The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution

By J. L. Mackie

When people speak of the law of the jungle, they usually mean unrestrained and ruthless competition, with everyone out solely for his own advantage. But the phrase was coined by Rudyard Kipling, in The Second Jungle Book, and he meant something very different. His law of the jungle is a law that wolves in a pack are supposed to obey. His poem says that the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and it states the basic principles of social co-operation. Its provisions are a judicious mixture of individualism and collectivism, prescribing graduated and qualified rights for fathers of families, mothers with cubs, and young wolves, which constitute an elementary system of welfare services. Of course, Kipling meant his poem to give moral instruction to human children, but he probably thought it was at least roughly correct as a description of the social behaviour of wolves and other wild animals. Was he right, or is the natural world the scene of unrestrained competition, of an individualistic struggle for existence? Views not unlike those of Kipling have been presented by some recent writers on ethology, notably Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz. These writers connect their accounts with a view about the process of evolution that has brought this behaviour, as well as the animals themselves, into existence. They hold that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species, or the group, rather than the good of the individual. Natural selection favours those groups and species whose members tend, no doubt through some instinctive programming, to co-operate for a common good; this would, of course, explain why wolves, for example, behave cooperatively and generously towards members of their own pack, if indeed they do. However, this recently popular view has been keenly attacked by Richard Dawkins in his admirable and fascinating book, The Selfish Gene.[1] He defends an up-to-date version of the orthodox Darwinian theory of evolution, with special reference to the biology of selfishness and altruism. One of his main theses is that there is no such thing as group selection, and that Lorenz and others who have used this as an explanation are simply wrong. This is a question of some interest to moral philosophers, particularly those who have been inclined to see human morality itself as the product of some kind of natural evolution.[2] It is well, however, to be clear about the issue. It is not whether animals ever behave for the good of the group in the sense that this is their conscious subjective goal, that they aim at the well-being or survival of the whole tribe or pack: the question of motives in this conscious sense does not arise. Nor is the issue whether animals ever behave in ways which do in fact promote the well-being of the group to which they belong, or which help

the species of which they are members to survive: of course they do. The controversial issue is different from both of these: it is whether the good of the group or the species would ever figure in a correct evolutionary account. That is, would any correct evolutionary account take either of the following forms? (i) The members of this species tend to do these things which assist the survival of this species because their ancestors were members of a subspecies whose members had an inheritable tendency to do these things, and as a result that sub-species survived, whereas other sub-species of the ancestral species at that time had members who tended not to do these things and as a result their sub-species did not survive. (ii) The members of this species tend to do these things which help the group of which they are members to flourish because some ancestral groups happened to have members who tended to do these things and these groups, as a result, survived better than related groups of the ancestral species whose members tended not to do these things. In other words, the issue is this: is there natural selection by and for group survival or species survival as opposed to selection by and for individual survival (or, as we shall see, gene survival)? Is behaviour that helps the group or the species, rather than the individual animal, rewarded by the natural selection which determines the course of evolution? However, when Dawkins denies that there is selection by and for group or species survival, it is not selection by and for individual survival that he puts in its place. Rather it is selection by and for the survival of each single gene - the genes being the unit factors of inheritance, the portions of chromosomes which replicate themselves, copy themselves as cells divide and multiply. Genes, he argues, came into existence right back at the beginning of life on earth, and all more complex organisms are to be seen as their products. We are, as he picturesquely puts it, gene-machines: our biological function is just to protect our genes, carry them around, and enable them to reproduce themselves. Hence the title of his book, The Selfish Gene. Of course what survives is not a token gene: each of these perishes with the cell of which it is a part. What survives is a gene-type, or rather what we might call a gene-clone, the members of a family of token genes related to one another by simple direct descent, by replication. The popularity of the notions of species selection and group selection may be due partly to confusion on this point. Since clearly it is only types united by descent, not individual organisms, that survive long enough to be of biological interest, it is easy to think that selection must be by and for species survival. But this is a mistake: genes, not species, are the types which primarily replicate themselves and are selected. Since Dawkins roughly defines the gene as a genetic unit which is small enough to last for a number of generations and to be distributed around in the form of many copies, it is (as he admits) practically a tautology that the gene is the basic unit of natural selection and therefore, as he puts it, the fundamental unit of self-interest, or, as we might put it less picturesquely, the primary beneficiary of natural selection. But behind this near-tautology is a synthetic truth, that this basic unit, this primary beneficiary, is a small bit of a chromosome. The reason why this is so, why what is differentially effective and therefore subject to selection is a small bit of a chromosome, lies in the mechanism of sexual reproduction by way of meiosis, with crossing over between chromosomes. When male and female cells each divide before uniting at fertilization, it is not chromosomes as a whole that are randomly distributed between the parts, but sections of chromosomes. So

sections of chromosomes can be separately inherited, and therefore can be differentially selected by natural selection. The issue between gene selection, individual selection, group selection, and species selection might seem to raise some stock questions in the philosophy of science. Many thinkers have favoured reductionism of several sorts, including methodological individualism. Wholes are made up of parts, and therefore in principle whatever happens in any larger thing depends upon and is explainable in terms of what happens in and between its smaller components. But though this metaphysical individualism is correct, methodological individualism does not follow from it. It does not follow that we must always conduct our investigations and construct our explanations in terms of component parts, such as the individual members of a group or society. Scientific accounts need not be indefinitely reductive. Some wholes are obviously more accessible to us than their components. We can understand what a human being does without analysing this in terms of how each single cell in his body or his brain behaves. Equally we can often understand what a human society does without analysing this in terms of the behaviour of each of its individual members. And the same holds quite generally: we can often understand complex wholes as units, without analysing them into their parts. So if, in the account of evolution, Dawkinss concentration upon genes were just a piece of methodological individualism or reductionism, it would be inadequately motivated. But it is not: there is a special reason for it. Dawkinss key argument is that species, populations, and groups, and individual organisms too, are as genetic units too temporary to qualify for natural selection. They are not stable through evolutionary time. Populations are constantly blending with other populations and so losing their identity, and, what is vitally important, are also subject to evolutionary change from within (p. 36). This abstract general proposition may seem obscure. But it is illustrated by a simple example which Dawkins gives (pp. 197201). A species of birds is parasitized by dangerous ticks. A bird can remove the ticks from most parts of its own body, but, having only a beak and no hands, it cannot get them out of the top of its own head. But one bird can remove ticks from another birds head: there can be mutual grooming. Clearly if there were an inherited tendency for each bird to take the ticks out of any other birds head, this would help the survival of any group in which that tendency happened to arise - for the ticks are dangerous: they can cause death. Someone who believed in group selection would, therefore, expect this tendency to be favoured and to evolve and spread for this reason. But Dawkins shows that it would not. He gives appropriate names to the different strategies, that is, the different inheritable behavioural tendencies. The strategy of grooming anyone who needs it he labels Sucker. The strategy of accepting grooming from anyone, but never grooming anyone else, even someone who has previously groomed you, is called Cheat. Now if in some population both these tendencies or strategies, and only these two, happen to arise, it is easy to see that the cheats will always do better than the suckers. They will be groomed when they need it, and since they will not waste their time pecking out other birds ticks, they will have more time and energy to spare for finding food, attracting mates, building nests, and so on. Consequently the gene for the Sucker strategy will gradually die out. So the population will come to consist wholly of cheats, despite the fact that this is likely to lead to the population itself becoming extinct, if the parasites are common enough and dangerous enough, whereas a

population consisting wholly of suckers would have survived. The fact that the group is open to evolutionary change from within, because of the way the internal competition between Cheat and Sucker genes works out, prevents the group from developing or even retaining a feature which would have helped the group as a whole. This is just one illustration among many, and Dawkinss arguments on this point seem pretty conclusive. We need, as he shows, the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS (p. 74 et passim). A strategy is evolutionarily stable, in relation to some alternative strategy or strategies, if it will survive indefinitely in a group in competition with those alternatives. We have just seen that where Cheat and Sucker alone are in competition, Cheat is an ESS but Sucker is not. We have also seen, from this example, that an ESS may not help a group, or the whole species, to survive and multiply. Of course we must not leap to the conclusion that an ESS never helps a group or a species: if that were so we could not explain much of the behaviour that actually occurs. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children, occasionally siblings for their siblings, and with the social insects, bees and ants and termites, their whole life is a system of communal service. But the point is that these results are not to be explained in terms of group selection. They can and must be explained as consequences of the selfishness of genes, that is, of the fact that gene-clones are selected for whatever helps each gene-clone itself to survive and multiply. But now we come to another remarkable fact. Although the gene is the hero of Dawkinss book, it is not unique either in principle or in fact. It is not the only possible subject of evolutionary natural selection, nor is it the only actual one. What is important about the gene is just that it has a certain combination of logical features. It is a replicator: in the right environment it is capable of producing multiple copies of itself; but in this process of copying some mistakes occur; and these mistaken copies - mutations - will also produce copies of themselves; and, finally, the copies produced may either survive or fail to survive. Anything that has these formal, logical, features is a possible subject of evolution by natural selection. As we have seen, individual organisms, groups, and species do not have the required formal features, though many thinkers have supposed that they do. They cannot reproduce themselves with sufficient constancy of characteristics. But Dawkins, in his last chapter, introduces another sort of replicators. These are what are often called cultural items or traits; Dawkins christens them memes - to make a term a bit like genes - because they replicate by memory and imitation (mimesis). Memes include tunes, ideas, fashions, and techniques. They require, as the environment in which they can replicate, a collection of minds, that is, brains that have the powers of imitation and memory. These brains (particularly though not exclusively human ones) are themselves the products of evolution by gene selection. But once the brains are there gene selection has done its work: given that environment, memes can themselves evolve and multiply in much the same way as genes do, in accordance with logically similar laws. But they can do so more quickly. Cultural evolution may be much faster than biological evolution. But the basic laws are the same. Memes are selfish in the same sense as genes. The explanation of the widespread flourishing of a certain meme, such as the idea of a god or the belief in hell fire, may be simply that it is an efficiently selfish meme. Something about it makes it well able to infect human minds, to take root and spread in and among them, in the same way that something about the smallpox virus makes it well able to take root and spread in human bodies. There is no need to explain the success of a meme in

