Darwinian Fairytales
David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (New York: Encounter Books, 2006)
The typical questions of our age are all foolish, and foolish in the same way as the typical questions of sociobiologists. (p. 123)
Welcome to Suburbia! Behold: an environment filled with landscaped subdivisions, fabulous shopping malls, “fast casual” restaurants (Chipotle, Panera Bread, etc.), bookstore chains, pretentious coffee shops, organic grocery stores, glittering office parks, and glaciers of commuting automobiles.
The cheerful species dominating this miserable habitat happens to be the busy white professional, a most prudent organism, free, affluent, mobile, a hedonistic calculator, attentive to its individual satisfaction and careless about everything else. Unlike their ancestors, such creatures find themselves unburdened of any loyalties and undistracted by disinterested pursuits. Among these noble citizens, perhaps the only humans believing they are citizens of Earth, we find innocence not only of the reality, but of the very idea of scarcity– they have a right to all things all ways all the time. Why can’t, uh, everything be, like, fun, y’know? These are the “right kind” of white people, the SWPLs, more Cubs than White Sox, with no understanding of what motivates the poor, the wicked, or the religious. Everyone is struggling for life, everyone is essentially selfish, and everyone seeks relief from responsibility. Long live Suburbia!
In short, our world is filled with soft Darwinians, that is, Darwinians who believe Darwinism imposes no unpleasant intellectual demands.
David Stove, examining the thought of R.D. Alexander, R. Dawkins, R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, W.D. Hamilton, G. Hardin, R. Trivers, G.C. Williams, E.O. Wilson, and many others, arrived at the conclusion that Darwin-ism, sometimes known as adaptationist biology, is fundamentally misguided, a prejudice local to our age. As a theory, of course, evolution by natural selection explains many sets of disconnected phenomena. However, we learn it is not a principle, a law, or anything like the Holy Spirit, just as DNA is not a god, nor Charles Darwin a Messiah. (Citing eugenicist passages from Darwin always makes for good sport.)
Given massive suburbanization began immediately after WWII, by 1965, all sorts of strange organisms found their specialized niche, the suburban world believed by the new grown-up suburbanites to be a law of nature. Libertarians emerged– ruthless free marketers of the Ayn Rand variety. But we’ve also seen the flourishing of vicious feminists placing careerism above life itself. What is going on? Selfishness is the theme in a culture of narcissism: enter the sociobiologist and the evolutionary psychologist.
The selfish theory of man is not new; cranks following Hobbes, Mandeville, and Machiavelli have held it at different times, and writers such as Butler and Hume have written elegant refutations of it. But popular attitudes toward the selfish theory have changed.
“Why didn’t all young American men eligible for the draft, instead of just thousands of them, flee their country to avoid fighting in the Vietnam war?” “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” “Why shouldn’t a woman have as many abortions as she wants to?” “What right has the government to steal part of my money, and call this theft taxation?” “How can the Pope continue to oppose contraception? Can’t he see that overpopulation is ruining the environment everywhere?” It would be easy to multiply examples of these characteristic questions of our age; but their family resemblance is so obvious, that it can hardly be necessary. (p. 122-3)
The scientific story from our so-called brights curiously tells us that altruism is not real, but selfishness ultimately is. A biological reductionist, then, is immediately faced with a dilemma. Either altruism does not exist, or it is a causal product of selfishness. The non-existence of altruism would imply that the welfare state, hospitals, charities, priesthoods, police departments, armies, governments and so forth are part of a grand delusion. This is a lunatic view, since the loyalty, cooperation, and attachment all around us would not reduce to anything, since they would not exist.
Or, we can claim that altruism analytically is just selfishness. Since our motives are our motives, everyone must act out of self-interest, right? However, that our motives are our motives is a tautology. That everyone acts out of self-interest is contingent. Logically, we cannot pull a non-tautological rabbit out of a tautological hat.
The New Testament of Darwin-ism that arose in the 1960s attempted to explain altruism with the idea of inclusive fitness, or kin selection– we supposedly tend to help others that have a genetic similarity to us. Consider adoptive parents, or parents who love a child after a mistaken baby-switch at a hospital. Consider helping a drowning stranger. Consider humans caring for pets. We don’t even care about genetic similarity in these cases of altruism. It easily follows that explaining altruism in terms of kin selection is confused; the causal mechanisms, as in the case of a blind baby-switch, ought to be in play independently of our beliefs. But that is not what we observe.
The entire idea of selfish genes is silly anyway. Claiming that molecules of sodium chloride, deoxyribonucleic acid, or dihydrogen monoxide can be selfish is madness, akin to claiming there are sex mad prime numbers.
We and all the other organisms “exist for the sake of DNA,” forsooth! It is impossible to benefit an H2O molecule, or an NaCl molecule: that is, a water molecule or a salt molecule. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. Launch a Help a Water Molecule Week and see how you get on. You may well raise some money, but how could you possibly put it to work? Water molecules simply cannot be helped. And no more can DNA molecules– that is, genes — be benefited. (p. 196)
To make matters worse, the target of selfishness by definition is oneself, not copies of oneself. Making copies of yourself does not increase *your own odds* of survival.
