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The science of selfishness Richard Dawkins' latest book says that selfish genes don't make selfish humans. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW | BY RICHARD DAWKINS | HOUGHTON MIFFLIN | 338 PAGES BY ANDREW BROWN | The obvious thing to be said about Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder" -- a new collection of largely unrelated essays from the neo-Darwinian scientist and author -- is that it is the worst of his books, and the first one where I have had to push myself through to the end. I say this unhappily, as a fan. Like almost everyone else I know, I was bowled over by "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker" when I first read them. Later, I bought the book that came between them, "The Extended Phenotype," which is dense with argument and example, but in some ways the most rewarding of all. Since then, Dawkins has tended to repeat himself a bit -- but that's the price of fame. All of Dawkins' work has fallen into three categories: Sometimes he is explaining his own ideas to other scientists -- what one might call real science. Sometimes he is explaining the work of other scientists to the general public -- pop science, or higher journalism. And sometimes he is just philosophizing -- which is also a function of pop science, and usually the one that makes it popular, as opposed to scientific. Unfortunately, the trend of Dawkins' career has been gradually to move away from the first two, where he is brilliant, and toward the third, where he is merely flashy. Mary Midgley, a very good philosopher whom Dawkins profoundly loathes, once remarked that "few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes" -- and in this book Dawkins' tendency to fling metaphors around like stock cars is given full reign. This comes out particularly in his chapter on genes. Since he has noticed that calling them "selfish" raises as many problems as it solves, and that genes in fact survive not as rugged individualists, but as dependent parts of complicated gene pools, he decides to call them "co-operators" as well. How can something be both selfish and cooperative? That's easy. You just explain that it's a "selfish co-operator." This is the powerful new method of "poetic science," with which "Unweaving the Rainbow" is largely concerned. Almost any contradiction can be magicked away by the power of "poetic science." At the start of the chapter on genes, we are assured that "there is no more connection between a selfish gene and a selfish human than between a rock and a rain cloud." OK, fair enough. One might ask why, in that case, genes can be "selfish" at all, if their selfishness is quite unrelated to the same quality in humans. But leave that aside: It seems plain Dawkins is arguing that "selfish genes" have no connection with selfish humans. However, two pages further on, we learn that there is an extremely strong connection between the two: Selfish behavior in humans (and other animals) is entirely genetic. "Animals are sometimes nice and sometimes nasty, since either can suit the self-interest of genes at different times. This is precisely the reason for speaking of 'the selfish gene' rather than, say, 'the selfish chimpanzee.'" But if this is the case, then genes cause animal behaviors. And rocks don't cause rain clouds. N E X T_ P A G E .|.Words fail us -- when "selfish" doesn't mean "selfish" at all |
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