terms of any benefit it confers on individuals or groups; it is a replicator in its own right. Contrary to the optimistic view often taken of cultural evolution, this analogy shows that a cultural trait can evolve, not because it is advantageous to society, but simply because it is advantageous to itself. It is ironical that Kiplings phrase the law of the jungle has proved itself a more efficient meme than the doctrine he tried to use it to propagate. So far I have been merely summarizing Dawkinss argument. We can now use it to answer the question from which I started. Who is right about the law of the jungle? Kipling, or those who have twisted his phrase to mean almost the opposite of what he intended? The answer is that neither party is right. The law by which nature works is not unrestrained and ruthless competition between individual organisms. But neither does it turn upon the advantages to a group, and its members, of group solidarity, mutual care and respect, and co-operation. It turns upon the self-preservation of gene-clones. This has a strong tendency to express itself in individually selfish behaviour, simply because each agents genes are more certainly located in him than in anyone else. But it can and does express itself also in certain forms of what Broad called self-referential altruism, including special care for ones own children and perhaps ones siblings, and, as we shall see, reciprocal altruism, helping those (and only those) who help you. But now I come to what seems to be an exception to Dawkinss main thesis, though it is generated by his own argument and illustrated by one of his own examples. We saw how, in the example of mutual grooming, if there are only suckers and cheats around, the strategy Cheat is evolutionarily stable, while the strategy Sucker is not. But Dawkins introduces a third strategy, Grudger. A grudger is rather like you and me. A grudger grooms anyone who has previously groomed him, and any stranger, but he remembers and bears a grudge against anyone who cheats him - who refuses to groom him in return for having been groomed - and the grudger refuses to groom the cheat ever again. Now when all three strategies are in play, both Cheat and Grudger are evolutionarily stable. In a population consisting largely of cheats, the cheats will do better than the others, and both suckers and grudgers will die out. But in a population that starts off with more than a certain critical proportion of grudgers, the cheats will first wipe out the suckers, but will then themselves become rare and eventually extinct: cheats can flourish only while they have suckers to take advantage of, and yet by doing so they tend to eliminate those suckers. It is obvious, by the way, that a population containing only suckers and grudgers, in any proportions, but no cheats, would simply continue as it was. Suckers and grudgers behave exactly like one another as long as there are no cheats around, so there would be no tendency for either the Sucker of the Grudger gene to do better than the other. But if there is any risk of an invasion of Cheat genes, either through mutation or through immigration, such a pattern is not evolutionarily stable, and the higher the proportion of suckers, the more rapidly the cheats would multiply. So we have two ESSs, Cheat and Grudger. But there is a difference between these two stable strategies. If the parasites are common enough and dangerous enough, the population of cheats will itself die out, having no defence against ticks in their heads, whereas a separate population of grudgers will flourish indefinitely. Dawkins says, If a population arrives at an ESS which drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad (p. 200). True: but is this not group selection after all? Of course, this will operate only if the populations are somehow isolated. But if the birds in question were

distributed in geographically isolated regions, and Sucker, Cheat and Grudger tendencies appeared (after the parasites became plentiful) in randomly different proportions in these different regions, then some populations would become pure grudger populations, and others would become pure cheat populations, but then the pure cheat populations would die out, so that eventually all surviving birds would be grudgers. And they would be able to recolonize the areas where cheat populations had perished. Another name for grudgers is reciprocal altruists. They act as if on the maxim Be done by as you did. One implication of this story is that this strategy is not only evolutionarily stable within a population, it is also viable for a population as a whole. The explanation of the final situation, where all birds of this species are grudgers, lies partly in the nonviability of a population of pure cheats. So this is, as I said, a bit of group selection after all. It is worth noting how and why this case escapes Dawkinss key argument that a population is not a discrete enough entity to be a unit of natural selection, not stable and unitary enough to be "selected" in preference to another population (p. 36). Populations can be made discrete by geographical (or other) isolation, and can be made stable and unitary precisely by the emergence of an ESS in each, but perhaps different ESSs in the different regional populations of the same species. This case of group selection is necessarily a second order phenomenon: it arises where gene selection has produced the ESSs which are then persisting selectable features of groups. In other words, an ESS may be a third variety of replicator, along with genes and memes; it is a self-reproducing feature of groups. Someone might reply that this is not really group selection because it all rests ultimately on gene selection, and a full explanation can be given in terms of the long-run selfextinction of the Cheat gene, despite the fact that within a population it is evolutionarily stable in competition with the two rival genes. But this would be a weak reply. The monopoly of cheating over a population is an essential part of the causal story that explains the extinction. Also, an account at the group level, though admittedly incomplete, is here correct as far as it goes. The reason why all ultimately surviving birds of this species are grudgers is partly that populations of grudgers can survive whereas populations of cheats cannot, though it is also partly that although a population of suckers could survive - it would be favoured by group selection, if this possibility arose, just as much as a population of grudgers - internal changes due to gene selection after an invasion of Cheat genes would prevent there being a population of suckers. In special circumstances group selection (or population selection) can occur and could be observed and explained as such, without going down to the gene selection level. It would be unwarranted methodological individualism or reductionism to insist that we not merely can but must go down to the gene selection level here. We must not fall back on this weak general argument when Dawkinss key argument against group selection fails. I conclude, then, that there can be genuine cases of group selection. But I admit that they are exceptional. They require rather special conditions, in particular geographical isolation, or some other kind of isolation, to keep the populations that are being differentially selected apart. For if genes from one could infiltrate another, the selection of populations might be interfered with. (Though in fact in our example complete isolation is not required: since what matters is whether there is more or less than a certain critical

proportion of grudgers, small-scale infiltrations would only delay, not prevent, the establishing of pure populations.) And since special conditions are required, there is no valid general principle that features which would enable a group to flourish will be selected. And even these exceptional cases conform thoroughly to the general logic of Dawkinss doctrine. Sometimes, but only sometimes, group characteristics have the formal features of replicators that are open to natural selection. Commenting on an earlier version of this paper, Dawkins agreed that there could be group selection in the sort of case I suggested, but stressed the importance of the condition of geographical (or other) isolation. He also mentioned a possible example, that the prevalence of sexual reproduction itself may be a result of group selection. For if there were a mutation by which asexual females, producing offspring by parthenogenesis, occurred in a species, this clone of asexual females would be at once genetically isolated from the rest of the species, though still geographically mixed with them. Also, in most species males contribute little to the nourishment or care of their offspring; so from a genetic point of view males are wasters: resources would be more economically used if devoted only to females. So the genetically isolated population of asexual females would out-compete the normal sexually reproducing population with roughly equal numbers of males and females. So the species would in time consist only of asexual females. But then, precisely because all its members were genetically identical, it would not have the capacity for rapid adaptation by selection to changing conditions that an ordinary sexual population has. So when conditions changed, it would be unable to adapt, and would die out. Thus there would in time be species selection against any species that produced an asexual female mutation. Which would explain why nearly all existing species go in for what, in the short run, is the economically wasteful business of sexual reproduction.[3] What implications for human morality have such biological facts about selfishness and altruism? One is that the possibility that morality is itself a product of natural selection is not ruled out, but care would be needed in formulating a plausible speculative account of how it might have been favoured. Another is that the notion of an ESS may be a useful one for discussing questions of practical morality. Moral philosophers have already found illumination in such simple items of game theory as the Prisoners Dilemma; perhaps these rather more complicated evolutionary games will prove equally instructive. Of course there is no simple transition from is to ought, no direct argument from what goes on in the natural world and among non-human animals to what human beings ought to do. Dawkins himself explicitly warns against any simple transfer of conclusions. At the very end of the book he suggests that conscious foresight may enable us to develop radically new kinds of behaviour. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators (p. 215). This optimistic suggestion needs fuller investigation. It must be remembered that the human race as a whole cannot act as a unit with conscious foresight. Arrows Theorem shows that even quite small groups of rational individuals may be unable to form coherently rational preferences, let alone to act rationally. Internal competition, which in general prevents a group from being a possible subject of natural selection, is even more of an obstacle to its being a rational agent. And while we can turn against some memes, it will be only with the help and under the guidance of other memes.