It ought to be clear by now that many brights have misplaced feelings of religious awe toward their genes, as if we’re helpless, masochistic puppets of hidden, immoral, godlike entities.
“Our stars rule us,” says the astrologer. “Man is what he eats,” said Feuerbach. “We are what our infantile sexual experiences made us,” says the Freudian. “The individual counts for nothing, his class situation for everything,” says the Marxist. “We are what our socioeconomic circumstances make us,” says the social worker. “We are what Almighty God created us,” says the Christian theologian. There is simply no end to this kind of stuff. (p. 183)
It isn’t an accident that cynical, self-styled pick-up artists make references to sociobiology all of the time. After all, our genes supposedly tell lurid stories of violence, sex, manipulation, and greed. Richard Dawkins, with an especially demonological cast of mind, even goes as far as to imply geometrical theorems are brain parasities, with his crackpot theory of memetics. Why do we refuse to recognize that our own actions and ideas are our own actions and ideas? My best guess is that democratic ages encourage the belief that the individual is impotent. On top of this, isolated consumers of a capitalist society also don’t like the discomfort of living with irrevocable decisions.
The response is that sociobiology is the land where pretty lies perish; critics are naive, sentimental, and unscientific. Society “really” lives under a veneer of altruism; deep down, everyone is rotten. There is a problem with this kind of worship of the noble savage: how did the veneer originate? We can’t say the tax man brings a sword, or make up Freudian traumas involving our parents, since that only explains that actions of people with just more people, which is an evasion, not an explanation.
So enough of the New Testament of Darwinism, a selfish world where nothing is as it seems. Let’s go back to the Old Testament of Darwinism, a more manly and less effeminate era, the age of supertyrants, of the brutal struggle for existence. Here, it was believed all organisms press against their supply of resources, there are variations between the organisms, and the strong survive. Survival of the fittest! This is easy to mock, and Stove gives no mercy.
You probably also think the English civil war of the seventeenth century grew out of tensions between parliament and the court, dissent and the established church, republic and the monarchy. Nothing of the sort, you see: it was a resumption of “the struggle for existence between man and man.” Cromwell and King Charles were competing with each other, and each of them with everyone else too, à la Darwin and Malthus, for means of subsistence. So no doubt Cromwell, when he had had the king’s head cut off, ate it. Uncooked, I shouldn’t wonder, the beast. And probably selfishly refused to let his secretary John Milton have even one little nibble. (p. 9)
Some say we once were like the cavemen found in cartoons and comic strips, but we aren’t now. One, if natural selection is a true as a global principle, it ought to be true for all times and places. Nothing is more superficial than to claim man is selfish everywhere, and then try to explain how he came to be otherwise. In addition, cavemen would not have survived by selfishly eating their protein-rich children. While the Darwinian New Testament seems silly, we can see how the exposed Old Testament needs it.
Darwin-ism, as we have learned from Geico commercials, is a ridiculous slander on human beings. It is also a Culture Fail, a clear incitement to crime; we can toss a few crumbs to creationists for at least getting this right. Predatory Hitlers have seen themselves on the cutting edge of Progress by acting in a Darwinian way, as if Darwin-ism reveals the inevitable, and the inevitable illogically can be changed. Our contemporary progressive health Nazis, obsessed about the physiological improvement of the Murican Volk, are a legacy of this attitude.
The worst part theoretically about the struggle to survive, is that a struggle is always a struggle for. All sorts of teleological language– advantage, beneficial, calculated, adaptation, organized, goal, chooses, investment, strategy, strive, tool, tactic, manipulate, develop, design– has yet to be cashed out in mechanistic language. So not only does Darwinism retain Malthusian assumptions about man, it retains teleological assumptions from Paley.
All of these problems would go away if we looked more critically at naturalism, specifically, what we consider to be natural. There is no a priori reason why restraint shouldn’t be as natural as indulgence, or cooperation as natural as competition. There is no a priori reason why shipwreck thought experiments ought to be considered natural, while daily life is unnatural; events are usually the other way around. Natural-ists, I suspect, are trapped with a vision of a clock — a blind watchmaker — as if there are no unrealized possibilities, and everything happens the way it must. But as Stove noted, unrealized possibilities are as common as dirt.
Stove wasn’t the first to criticize adaptationist biology; Gould or Lewontin perhaps offer greater degrees of theoretical sharpness and depth. Stove however gains credit for restating the obvious, which is the most important task of a philosopher. Not all explanations are complete explanations; natural selection as a theory only explains a limited set of disconnected phenomena. If we’re going to treat natural selection like The Force from Star Wars– giving us our power, surrounding us, penetrating us, binding the galaxy together– then errors and absurdities will only result.
