"It takes... a mind debauched by learning... to ask for the why of any instinctive human act." William James
There are, i suppose, a great many evolutionary anthropological explanations of why human beings seem to need to divide themselves into opposing camps, and draw lines round who, or what, may be included or excluded. The recent Darwin wars, energetically and provocatively described by Andrew Brown in his book of the same name, are a case in point. There are the Darwinians who believe that human and natural history can be best explained in terms of gradual adaptations of organisms to environments through natural selection and the social-biological exchanges of sexual selection. There are their opponents who accept the idea of adaptation but dislike the exclusive emphases of the enthusiasts. The opponents frequently hold political beliefs-usually of the left-and include social scientists, who dislike biological reductionism. It is difficult for an outsider to understand why so many of them are so very angry. The tone of the debate is rancorous, as though conducted with Pleistocene blunt instruments or waspish, self-righteous theological pamphlets.
Evolutionary psychologists and social thinkers are a long way from telling us anything useful about how we evolved to need to know about our origins with such passionate curiosity. They do not seem much further ahead in explaining our need for systems of belief. Keats described negative capability as a capacity for "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." He was criticising Coleridge's theological obsessiveness. But those of us who are natural agnostics know that this negative frame also needs questioning. There are some certainties, if fewer than humans would like. What terrifies reasonable agnostics-or should-is Blake's statement "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's." And so we have unwieldy Luvah, Vala, Albion, Golgonooza, Urizen, Los and all the others, whose pale of spears prickled defensively round Blake's sanity. Marx had explanations for the development of religions. Darwinians tend to remark irritably that religion is "a parasite" as though that explains anything about its persistence and universality. EO Wilson, making a list of what all ant societies had in common, as compared to all human societies, did state that all human societies had religions. In Consilience he made a clumsy stab at laying the foundations of his own system, which would be based on the one viable kind of knowledge, science, and would slowly take all the other intellectual and artistic disciplines into itself.
Someone trained as a literary reader and writer, reading the polemic on both sides, might come to the conclusion that the passions are aroused by almost instinctive anxieties about individual freedom and autonomy. The Darwinians offer themselves as liberators. If we understand that our genes' function is to replicate themselves and that our behaviour is constructed and constrained by kin selection, or reproductive strategies, and that we are one animal among others, we are as the Quakers put it "in the truth," and the truth will make us free. Biological fundamentalism rids us of a lot of cultural clutter, and political and psychological coercion. We are not guilty of each other's failings, and can understand our own.
The anti-Darwinians, who are on the side of what used to be called "nurture" in the nature/nurture debate, are afraid that this reductive enthusiasm carries with it dangerous baggage. Not only eugenics and social Darwinism of the old sort, but euthanasia, and educational and racial discrimination. The anti-Darwinians tend to believe that the idea of the social construction of reality means something, and that the Darwinians want a world in which Mrs Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society will be felt to be both right and good. Both camps have a tendency-interesting to a literary evolutionist-to caricature each other's positions, to create pasteboard demon masks, to burn each other in effigy.
As long ago as 1955 Lionel Trilling, in a lecture entitled "Freud: Within and beyond Culture," praised Freud for offering resistance to "cultural omnipotence." Trilling said that Freud described, "somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult...a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it." I think that much of the popularity of Darwinian ideas results from this sense that biology is liberating.
We have lived through a time of great overmastering systems of explanation-including Freud's own, and the various versions, political and cultural, of Marxism. In the 1970s I felt trapped by Freud's idea of "normality," and the sociologists' confident diagnosis of my own unconscious ideological positions. Later I felt trapped by constructions of "gender," largely because I had not the intellectual weaponry, or indeed the desire, to construct an opposing set of definitions, only a sense that the systematisers' descriptions of me were misleading, or inadequate, or couched in loose, or meaningless, or tautological language. Whereas to read and to understand John Maynard Smith's careful description of Weissman's "central dogma"-that the life and growth of the individual body does not affect the "germ cells," the sexual cells which pass genetic information on to the next generation-was to understand something precise about heredity and mortality. Weissman argued that while the body was mortal, the germ cells were potentially immortal-a formulation which fascinated Freud himself. With Weissman's "central dogma" a human could understand what an individual was, and what his or her relation was to others.
From this one-way influence came the "selfish gene" and William Hamilton's theories of limited altruism. These were liberating in their narrowness and precision so long as no one came along to make them into part of a system of dogmas. But of course-it happens as bees make honey-someone always will. EO Wilson and Richard Dawkins both have backgrounds of strong religious belief. Dawkins's militant atheism makes sense, though his attacks on religion tend to miss the real targets. EO Wilson's desire for a scientific church, for a faith, is a much more dubious proposition.