This is an enormous problematic area. For the moment I turn to a smaller point. In the mutual grooming model, we saw that the Grudger strategy was, of the three strategies considered, the only one that was healthy in the long run. Now something closely resembling this strategy, reciprocal altruism, is a well known and long established tendency in human life. It is expressed in such formulae as that justice consists in giving everyone his due, interpreted, as Polemarchus interprets it in the first book of Platos Republic, as doing good to ones friends and harm to ones enemies, or repaying good with good and evil with evil. Morality itself has been seen, for example by Edward Westermarck, as an outgrowth from the retributive emotions. But some moralists, including Socrates and Jesus, have recommended something very different from this, turning the other cheek and repaying evil with good. They have tried to substitute Do as you would be done by for Be done by as you did. Now this, which in human life we characterize as a Christian spirit or perhaps as saintliness, is roughly equivalent to the strategy Dawkins has unkindly labelled Sucker. Suckers are saints, just as grudgers are reciprocal altruists, while cheats are a hundred per cent selfish. And as Dawkins points out, the presence of suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy. It allows cheats to prosper, and could make them multiply to the point where they would wipe out the grudgers, and ultimately bring about the extinction of the whole population. This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsches view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type. But in practice there may be little danger. After two thousand years of contrary moral teaching, reciprocal altruism is still dominant in all human societies; thoroughgoing cheats and thoroughgoing saints (or suckers) are distinctly rare. The sucker slogan is an efficient meme, but the sucker behaviour pattern far less so. Saintliness is an attractive topic for preaching, but with little practical persuasive force. Whether in the long run this is to be deplored or welcomed, and whether it is alterable or not, is a larger question. To answer it we should have carefully to examine our specifically human capacities and the structure of human societies, and also many further alternative strategies. We cannot simply apply to the human situation conclusions drawn from biological models. Nevertheless they are significant and challenging as models; it will need to be shown how and where human life diverges from them. University College, Oxford. References 1 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976). 2 I am among these: see p. 113 of my Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977). 3 This suggestion is made in a section entitled The paradox of sex and the cost of paternal neglect of the following article: R. Dawkins, The value judgments of evolution, in M. A. H. Dempster and D. J. McFarland (eds) Animal Economics (Academic Press, London and New York, forthcoming).

Gene-juggling

By Mary Midgley

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkinss book The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie.[1] What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkinss producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weakness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing - the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths. He is an uncritical philosophic egoist in the first place, and merely feeds the egoist assumption into his a priori biological speculations, only rarely glancing at the relevant facts of animal behaviour and genetics, and ignoring their failure to support him. There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable.[2] I shall come to this point later, but I shall not begin with it, because, damning though it is, it may seem to some people irrelevant to his main contention. It is natural for a reader to suppose that his over-simplified drama about genes is just a convenient stylistic device, because it seems obvious that the personification of them must be just a metaphor. Indeed he himself sometimes says that it is so. But in fact this personification, in its literal sense, is essential for his whole contention; without it he is bankrupt. His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively selfinterested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively self-interested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. This strange convoluted drama must be untwisted before the full force of the objections from genetics can be understood. Dawkins does toy with egoistic explanations at the more ordinary level as well as with metaphysical gene selfishness, although it is not clear why he thinks he needs to . When animals act, as they quite often do, for each others advantage, Dawkins explains this, where possible, as reciprocal altruism, that is, not altruism at all but a bargain. It is only when this becomes too obviously unconvincing that he shifts his ground, becoming equally ready to say either that the individual is aiming to increase his own genetic fitness - i.e. to prosper by having a lot of descendants and relatives - or that the real agent is not the individual at all but the personified Gene. This is a mysterious entity riding in the individual and apparently composed of the numerous genes in his cells, which chooses to sacrifice him - and in some sense itself - for the sake of its representatives, with which it

somehow identifies, in the descendants who outlive him. I shall discuss the two last alternatives, which are extremely bizarre, later. The first and slightly more respectable idea is the one which seems chiefly to attract Mr Mackie, because it fits in with traditional egoism. Mackie approvingly cites Dawkinss exposition of it in terms of three imaginary genetic strains in a supposed bird population. They are: Suckers, who help everybody indiscriminately, Cheats, who accept help from everybody and never return it, and Grudgers, who refuse help only to those who have previously refused it to them. These strategies are supposed each to be controlled by a single gene, and the help in question is assumed to be essential for survival. In this absurdly abstract and genetically quite impossible situation, Dawkins concludes that Cheats and Grudgers would exterminate Suckers, and Grudgers might well do best of all. Mackie comments with satisfaction that a grudger is rather like you and me (p. 410), and reproves Socrates and Christ for supporting Suckers in telling us to return good for evil. As Dawkins points out, he goes on, the presence of Suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsches view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type (p. 464), though he more cheerfully concludes that such moralities are mere words and will have no influence anyway. Now even if Dawkinss calculations made genetic sense, the only way in which they could provide support for Nietzsche or any other philosophic egoist would be by showing that reciprocal altruism or Hobbesian prudential bargaining was the only source, or at least far the most persistent and central source, of all animal altruism - in which case we should indeed have good reason to suspect that it was more important than appeared in the human case as well. But the facts of animal life contradict this suggestion entirely. The main source and focus of altruistic behaviour in animals is the care of the young, which in most species will certainly never be repaid. Where the young leave home at maturity, parents are lamentably bad Hobbists if they take any notice of their children at all, apart from eating them. Moreover, advanced social species show a great deal of casual and uncalculating friendliness in their lives, and this often proceeds from old to young, from the strong to the weak, even where there is no blood relationship. Calculation about the future is an extreme late-comer in evolution; what forges society is the emotions. Animals are never guided in their lives by any such rigid, simple, games-theory criterion as did he do it to me last time? still less will he be able to do it back? They can certainly be angry, and to some extent bear grudges. But these events form only one strand among others in the very complex web of social relations which unites them. Within their friendships, mutual help will indeed take place. But the reason will not be the recognition of an insurance premium falling due. It will be liking and affection. All this is to explain what I mean by calling Dawkinss case absurdly abstract. (It is significant that he could not find a real one.) Dawkins supposes the help given to consist in grooming. But then - at least in birds and mammals - the behaviour of sucker is impossible. Grooming occurs only in social creatures, and occurs there as part of their social bonds. They groom their friends and relations; nobody grooms all comers indiscriminately. This is not a fiddling point. The advantage of being social does not spring from a chance collection of isolated behaviour-atoms like hygienic grooming. It is only possible as part of a whole complex way of life in which the outgoing emotions -

which egoism denies - constantly work for harmony. (Insects may need to be understood differently, but then neither Mackie nor Dawkins supposes that we are insects.) This disregard of the essential emotional context reappears in Mackies idea that the undiscriminating sucker behaviour is one recommended by Socrates and Christ. Neither sage is recorded to have said be ye equally helpful to everybody. Both, in the passages he means, were talking about behaviour to one narrow class of people, with whom we are already linked, namely our enemies, and were talking about it because it really does present appalling problems. The option of jumping on ones enemies faces whenever possible has always been popular. In spite of its attractions, and in spite of Nietzsches romantic power-worship, it has proved to have grave drawbacks. Of course charity and forgiveness have their drawbacks too, especially if they are unintelligently practised. As Mackie rightly says, there are problems about reconciling them with justice, and justice too has its roots in our emotional nature. There are real conflicts here as both Socrates and Christ realized. But since they are real they cannot be much helped by a dashing gesture towards Nietzsche. In dealing with these problems Dawkinss grossly simplified and distorted scheme is no use at all. Suckers do not exist. A blank, automatic, undiscriminating disposition to help everyone in sight would be pathological in any animal. In a human being, it would certainly not pass as charity or forgiveness but simply as loopiness. No doubt this, along with the equal dottiness of cheat, is what gives Mackie the impression that, by comparison a Grudger is rather like you and me. Being a shade less simple he certainly is more so, but the difference is trifling. We find him slightly less hard to believe in because he seems to show signs of being able to distinguish between friends, enemies and strangers. And we, like any other social animal regard this as a paramount condition of normal life. But the signs are deceptive because the Grudger is supposed to view as enemies all those who have ever failed to return his help in the past, and as friends all those who have returned it. This principle, on which a mans employer would usually be his best friend and his children always his enemies, is unknown in the animal world. Altruism is transitive long before it is reciprocal. No one who has heard of evolution has any business to suppose, as Hobbes excusably did, that calculating prudence is the root of all social behaviour. Now that we know how complex the social life of other species can become when their intelligence does not make calculation possible, we know that there is no such single root. Ethological comparison strongly confirms, what an unprejudiced view of the human scene has always suggested, that motivation is complex. There is no short cut to understanding it. In each case we have to look at the detailed evidence. The particular case which Mackie raises of the way in which the injured treat their injurers is a good instance of the surprising complexity which we find when we do this. In the species most like our own, lasting resentment after injuries is by no means a prominent or important motive. In some cases, of course, immediate fighting is possible, but prolonged grudge-bearing is rare and trivial. Jane Goodall notes with interest how in her chimps the usual effect of an injury is something very different - a distressed approach to the aggressor with a demand for reconciliation. What seems to be most noticed is not the injury itself, but the failure of the social bond: A chimpanzee, after being threatened or attacked by a superior, may follow the aggressor, screaming and crouching to the ground or holding out his hand. He is, in fact, begging a

reassuring touch from the other. Sometimes he will not relax until he has been touched or patted, kissed or embraced (In the Shadow of Man, p. 221). While a male chimpanzee is quick to threaten or attack a subordinate, he is usually equally quick to calm his victim with a touch, a pat on the back, an embrace of reassurance. And Flo, after Mikes vicious attack, and even while her hand dripped blood where she had scraped it against a rock, had hurried after Mike, screaming in her hoarse voice, until he turned. Then as she approached him, crouched low in apprehension, he had patted her again and again on her head, and as she quietened, had given her a final reassurance by leaning forward to press his lips on her brow (p. 114). As she points out, this reaction makes it possible to resume the relationship as though the injury had never taken place. (A community of retentive grudgers would by contrast be a terribly insecure one; no lapses would be tolerated.) She rightly remarks, too, that small human children do the same thing. It is only for adult human beings, with their much stronger powers of memory, imagination and foresight, that this simple reaction becomes impossible. The whole problem then takes on another dimension of complexity. Altogether, I know of no evidence from the behaviour of other species to suggest that prolonged grudge-bearing is anywhere a powerful motive. It can hardly, then, be an important root of justice. By contrast, readiness to fight back immediately in case of injury certainly is such a root. Actual animal-watching shows that this tendency is nothing like as strong or as common as has often been imagined. Still, there are plenty of situations where it does occur, usually either between individuals of roughly equal status, or between strangers, or on occasions of exceptional outrage. But to grow into the emotional raw material of justice, this capacity for instant retribution needs another element. It has to become vicarious; that is, altruistic. And it does so. Dominant animals often do attack middle-ranking ones who are bullying their inferiors, and may take the inferiors under their permanent protection. But this too is an outgrowth of parental protectiveness; again it presents the problem of altruism. In fact, the account that Mill gave of the matter is a fair one, provided that it is understood, not as an analysis of the notion of justice, but as an account of its psychological origins: The sentiment of justice appears to me to be, the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathizes, widened so as to include all persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human conception of intelligent self-interest (Utilitarianism, Ch. 5). But the fact that there are those with whom one sympathizes at all is ruinous to simpleminded egoism. The human capacity of enlarged sympathy certainly makes the point still more pressing, but the simplest case of parental care in animals already presents it in a damning form. This persistent difficulty in reducing parents to the egoist pattern is just the kind of thing which makes Dawkinss typical readers - people with vaguely egoist leanings about individual human psychology - willing to follow him in losing touch with the observed facts of motivation altogether and taking off for the empyrean with the Gene. Dawkins, however, does not even start from those facts. He draws all his material from sociobiological evolutionists such as W. D. Hamilton, Edward O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith who are not directly interested in individual psychology at all.

