he could take up meditation. That does not make prior demands and can open a window to another reality.
The reception of The Selfish Gene changed Dawkins’ life. His path since then would have provoked the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The second volume of his autobiography should be a real blockbuster.
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press, 2013, ISBN: 9780593070901, £14.99.
Comments
I think The God delusion” should be required reading for anyone who is serious about the question of God.”
By Porpoise on 8th May 2014 - 8:59
As a non theist Quaker I support much of his work, particularly his attacks on creationism and it’s variants.
By martinbir on 9th May 2014 - 16:47
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