All the same, it seems to me that the anti-Darwinians spend much of their time asserting that the Darwinians think things they do not think, and have designs on our society they do not have. The anti-Darwinians tend to come from worlds where political belief-and telling other people what is best for them-comes naturally. They like to deconstruct the idea of scientific objectivity and and pure intellectual curiosity. We have, indeed, lived through a longish period of being told that objectivity has no meaning. But the fact that a given scientist may also have a political project or funding constraint, doesn't mean that his experiments aren't objective.
Two recent books-Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind and Alas, Poor Darwin, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, exemplify the contrasting rhetorical styles of the two camps in the Darwin wars. Miller's book is, he says himself, a piece of exploratory polemic, setting out the argument that the exigencies of sexual selection are at least as responsible for the disproportionate size of the human brain, and the development of language, as the adaptive processes of natural selection. He presents the brain-and art and culture, language and conversation-as forms of sexual display and seduction, like the peacock's tail. He paints in broad strokes, uses jokes and badinage, and veers between impressive precision and imprecise impressionism.
Alas, Poor Darwin is also polemic. Its sub-heading is "Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology." Its 15 authors attack, with varying degrees of clarity and pointedness, the reified object they call EP. Their methods include precise analysis, like Patrick Bateson's elegant and useful essay on the muddled history and limited usefulness of the concept of "instinct," and the detractors' usual weapon of oversimplifying the arguments of their opponents. It is not helpful to argue that human bipedalism is a product of nurture, not nature, by instancing the German goose-step, or the fact that some humans learn to walk in swamp and some in gravel. I cannot believe that any evolutionary scientist ever thought that such environmental variables did not exist, and affect learning.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith makes a strong case, in "Why Babies' Brains Are Not Swiss Army Knives" against the idea of "evolutionary psychologists and nativists" that "the human mind is equipped with a body of genetically determined information specific to Universal Grammar." She uses her own work on the infant origins of atypical development in Williams Syndrome and Down's syndrome children to argue that "regulatory development" of brains is a better description of learning processes than the "mosaic" division into "modules" she ascribes to the EP and nativist enemy. Her argument is persuasive, but her description of the enemy, even though backed up with carefully chosen quotations, is too often a caricature. I still recall the sense of wonder with which I first encountered Noam Chomsky's description of the extraordinary feats of sentence construction and recognition performed by very young children. And even if we are told that brains can learn to repair damage to one part by resorting to other parts, the precise nature of linguistic loss caused by local brain damage remains fascinating, and in need of explanation. Somehow the wrath engendered by the whole debate seems to be quite excessive, and on the wrong level.
Some at least of the reasons for this can be located in the rhetoric. The anti-Darwinians are incensed by the metaphors of the Darwinians. I have some sympathy with this. The prime offender is probably Richard Dawkins's unforgettable description of human individuals as "lumbering robots" constructed and driven by genes. It is striking that Darwinians have a tendency to think of biological processes and organisms in terms of man-made objects. They speak of "hard-wired" brains, of "modules" of inherited abilities, which they do indeed compare to Swiss army knives. Geoffrey Miller adds the image of the human brain as a multimedia entertainment centre. We could add the excessive use of the word "blueprint." What all these metaphors have in common is that they compare random natural processes to objects designed by humans-thus inadvertently reintroducing the Divine Watchmaker.
Another polemical weapon employed by both sides in the Darwin wars is what Edgar Wind, referring to Jung's systematisation of astrological and religious symbols, has called the "erosion of categories." Miller does this when describing the brain as an organ of sexual display. This description is so partial as to be almost meaningless. The penis is an organ which evolved to fit into a particular slot or slit, however we have subsequently taken to using it for polymorphously perverse purposes, decorating it with flowers like DH Lawrence's Mellors, or worshipping it as a lingam or phallus. Evolutionary psychology can be persuasive about why gorillas have small testicles and humans have large ones. But the brain does more things than the penis does, including observing itself as best it can. It is both more amorphous and more complicated, and partial descriptions of its functions are correspondingly cruder.
Miller's forays into literature resemble EO Wilson's. They aren't wrong. They are just too brief and simple to be very useful. He compares Cyrano and Scheherazade as sexual talkers, using language for courtship. But he describes the essential nature of Scheherazade's life-saving storytelling as "fantasy", and compares it to the factual seductions of scientific discourse. What is remarkable about Scheherazade's tales is less their untruthfulness than their discontinuous continuity-the way the Arabian Nights often end with an unfinished story containing the beginning of a new story within a story. But the odd throwaway comparison between science and fantasy is interesting. We need a discourse that eschews metaphor and rhetorical flourishes if we are to think out a clear, post-religious, ethically adequate description of our human state.