(Incidentally, his pages are virgin of originality except for a single suggestion which I shall discuss in my last section.) These evolutionists main business has been to show how conduct which does not benefit the agent can survive in evolution by benefiting his kin; they have worked out the arithmetic of kin-selection. This way of thinking actually makes any dependence on individual selfishness as a motive unnecessary, and the term selfish should not appear in their writings. For some reason, however, they are still devoted to it. Even the least romantic of them, W.D. Hamilton, has a paper called Geometry for the Selfish herd, and Wilson takes enormous pains to show that a great range of obviously uncalculated altruistic human behaviour, such as impulsive rescuing, is really bargaining, and therefore concealed selfishness.[3] They show a strong and unexamined tendency to assume both that individual motivation must actually, despite appearances, be selfish, and that it makes sense to talk of entities other than individuals as being selfish. R. S. Trivers, closely followed by Dawkins, has inflated this bad habit into a mythology. Before examining it, however, it is worth while asking why dogmatic egoism exerts this powerful pull. At the quite unthinking level, of course, it has two great attractions, both of which it shares with Hedonism - its great apparent simplifying power, and its swashbuckling style. But anyone who is so far intrigued by these as to begin applying it in detail quickly finds that the facts are too complicated for it. The first advantage is illusory. The second, though very influential in accounting for Dawkinss success, cannot be the only factor determining his mentors; two other more serious reasons come in. The first is an error that has always dogged this controversy, namely, an unrealistic notion of altruism. People define altruistic behaviour negatively, as activity which while helping others does nothing for the agent, which he himself does not at all want, or which is necessarily to his disadvantage. This negative conception seems to destroy the possibility of motivation towards it. The word however means something positive. Thy act is done for the benefit of another. Helping him is the aim, ones own feelings are the inducement; ones own disadvantage forms no part of the idea. It is mere confusion to suppose that satisfaction taken in it, or its happening to turn out useful to one, make it a selfish act. Bishop Butler long ago nailed this error: If, because every particular affection is a mans own, and the pleasure arising from its gratification his own pleasure, such particular affection must be called self-love, according to this way of speaking, no creature whatever can possibly act but merely from self-love. But then, this is not the language of mankind; or if it were, we should want words to express the difference between the principles of an action, proceeding from cool consideration that it will be to my advantage; and an action suppose of revenge, or of friendship, by which a man runs upon certain ruin, to do evil or good to another (Sermon XI, Sec. 7). Altruism, in fact, is not a fantastic concept, but a descriptive one with a use to distinguish some existing motives from others. Besides this familiar difficulty, however, the evolutionary context adds another, newer and more confusing factor. In natural selection, many are born but few survive for long. We call this competition, and the metaphor at once suggests the specific motive of contentiousness. As we begin to grasp the scale of the phenomenon, the strength of the motive involved seems to grow. Before Darwin drew attention to it, nobody, probably, realized how many must die early as the necessary

condition of the life and development of a few. My present business is not with the problems of theology but with the confused way in which people have persistently attributed to individual creatures the motives which seem needed in an imaginary being who might actually understand, and will, this whole process in which he is involved. Darwin, just because he was an exceptionally humane man, was shaken by what he found, and often used terms like war and remorseless struggle. Being a realistic naturalist, however, he would never have made the mistake of supposing that mice and mushrooms, pigs and pampas-grass were actually busy on unscrupulous plots to destroy each other, still less that minute scraps of their cell-tissues were so occupied. Only quite advanced creatures are sufficiently conscious of each others existence to compete in the full sense of the word - to know what they are about and have the appropriate motives. (Even human beings do not usually do so.)Predators, as their expressive movements show, do not regard their prey with anger or cruelty or as a fellow-creature at all, but just as meat. Remorse could not enter into the matter, so remorselessness in the true sense of determined callousness cannot either. For the same reason, the milder notion of selfishness is equally out of place. Among social birds and mammals we might use it, though hesitantly, to describe an individual who constantly grabbed more than his share. But for non-social creatures we could not use it so, since no question of shares arises among them. Similarly, a robin driving intruders off his territory cannot be supposed to weigh up their claims, predict their subsequent starvation, and decide in his own favour. He is not selfish; he just wants the place clear. One cannot speak even of unthinking selfishness in beings incapable of the thought in question. Most selective competition does not require competitive motives, nor any sort of motive involving calculation of consequences, and much of it requires altruistic ones. Absolutely none of it below the human level can proceed from dynastic ambition. Moreover, dynastic ambition is not selfishness, but a particular complex human motive which may well conflict with self-interest. The further down the scale of creatures we go, the more obvious all this becomes. Nobody attributes selfish planning to a paramecium. What, then, can Dawkins mean by attributing it to a gene? Doing his best for Dawkins, Mackie ignores this point, but it cannot be ignored; as its title implies, the book depends on it. Dawkins brings in gene motivation because his account of individual motivation is a total failure; in fact, he switches from one to the other with bewildering speed every time he gets into a difficulty. About individual motivation he would like to be an egoist, but the facts of ethology prevent it. He wants to relate the workings of natural selection in a simple and satisfying way to those of motivation by finding a single universal motive, and there is no such motive. Having picked on selfishness for this role, he personifies genes in order to find an owner for it. It may indeed seem that he must just be speaking metaphorically, as he sometimes claims. But the trouble about these admissions is that Dawkins seems to have studied under B. F. Skinner the useful art of open, manly self-contradiction, of freely admitting a point that destroys ones whole position and then going on exactly as before. When ruin stares him in the face, he withdraws into talk of metaphors, but he goes on afterwards as if the literal interpretation still stood. For instance, on p. 95 of The Selfish Gene. If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene

trying to do? . . . It is a distributed agency A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself which are sitting in other bodies In short, because a gene cannot perpetuate itself but only likenesses of itself, the language of selfishness is so crashingly wrong that even Dawkins sees he will have to hide it under the table for a bit, even from people who were willing to make a pet of his bogus entity. But this by no means makes him go back and alter the flat, unfigurative assertions which are everywhere essential to the books argument or modify its opening manifesto: [This book] is not science fiction; it is science. Clich or not, stranger than fiction expresses exactly how I feel about the truth. We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment (p. x). Not a word of caution about metaphors follows. On p. 210, Dawkins has the gall to write, Throughout this book, I have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. These disavowals do occur now and then, but, like the paternosters of Mafia agents, they have no force against his practice of habitually relying on the literal sense. On p. 48, too, he takes a very different line. Resisting people who might say that he has an excessively gene-centred view of evolution, he makes the quite proper and moderate reply that study of genetic causes is useful. Then, evidently concluding that genes have been shown to be the only reality, he suddenly adds: At times, gene language gets a bit tedious, and for brevity and vividness we shall lapse into metaphor. But we shall always keep a sceptical eye on our metaphors, to make sure they can be translated back into gene language if necessary. This seems to mean that not only the talk of conscious motives, but also all talk of whole organisms and their behaviour, is only a metaphorical way of describing the behaviour of genes. Anyone who can talk like this has a deeply confused view of metaphor, and a few words on this topic seem called for. To understand how metaphors can properly be used in scientific writing, we must get straight a fundamental point about the relation between metaphors and models. Every metaphor suggests a model; indeed, a model is itself a metaphor, but one which has been carefully pruned. Certain branches of it are safe; others are not, and it is the first business of somebody who proposes a new model to make this distinction clear. Once this is done, the unusable parts of the original metaphor must be sharply avoided; it is no longer legitimate to use them simply as stylistic devices. For instance, the familiar model of mechanisms in biology has long ago been pruned of its original implication that a mechanism needs an inventor or maker. Anyone writing about a biological mechanism knows that he must keep such inventors out of his explanation. He must somehow manage to use the language of purpose and adaptation without this reference; figurative speculations about the inventors character and history will damage and confuse his reasoning. He may want to do theology, but if so, he must do it explicitly, not by loosely extending the language of mechanisms'. Just so Dawkins, in officially discussing the merely physical action of genes, constantly uses the language of conscious motive and depends entirely on it to create the impression that he is in a position to say anything about human psychology. Calling genes selfish is indeed a metaphor. Whatever may be deemed to be the usable part of this metaphor, which

might fit it to become a model, everyone will agree that the attribution of conscious motive belongs to the unusable part. Yet that attribution is the only thing which makes it possible for him to move from saying genes are selfish to saying people are selfish. If anyone has any doubt about this, it may be best dealt with by moving on to examine the supposedly safer branches, to ask what then, ignoring the figurative flourishes, is the literal sense which the metaphor is there to convey? Shorn of its beams, it turns out to be a point about the ultimate unit of selection: The fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity (p. 12, cf. p. 42). Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust - storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time [whereas the gene] does not grow senile It leaps from body to body in its own way and for its own ends...The genes are the immortals (p. 36). The suggestion seems to be that, in order to understand the behaviour of larger units or temporary aggregations, all that we need is to understand the behaviour of genes. This looks like a simple recommendation to go and do some genetics. Dawkins, however, is no geneticist, and when we ask for further information on how genes do behave, he invariably returns to what was supposed to be merely a metaphor: Can we think of any universal qualities which we would expect to find in all good long-lived) genes?There might be several such universal properties, but there is which is particularly relevant to this book at the gene level, altruism must he bad selfishness good . . . Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival gene is the basic unit of selfishness (p. 38 - 39). (i.e. one and The