Another side-effect of rhetorical flourishes is a kind of reification or personification of arguments and ideas. So-called modules in the brain aren't things but they seem to be. Similarly, Richard Dawkins's invention of the "meme" has given rise to religious adherence and much indignation. I was initially attracted to the idea of loose ideas or concepts that attached themselves to people and propagated themselves across society. Dawkins instances the spread of the habit of wearing baseball caps pointing backwards. We could usefully think about the Opies' wonderful study of the spread of playground rhymes, and the tendency of individuals to claim authorship for common property. Or we could think about the way in which politically correct terminology works-the idea spreads that certain words are taboo ("crippled" "handicapped" "disabled") and the culture finds acceptable synonyms which in turn become taboo. Here memes intersect with ethics. We need to ask what is usefully described here as a meme-is it the replacement of culturally acceptable adjectives, or is it the atmosphere of respect and concern for others? The moral atmosphere is too vague to be a "meme".
And what do we do when we come to, let us say, Aphrodite? Is Aphrodite a meme? Is it a useful way of thinking about her? If not, where do memes end and some other category-natural forces, belief systems, goddesses, persons-begin? Memes are part of the world where things can be confined to safe comparisons with university common rooms, tables and chairs and Swiss army knives. Aphrodite isn't. She is a Power. She may not belong in discourse about sexual selection, but she belongs, along with all other belief systems, in a serious attempt to explain ourselves, our evolution, our history. The meme, on the other hand, has yet to prove that it can add anything useful to the words we have already, like "concept" or "fashion" or "idea."
The Darwin wars are also about the possibility and desirability, and perhaps the inevitability, of belief systems. Dorothy Nelkin, in Alas Poor Darwin, points out that evolutionary psychology resembles religious belief systems, but she then gets stuck repeating that observation, without any attempt at explanation. At least some of the reason for religious language in the titles of popular science books is commercial: publishers have found that if they introduce sacredness, God, Mystery, Blood, into their titles, they sell millions more copies. The reason why they sell millions more copies is because human beings are religious animals. If you talk to sceptical scientists about religion they tend to give you short, sharp, easy answers, like that one about it being a "parasite" carried on (metaphorically) junk DNA. Or to say impatiently that human beings cannot accept their own mortality, or more subtly, that human beings cannot assume their own independence, and need father figures and authority. But religion has not functioned so simply in the past. At some point the self-interest of the selfish gene gave way, in all sorts of societies, to complicated ethical systems, to visions of human generosity and requirements of behaviour that varied from sacrifice of your son (Abraham and Isaac) to self-immolation. How did we move from kin selection to the Buddhist and Manichaean respect for all life? Why do we care so much that we are destroying other species? Why do most of us feel an obligation not to be cruel or to cheat? What led to the murderous cult leader, Charles Manson, feeling that he had no right to sweep away flies from his mouth?
I am not arguing for a return to any religious system, or even to any ethical system derived from religious systems. I believe myself that our best option is a clerkly scepticism, and a constantly corrected, constantly vigilant scientific curiosity. I am rather dismayed by the ease with which the two camps in the Darwin wars take on the forms and manners of outmoded human groupings. There is no need for the Darwinians to behave like a movement, religious or ethical. The Marxists on the other side-also believers, of course-like Richard Lewontin, are fond of pointing out that Darwin's own mind must have been affected by his historical position as a capitalist depending on the random fluctuations and competitive strategies of the market. Of course all of us are historically limited, socially limited, linguistically limited, intellectually limited, differently abled. But Darwin's huge patient curiosity, his checking of facts, his leaps of intuition measured and checked and measured, his caution and scepticism, are what remain impressive. And, indeed, hopeful.
Iris Murdoch pointed out that our ethics were a development of our religion, which had contained injunctions, beliefs and sanctions. Her philosopher characters had a hard time getting their heads round the idea of being "good for nothing." The limited liberating ethic of Darwinism is based on biological reason. We do understand parts of our ethical vocabulary better as a result of it. Work has been done on the maths of "altruism"-which is a manageable word invented by Auguste Comte as part of his system, his Positive Religion. The harder words-like charity, like respect for life, like love, like truthfulness-have been cast loose from the religious systems in which they were used, and need rediscovering, redefining and, in some cases, jettisoning. The relations of these processes to the scientific project of examining the world we find ourselves in are neither simple nor religious. But we seem to have evolved to treat them as though they were. And that in itself should be a subject of scientific study. n