The reason why he cannot get off this subject is not that he knows no genetics, but that all the genetics which he or anyone else knows is solidly opposed to his notion of genes as independent units, only contingently connected, and locked in constant internecine competition, a war of all against all. (In spite of some words in the last quotation, he cannot really mean that it is just war between each gene and its own alleles; this would allow co-operation over the rest of the field and destroy his case entirely.) What he needs is a prisoners dilemma situation, in which each unit operates alone, and does it in the same way whatever the others may do. What he has got is a situation of the utmost causal complexity, in which genes probably always vary their workings according to context, always depend on each other, and in many cases may produce a totally different effect when different modifier genes accompany them. It is time to turn to the genetic realities. As I have suggested, Dawkinss crude, cheap, blurred genetics is not just an expository device. It is the kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred psychology. For selection to work as he suggests by direct competition between individual genes, the whole of behaviour would have to be divisible into units of action inherited separately and each governed by a single gene. Something like his simple sucker/cheat model would have to be adequate right across the board. One gene must govern each strategy if their interests are supposed to be always in competition. To convince us that this is so, Dawkins brings up once more the case of Rothenbuhlers Hygienic Bees, creatures which have been appearing in suspicious isolation as a stage army in all such arguments for some time, and, as if it were both well proven and typical,

he airily adds, If I speak, for example, of a hypothetical gene "for saving companions from drowning" and you find such a concept incredible, remember the story of the hygienic bees (p. 66) . Actually, not only does the bees case stand alone, but it is certainly not proven. To show that even the simple behaviour it involves is really governed by only two genes would take something like seventy generations of outbreeding experiments to ensure that the effects described are not due to the close linkage of genes at a whole series of adjacent loci, and even this would not show that these genes affected nothing else.[4] (By Dawkinss account, Rothenbuhler has studied two generations.) Those are the standards to which geneticists work. Genetics is that complicated. It is so because - as is well known - genes are essentially co-operative; they are linked together in the most complex and hierarchical ways and affect each others working to an incalculable extent. The idea of a one-one correlation is not genetics at all. As Dobzhansky put it, tracing the history of his subject in 1962: The original conception of simple unit-characters had to be given up when it was discovered that the visible traits of organisms are mostly conditioned by the interaction of many genes and most genes have pleiotropic, or manifold, effects on many traits . . . Although geneticists no longer speak of unit-characters, others continue to do so The academic lag goes far to explain why so many social scientists are repelled by the idea that intelligence, abilities or aptitudes may be conditioned by heredity (Mankind Evolving, p. 33). This refers to work done before 1920. Since that time, the emphasis on interdependence among genes has steadily grown. In his offhand way, Dawkins acknowledges some of this in Chapters 3 and 4. But this in no way embarrasses him when he writes of the grudger gene (p. 199) nor when he repeatedly assumes in those same chapters that each gene is a quite independent force wielding enormous individual influence. Thus, in considering how sexual reproduction arose, he writes that this would indeed be hard to understand in terms of advantage to the individual or even the increase of his posterity: But the paradox seems less paradoxical if we follow the argument of this book, and treat the individual as a survival machine built by a short-lived confederation of long-lived genes. Efficiency from the whole individuals point of view is then seen to be irrelevant. Sexuality versus non-sexuality will be regarded as an attribute under single-gene control, just like blue eyes versus brown eyes. A gene for sexuality manipulates all the other genes for its own selfish ends (p. 47, my italics).[5] Occurring in a students genetics essay, the italicized sentence would just be a bad mistake. It cannot be turned into something else here by the metaphorical context, because this point is not part of the metaphor; it is what the metaphor is meant to convey as literal fact. The context does, of course, make a difference, because what in a student would be simple ignorance is here being used to bail out an unworkable thesis. The same open disregard for consistency surrounds the questions of the genes credentials as a unit. Its unity and permanence are, as the quotations just made show, supposed to be its great merits. Dawkins however cheerfully acknowledges what is well known; that the word gene is used in various senses by geneticists for varying sections along the DNA, and that none of them is immortal. In fact the word may be used to indicate different lengths of DNA within the chromosome depending whether a unit of mutation, function or recombination is being referred to. These are so far different that Dawkinss danger is like that of

someone analysing language, who insists that we must find its fundamental elements, but talks as if it did not matter whether we take those elements to be letters, words or sentences. Aware of trouble here, he hastily adopts a general definition for 'gene which he attributes (rather surprisingly and without reference) to George Williams. A gene is now defined as any portion of chromosomal material which potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection (p. 30). This, he claims with relief, is the end of his search for the fundamental unit of natural selection, and therefore the fundamental unit of self-interest. What I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot help being right. That is: in physical terms, what he says is tautological and meaningless; he might be talking about any section of the DNA, though obscurely. In psychological terms, it is both meaningless and absurd, since he has linked the notion of self-interest quite gratuitously to a kind of subject for which it can make no sense at all. The only possible unit of self-interest is a self, and there are no selves in the DNA. When the mountains of metaphor are removed, in fact, what we find is not so much a mouse as a mares nest, namely the project of finding a unit which will serve for every kind of calculation involved in understanding evolution; a fundamental unit at a deep level which will displace, and not just supplement, all serious reference to individuals, groups, kin and species, and which (for some unexplained reason) will also be the unit of selfishness or self-interest. Dawkins is not the only person to be impressed by the idea of a universal unit, but it is vacuous. To see how vacuous, we might ask the parallel question, what is the fundamental unit of economics? A coin? If so how large and of what country? A single worker? A factory? A complete market exchange? A minimal investor? For various purposes and from different angles, we might need to count any of these things. The decision which to count, and how finely to divide them, would depend entirely on the particular problem which we wanted to solve, and for most purposes we would refer to all of them, and would rightly not expect to have to reduce one to another. The reason which Dawkins gives for electing genes to this strange position in evolution is that they are less changeable than the entities of which they form part. But as far as this goes, physical particles are in a stronger position still. Dawkins sometimes does toy with this thought, calling them too selfish replicators; why stop at genes? The reason can only be that our understanding of genes does a special job in explaining evolution. This is true, but, since genes are not on view, it is a limited job, entirely dependent on a direct understanding of the more obvious entities in their own terms. Moreover, physical particles can exist without organisms; genes cannot. They survive only if their owner belongs to a species, and one which has not fallen below the critical frequency for further breeding. Members of a population within a species probably have as many as 7080 per cent of their genes in common (ignoring neutral alleles whose results (allozymes) make no difference and are therefore invisible to selection).[6] And these genes are hierarchically linked in such a way that any serious disturbance of the group will not give rise to a viable organism at all. (This is why hybrids are usually sterile.) Genes are units indeed for some purposes of calculation, but they are not independent, privateering units. If a gene were a conscious planner, it would have to reckon its interests as including those of a mass of other genes on which it is dependent, as well as all such genes in all possible mates for its owners descendants, and all necessary ancestors for those mates - in short, everything needed for the gene pool - in short, since any gene pool can fall into trouble, everything needed for the whole species, and indeed for the eco-system. No biological unit can he both

fundamental in the sense of lasting, and also independent. But this is no tragedy, since there is no sort of need for such a unit. Physics itself no longer looks, as it used to, for atoms in the strict sense of unsplittable units, permanent and unchangeable billiard-balls, at the end of its analysis. There is no point at all in other sciences dressing up in its old clothes and inventing such units. There is however a perfectly good controversy carried on among evolutionists about the unit of selection, one dealing with a real but much more limited issue. We ask: what is it that natural selection selects? Now there is an obvious and perhaps conclusive sense in which we must answer individuals. Organisms are born and die as wholes; each does not directly involve another, but it does involve all its parts. The notion of group selection, however, was invented to account for the fact that some ways of behaving seem adapted rather to preserve the group than the individual. (This thought arose not so much about altruistic behaviour as about population mechanisms which look like devices to stabilize the size of a group.) But the phrase group-selection is confused, because what is selected ought to be items out of a set .And it does not normally happen that many distinct groups compete without mixing. Instead there is usually gene-flow between them, and groupstabilizing characters spread throughout the species. Group-selection is a bad term if it is taken to mean something parallel and alternative to individual selection. All the same. the point raised is a real one, and draws attention to a confusion in the notion of selection itself. Organisms are selected as individuals, but what are they selected for? The term select leads people to hope for a simple, positive answer to this question, a single, isolable purpose. We would like to say, just as an employer choosing workers selects simply the ones who will maximize profits, so evolutionary pressures select simply those who will maximize something specific like their own life-span. But neither employers nor pressures can really act so simple-mindedly. The idea of an economic man whose sole aim is to maximize profits cannot be made coherent. This is not only because, if he is a man as well as being economic, he will be moved by non-economic considerations like not wanting to go to jail or work himself to death. It is because we do not know, and economics cannot tell us, at what time the profits are to be counted. Security for next year, or for some such slice of the future, normally counts as a condition to be satisfied before profits start to be reckoned; indeed, the notion of profits is normally understood against a background of this condition and many others, such as not murdering all possible rivals. But in principle one could decide to aim at absolute maximization in six months followed by suicide, or alternatively, as misers do, to live in penury with a view to maximizing at the end of the longest possible life-span. Quite different policies would follow these decisions. Puzzles remarkably like this infest the attempt to find a single aim for natural selection. Sociobiological thinkers are inclined to hope they can solve them by substituting maximum genetic fitness for maximum life-span as the aim of selection. But this is mere word-spinning. Maximum genetic fitness means having as many surviving relatives as possible, and this simply is being selected - it is not the aim or condition of it. Just as with economics, the degree of success achieved will seem to vary with the time when one decides to do the audit. Changes long after an individuals death can bring his hitherto unwelcome genes into sudden demand; webbed feet or a silent habit become necessary in new circumstances. But they might not have done, and it is idle to say then he was fitter than we supposed; after all, we might have to reverse the judgment again later on.

It is probably necessary, for evolution as for economics, to think not of one single aim, but of a number which converge, and particularly to notice a number of negative conditions which must be met. No sensible economist supposes that his subject lays bare the ultimate structure of human life and reveals its deep determining purpose. Evolution, however, is a much larger and more complex thing than human life, less likely still to yield to formulation in such simple terms. Even if we confine ourselves to asking what is needed for an individual to be selected - to survive and leave descendants - we shall not find one goal which he has to reach, but rather a great many disasters which he has to avoid. His own qualities can only account for sonic of them. Some are outside anyones control, some - a great many in social species - lie in the control of con-specifics. Mutual aid and protection can be quite essential to him, and they are more often transitive than reciprocal. Because they largely occur among kin, this point has been expressed by talking of kinselection, which means the development of kin-profiting behaviour by the selective advantage which it gives to those kin-groups which practise it. This is a reasonable idea, though again it is not actually an alternative to individual selection. As with larger groups, the picture is not one of isolated kin-groups competing, but of protective behaviour spreading through the advantage it confers. Since kin-groups are normally not exclusive, this spread will eventually go beyond them. Kin in fact is not the name of a super-entity which replaces individuals in the selection process, but a pointer to the necessarily social character of some behaviour. This social character can have various ranges. Parental care helps chiefly ones kin. The mobbing of predators helps chiefly ones group. Migration and colonization may help chiefly ones species. In all these kinds of case, the reason why the behaviour can develop is that it helps to build up the supportive background needed by all individuals rather than directly helping the agent. Thus the notions of kin- and group-selection each have a point, but it is one which can be expressed compatibly with the obvious truth expressed by the notion of individual selection. Real empirical issues remain, about just how the mechanisms involved work, both socially and physiologically, but a blank clash of polarized views is unnecessary. Gene-selection, however, which Dawkins puts forward as winning candidate for this somewhat unreal race, is a much more obscure idea. Because of the genetic complications I have mentioned, it is hard to give it any meaning at all. As Stephen Jay Gould sensibly puts it: No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them - direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by a single gene. . . Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesnt even work directly on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms . . . The image of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival, bears little relation to developmental genetics as we understand it (Caring Groups and Selfish Genes, Natural history, Vol. 86, Dec. 1977). Why, finally, does all this matter? There are many aspects of it which I cannot go into now, and I concentrate on the moral consequences which Dawkins and Mackie draw. Egoism, when it is not just vacuous, is a moral doctrine. It has, as Mackie sees, always a practical point to urge. Aristotle used it to tell us to attend to our own personal and intellectual development. Hobbes used it to urge citizens to treat their government as accountable to

them generally, and particularly to make them resist religious wars. Nietzsche, nonpolitical and often surprisingly close to Aristotle, did on his egoist days preach selfsufficiency and self-fulfilment as a counterblast to the self-forgetful and self-despising elements in Christianity. But he is only a part-time egoist. Any attempts to use him as a signpost here would, as usual, be frustrated by his equal readiness to denounce bourgeois caution and exalt suicidal courage, or love of the remotest. He hated prudent bargaining. His egoism is confused, too, by contributions from his personal terror of love and human contact. Still, against the wilder excesses of Christianity he certainly had a point, and he was able to make it without any reference to genes. Is there any way in which reference to genes could become relevant to disputes about it? Dawkins makes the connection as follows: The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in our genes is ruthless selfishness . . . Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (pp. 23, my italics). He contends, that is, that the appearance of a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals including ourselves, is only a deceptive phantom. The underlying reality, as he often says, is not any other individual motivation either, but the selfishness of the genes. Yet he just as often talks as if this established that the individual motivation were different from what it appears to be - as here, we are born selfish. His thought seems to be that individual motivation is only an expression of some pro-founder, metaphysical motivation, which he attributes to genes, and is bound therefore to represent it. And he has arrived at his notion of gene-motivation by dramatizing the notion of competition. Even as drama, this fancy is gratuitous. All that can be known about our genes from the fact that they have survived is that they are strong. If people insist on personification, the right parallel would no doubt be with a situation in which a number of travellers had, independently, crossed a terrible desert. It might happen that in doing so they had unknowingly often removed resources which would have saved the lives of others - but this could tell us nothing about their characters unless they had known that they were doing so, and scraps of nuclear tissue are incapable of knowledge. We could be sure only that such travellers were strong, and to make a parallel here we must examine the concept of gene strength. This strength is not an abstract quality, but is relative to the strains imposed at the time. The fact that people have survived so far shows only that they have had the genetic equipment to meet the challenges they have so far encountered. Human pugnacity had its place in this equipment. But since people are now moving into a phase of existence when that pugnacity itself becomes one of the main dangers to be faced, new selective pressures are beginning to operate. In this situation telling people that they are essentially Chicago gangsters is not just false and confused, but monstrously irresponsible. It can only mean that their feeble efforts to behave more decently are futile, that their conduct will amount to the same whatever they do, that their own and other peoples apparently more decent feelings are false and hypocritical. On the other hand, to tell them (what is quite different) that they have actually no motives at all and no control over their actions, that they live in a permanent state of post-hypnotic suggestion, helpless pawns in the hands of powers over whom they have no influence, is melodramatic and

incoherent fatalism. The unlucky thing is that people enjoy fatalism, partly because it promotes bad faith and excuse-making, partly because the melodrama has a sadomasochistic appeal - an appeal which gets stronger the nastier the powers in question are supposed to be. Dawkins, however, claims innocence of all this. H says he is merely issuing a warning that we had better resist our genes and upset their designs: Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs (p. 3). He does not explain who the we are that have somehow so far escaped being pre-formed by these all-powerful forces as to be able to turn against them. He does not even raise the question how we are supposed to conceive the idea of building a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, if there were no kindly and generous feelings in our emotional make-up. He does however see some difficulty in accounting for the diversities of human conduct. This so far disturbs him that he produces for once an idea of his own, not derived from Trivers, Hamilton, Wilson or anybody else - the idea that cultural evolution is a process on its own, taking place in units called memes (short for mimemes): Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms 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 (p. 206). These memes, equally with genes, are selfish and ruthless: When we look at the evolution of cultural traits, and at their survival value, we must be clear whose survival we are talking about . . . A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over. We do not even have to posit a genetic advantage in imitation (pp. 214-215). So, apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves. We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather then elephants or octopuses. This is not an easy question to handle for dances, but it will be still harder for scientific theories. Dawkins explicitly includes them as memes, so that the proper way to enquire about them seems to be, not to investigate their truth or any other advantage which they might have for the people using them, but to study the use they make of people. Here, to be frank, Dawkins blathers, and no wonder. The idea of memes is meant to save human uniqueness, to avoid producing the sense of insult which readers often feel on being told that their traits are inherited, and which they have a right to feel ten times more strongly after the account which Dawkins

has given of inherited traits. But it is still an explanation of the only kind which (apparently) Dawkins can conceive, namely a metaphysical one in terms of autonomous, parasitical, non-human entities. Again it is unrelated to the facts, and on top of that this time it fails still more obviously and resoundingly in the job of providing units .A meme is meant to be a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. In the case of genes, Dawkins has insisted very firmly on the permanence, distinctness and separability needed for such units, and because the general public does not realize that genes do not have it, he has more or less got by. In the case of memes the simplest observer can see that no such standards can be met. Consequently, even if - absurdly - imitation were the essence of culture, it could not have units and the whole conception falls to the ground. Besides this, of course, the theory not only fails to give a proper, workable account of human freedom but sets up another, apparently impenetrable, barrier in the way of supposing that we are free at all. No wonder, then, that Dawkins hurries past his half-finished meme-construction to advise us in peroration, to save ourselves from the worst excesses of the blind replicators including memes. We are to do this partly by improved calculations of selfinterest, but also, he says, partly by deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. Why it should be imagined that Dawkins and his disciples, beginning this enterprise now, could succeed when everyone else in recorded and unrecorded history who has tried it has managed only to become infested by memes (including scientific theories), does not emerge. Nor is it clear whether Mr Mackie is going to welcome this new enterprise. Over memes there is, of course, a nightmare possibility of developing Dawkinss case. In a sufficiently depressed mood, a psychologist might really feel moved to describe the history of human thought in terms of its progressive infestation by conscious, selfinterested, parasitical bad ideas. For the time, that might seem to him the only way of explaining the confusion he sees, the chronic waste of human speculative intelligence, the contentiousness, the showing-off, the neglect of obvious facts. In this project, he might well find his most convincing examples in theories of motivation, and specially in those (like Dawkinss) which simplify it by reduction and trade on fatalism. This topic is, of all important human enquiries, perhaps the hardest to approach impartially, the most prone to distortion both by oversimplification and bad faith. Modern specialization, too, has made it even more vulnerable to bad theories by dividing the critics who should provide immunity against them. There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists. Should we then (he might wonder) resign ourselves to enduring all such manifestations, including The Selfish Gene, as impregnable alien life-forms, a kind of mental bacillus against which no antigen can ever be developed? Emerging finally from his bad mood, however, he would find strength to resist this idea. Entities (he would remind himself) ought after all not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Spooks should not be encouraged; less superstitious explanations are not hard to find. Slapdash egoism is not really a very puzzling phenomenon. It is a natural expression of peoples lazy-minded vanity, an armchair game of cops-and-robbers which saves them the trouble of real enquiry and flatters their self-esteem. No non-human intervention is needed to account for it; it is a commonplace, understandable disorder of human development,

like obesity or fallen arches. It is no subject for science fiction; ordinary care and attention are enough to remedy it.[7] University of Newcastle upon Tyne

References 1 J. L. Mackie, The Law of the Jungle, Philosophy 53 (October 1978). 2 The attempt which he has eventually made to answer some of these criticisms may be read in Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 47 (1978), 6176. Apart from some minor disputes, it simply intensifies the conceptual blunders which I discuss here. Dawkins always answers opponents who point out that genes as scientists normally conceive them cannot possibly play the role which he assigns to them by retreating still further from the facts to a more general metaphysical position where genes are classed as replicators. Unless he either learns to do metaphysics or retreats out of sight entirely, this is not going to do him any good. 3 See Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1975), 120. He adds, however, Human behaviour abounds with reciprocal altruism consistent with genetic theory, but animal behaviour seems to be almost devoid of it. He accounts for this (as I do) by the lack of calculation in animals, but seems not to see that, since these animals are the subjects we are dealing with for almost the whole of evolution, any genetic theory inconsistent with their capacities will have to be revised. Dawkins, in his Grudger story, ignores Wilsons reasoning here, as he does most other things that do not suit him. 4 For an example of such work fully carried through, see Kyriakou, Burnet and Connolly on heterozygote advantage in the mating behaviour of Drosophila (The behavioural basis of over-dominance in competitive mating success at the ebony locus in Drosophila melanogaster). Animal Behaviour 27 (1979) (in press). 5 Contrast with this confident and startling pronouncement a typical passage from the Preface to John Maynard Smiths thoughtful book The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge University Press, 1976): I am under no illusion that I have solved all the problems that I raise. Indeed, on the most fundamental questions - the nature of the forces responsible for the maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination - my mind is not made up. On sex, the relative importance of group and individual selection is not easy to decide It has struck me while writing that the crucial evidence is often missing, simply because the theoretical issues have not been clearly stated. 6 See R. S. Singh, R. C. Lewontin, and A. A. Felton on Genetic Heterogeneity within Electrophoretic "Alleles" of Xanthine Dehydrogenase in Drosophila pseudoobscura, Genetics 84 (1976), 609-629. 7 For a fuller discussion of sociobiological ideas in their more modest, Wilsonian form, see my book Beast and Man (Cornell University Press, 1978; Harvester Press, 1979), Chapters 4-8. Up till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break

a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackies article is not the only indication I have lately met of serious attention paid to his fantasies. What this shows is that, in the absence of a serious and realistic psychology of motive, people will clutch at straws. Moral philosophers, in particular, have so thoroughly and deliberately starved themselves of the natural facts needed to deal with their problems that many of them are reduced to a weak state in which they lack resistance to even the most obvious absurdities. Anti-naturalist diets must be altogether given up if this sort of thing is to be avoided. I would like to acknowledge invaluable help over the scientific side of this paper, given by my colleague Dr A. L. Panchen of the Zoology Department of the University of Newcastle.

Genes and Egoism

By J. L. Mackie

Mary Midgleys article [1] is not merely intemperate but misconceived. Its errors must be corrected if readers of Philosophy are not to be left with false impressions, for it rests on a complete misunderstanding both of Dr Dawkinss position and of mine. I leave it to Dawkins to reply about his own work; I shall comment only on the opinions Midgley ascribes to me, and try to make it clear what my views really are. What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins, she says, is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism (p. 439). This is nonsense. I am not sure whether she has psychological or ethical egoism in mind, but this matters little, since I have not adopted or advocated either position, and am not looking for support for either. If my article [2] supports anything, it is reciprocal altruism, but in fact I took care to leave all such questions open. I must simply repeat my closing remarks, which Midgley has ignored: To answer itthat is, the question whether the practical inefficacy of saintliness is to be welcomed or deploredwe should have carefully to examine our specifically human capacities and the structure of human societies, and also many further alternative strategies. We cannot simply apply to the human situation conclusions drawn from biological models. Nevertheless they are significant and challenging as models; it will need to be shown how and where human life diverges from them. If she had wanted to know more about my views, Midgley could have glanced at my book on ethics [3] no need to read it all, the index entries under altruism and egoism give the key passages. What I say there is that human motivation is partly egoistic and partly altruistic, but that the altruism is mainly what Broad called self-referential, that is, concern for others... who have some special connection with oneself; children, parents, friends, workmates, neighbours ... (p.132). All of Midgleys passionate insistence that human beings (as well as other animals) are altruistic towards their young, that there is uncalculating friendliness, that help is given to friends and relations (pp. 440441) is therefore totally beside the point: what she says under this heading is no more than I have said all along. In my article I stressed reciprocal altruism. Midgley thinks that this is not altruism at all but a bargain (p. 440). But she is wrong. Reciprocal altruism is shown in gratitude for benefits and further benefits in response to gratitude (contrasting with resentment of injuries). Over time, it may work a bit like an implicit bargain; but only a bit. It can be and normally is uncalculating, even in human beings who are capable of calculation. It can flourish as a behaviour pattern, apart from any explicit motivation. Bargains, agreements, contracts, promises and so on are much more sophisticated performances; they too have a role in human life, certainly, but reciprocal altruism is a much simpler and more pervasive phenomenon.

Midgley quotes (p. 445) Bishop Butlers argument against psychological egoism. Does she really imagine that she needs to draw my attention to this? I have been teaching moral philosophy for more than thirty years; like most teachers of this subject, I have commended this argument to every generation of my students, and I refer to it on p. 143 of my book. In that book I have argued (following Sidgwick) that there is no rational disproof of ethical egoism; but not with a view to establishing ethical egoism, but as part of my general case against objectively prescriptive values. So far as practical ethics is concerned, I have said that egoism and self-referential altruism would form a central part of the good life, that it is not only legitimate but right and proper that [people] should pursue what they see as their own well-being, and that we also want some self-referentially altruistic moral principles (p. 173). Here I am, as it happens, agreeing with Bishop Butler: Self-love in its due degree is as just and morally good, as any affection whateverNeither does there appear any reason to wish self-love were weaker in the generality of the world, than it is (Preface to the Sermons), and benevolence to some preferably to others [is] virtue (Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue). But 1 have argued also that we need some constraints on the pursuit of these narrower interests, namely what I call the special device of morality in the narrow sense (p. 170). Any suggestion that my ethical position is pure egoism is as wide of the mark as the suggestion that I endorse pure psychological egoism. So far as philosophy is concerned, therefore, Midgley has attacked a wholly imaginary target. But her misunderstanding goes far deeper than this. If she had read my article with even a minimum of attention she would have seen that its main subject is neither ethics nor psychology, but a theoretical point in biology, namely the possibility of a kind of group selection. I make no claim to biological knowledge, but my purpose was to show that some of the models used by Dawkins leave room for such a possibility - a possibility which is of interest to moral philosophers if they are trying to understand morality itself as the product of some kind of natural evolution. Slapdash egoism, Midgley says, is not really a very puzzling phenomenon (p. 458). Nor, I suppose, is slapdash discussion (even in a reputable philosophical journal); but it is deplorable. Let me end, however, on a more positive note. If anyone agrees with me (Ethics, pp. 106, 123) that morality is not to be discovered but to be made, then he may well wonder whether there are any practical limits, any constraints upon what we can put into it if we want our moral recommendations to be effective, to work and survive in competition with other tendencies. Some constraints may result from biologically determined and hence general tendencies in human nature; others may result from the game-theoretic interplay of cultural traits, which, as Dawkins argues, may well show formal analogies with biological evolution. (This suggestion is in no way undermined by Midgleys fuss about units.) I hope it is clear by now that I am not suggesting that either sort of constraint will be anything as simple as universal pure egoism. In fact, one of the most interesting points to emerge from the game-theoretic approach is the possibility that an evolutionarily stable strategy will be a mixed strategy, with contrasting behaviour tendencies in some stable ratio either between individuals in a population or within each individual - particularly interesting since each of us tends to display a mixed strategy with regard to, say, honesty

or even politeness. It is good common sense, not melodramatic and incoherent fatalism, to be aware of the possibility of such constraints and to be prepared to work out what they are likely to be. University College, Oxford References 1 Mary Midgley, Gene-juggling, Philosophy 54 (October 1979). 2 J. L. Mackie, The Law of the Jungle, Philosophy 53 (October 1978). 3 Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin, 1977).

In Defence of Selfish Genes

By Richard Dawkins

I have been taken aback by the inexplicable hostility of Mary Midgleys assault.[1] Some colleagues have advised me that such transparent spite is best ignored, but others warn that the venomous tone of her article may conceal the errors in its content. Indeed, we are in danger of assuming that nobody would dare to be so rude without taking the elementary precaution of being right in what she said. We may even bend over backwards to concede some of her points, simply in order to appear fair-minded when we deplore the way she made them. I deplore bad manners as strongly as anyone, but more importantly I shall show that Midgley has no good point to make. She seems not to understand biology or the way biologists use language. No doubt my ignorance would be just as obvious if I rushed headlong into her field of expertise, but I would then adopt a more diffident tone. As it is we are both in my corner, and it is hard for me not to regard the gloves as off. I will try to make my reply constructive, in the hope that it may interest those who have not read Midgleys article, as well as those who have. Unattributed quotations with page numbers will all be taken from her article. Since it was my book, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), which stimulated her attack, it will also be necessary for me to quote from it. I shall divide my reply into eight sections. Definitional Misunderstanding [Dawkins] central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively self-interested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes' (p. 439). Midgley raises the art of misunderstanding to dizzy heights. My central point had no connection with what she alleges. I am not even very directly interested in man, or at least not in his emotional nature. My book is about the evolution of life, not the ethics of one particular, rather aberrant, species. I shall return to this misunderstanding of me, but for the moment let me concentrate on her more serious misunderstanding of the definitional conventions of the whole science of sociobiology, a science of which she aspires to be a serious scholar.[2] When biologists talk about selfishness or altruism we are emphatically not talking about emotional nature, whether of human beings, other animals, or genes. We do not even mean the words in a metaphorical sense. We define altruism and selfishness in purely behaviouristic ways: An entity is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entitys welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect.

"Welfare" is defined as "chances of survival", even if the effect on actual life and death prospects is . . small . . . It is important to realize that the above definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not concerned here with the psychology of motives . . . that is not what this hook is about. My definition is concerned only with whether the effect of an act is to lower or raise the survival prospects of the presumed altruist and the presumed beneficiary (The Selfish Gene, pp. 4-5). It follows from such a behaviouristic definition of altruism and selfishness that calculation, whether long-term or not, is irrelevant, as is emotional nature. I assume that an oak tree has no emotions and cannot calculate, yet I might describe an oak tree as altruistic if it grew fewer leaves than its physiological optimum, thereby sparing neighbouring saplings harmful overshadowing. A biologist would be interested in calculating the genetic and other conditions which would be necessary for such altruism to be favoured by natural selection: for instance, it might be favoured if the saplings were close relatives of the tree. Philosophers may object that this kind of definition loses most of the spirit of what is ordinarily meant by altruism, but philosophers, of all people, know that words may be redefined in special ways for technical purposes. In effect I am saying: Provided I define selfishness in a particular way an oak tree, or a gene, may legitimately be described as selfish. Now a philosopher could reasonably say: I dont like your definition, but given that you adopt it I can see what you mean when you call a gene selfish. But no reasonable philosopher would say: I dont like your definition, therefore I shall interpret your statement as though you were using my definition of selfishness; by my definition your concept of the selfish gene is nonsense, therefore it is nonsense. This is, in effect, what Midgley has done: Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological (p. 439). Why didnt she add to this witty little list, for the benefit of quantum physicists, that fundamental particles cannot have charm? If I spoke of a selfish elephant I would have to be very careful to state, over and over again, whether I meant the word in its subjective or its behaviouristic sense. This is because a good case might be made that elephants subjectively experience emotions akin to our own selfishness. No sensible case can be made that genes do, and I therefore might have thought myself safe from misunderstanding. To make doubly sure, I still went to the trouble of emphasizing that my definition was behaviouristic. The many laymen who have read my book seem to have had little trouble in grasping this simple matter of definition. Did Midgley, perhaps, just overlook my definition? One cannot, after all, be expected to read every single word of a book whose author one wishes to insult. But in the present case no such excuse can be made. My definition is not private to me. It is essentially the same kind of definition as is used by all modern biologists who write about social behaviour in animals, and Midgley is supposed to know about these things. Actually I think it is arguable that we ethologists (sociobiologists) have overdone our insistence on objective, behaviouristic definitions of words like hunger, fear and selfishness. Maybe one day we will all come round to the minority view of Donald Griffin (The Question of Animal Awareness, New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1976) that the present anti-subjective bias of ethological language constitutes an obsolete straitjacket. But for the time being, whether we like it or not, it just is the case that biologists use these words in a special, restricted sense. A philosopher who wishes to understand biologists

must, therefore, learn this basic feature of biological language, particularly a philosopher who aspires to write about biology. The imagination reels at what a mind labouring under Midgleys definitional misconception must make of almost any of the modern literature on animal behaviour. Egoism To Midgley it evidently follows from her misunderstanding of my words that I am advocating an egoistic view of human ethics, or at least that I would like to be an egoist (p. 446). But even if, to grant the inconceivable, I really was saying that genes had a selfish emotional nature (p. 439), it would not follow that I thought human beings had one too. And even if I did think human beings were fundamentally selfish, it would not follow that I welcomed the idea. In fact, of course, to the extent that I am interested in human ethics (a rather small extent), I disapprove of egoism. To the extent that I know about human psychology (again, a rather small extent), I doubt if our emotional nature is, as a matter of fact, fundamentally selfish. And I of course do not think genes have emotional natures at all. Let me try to say again what I do think. The facts of ethology certainly deny individual egoism as a rule in nature. Every ethologist knows this, and examples abound in my book. how, then, is the Darwinian to explain individual altruistic behaviour in animals? Group selection is one possible answer: a species, or other group, may selfishly survive at the expense of rival groups if the individuals within it behave altruistically towards each other. But unfortunately, except under very special conditions, biologists now agree that group selection cannot work in nature. There is no authoritative support for the once fashionable habit of explaining animal adaptations, altruistic behaviour among them, as for the good of the species. Midgley, incidentally, has this old biology A-level reflex well developed, as when she says What is maladaptive . . . damages the speciess chances of surviving (Beast and Man, p. 149), and .... there is a problem about evolution, which runs "Can a species survive if each member of it sometimes does things which do not (in fact) pay him?" (op. cit., p.117). The contemporary biologist would say that whether or not a species survives is, though doubtless an interesting question, nothing to do with Darwinian selection. Darwinian selection does not choose among species. What, then, does it choose among? The favoured answer is individuals. In a sense this is correct, but only if we put it very carefully; what matters is not differential survival of individuals, but differential inclusive genetic fitness of individuals. The fitness of an individual (again, this is a special technical usage, different from everyday usage) means its success in getting copies of its genes represented in future generations. Fitness is a difficult quantity to calculate and a difficult concept to understand (see, for instance, Midgleys own misunderstanding of it in Beast and Man, pp. 138-140). My suggestion is that we can lessen the risk of misunderstanding if we shift our attention from the organism as agent, to the gene itself. Inclusive fitness is, I have only half facetiously pointed out, that property of an individual organism which will appear to be maximized when what is really being maximized is gene survival.[3] We may say, with the majority of modern specialists, that maternal care is favoured by natural selection because of its beneficial

effects on the inclusive fitness of the mothers concerned. Or, we may say what is essentially the same thing in terms of the selfish gene: genes that make mothers care for their young are likely to survive in the bodies of the infants cared for; genes that make mothers neglect their infants are likely to end up in dead infant bodies; therefore the gene pool becomes full of genes that induce maternal care; this is why we see maternal care in nature. In effect, what I have done is to reject the selfish group as an explanation of individual altruism, to say the selfish individual is a better, but more complex and easily misunderstood, alternative, and to offer the selfish gene as a simple, correct alternative. The details are by no means simple, however, and my book is a working out, in various ways, of the complications and implications of this fundamental principle, that individual behaviour, altruistic or selfish, is best interpreted as a manifestation of selfishness at the gene level. To illustrate the kind of argument I was making, I used an analogy: If we were told that a man had lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was. We might expect that he would have qualities such as toughness, a quick trigger finger, and the ability to attract loyal friends Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes (The Selfish Gene, p. 2). If anybody had suggested to me that it was possible to misread that passage as saying that people are essentially Chicago gangsters I would have laughed. Yet this superhuman feat of misunderstanding is exactly what Midgley manages to achieve, . . . telling people that they are essentially Chicago gangsters is not just false and confused, but monstrously irresponsible (p. 455). I ask Midgley to look again at my words, take a few deep breaths and read them calmly and quietly. See the role of my Chicago gangster analogy. The point was that knowledge about the kind of world in which a man has prospered tells you something about that man. It had nothing to do with the particular qualities of Chicago gangsters. I could just as well have used the analogy of a man who had risen to the top of the Church of England, or been elected to the Athenaeum. In any case it was not people but genes that were the subject of my analogy. Reciprocal Altruism Midgleys misunderstanding of the theory of reciprocal altruism is a special case of her more general muddle, already alluded to, about animals calculating. The evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism, largely due to R. L. Trivers, was the subject of J L. Mackies paper in this journal which was the immediate stimulus for Midgleys attack. Briefly, Trivers suggested that the principle of doing favours in the expectation of their possibly being returned later, which we understand at the level of conscious calculation, can be made to work in an evolutionary model without assuming conscious calculation. The appropriate mathematics is the theory of games, as I illustrated in my simple explanatory model of three strategies called cheat, sucker, and grudger (The Selfish Gene, pp. 197-201). Now Midgley appears to think that reciprocal altruism can only work in animals

that can calculate. She quotes E.O. Wilsons surprising statement that Human behaviour abounds with reciprocal altruism consistent with genetic theory, but animal behaviour seems to be almost devoid of it (Midgleys italics, not in original, not acknowledged). Midgley goes on: [Wilson] accounts for this (as I do) by the lack of calculation in animals, but seems not to see that, since these "animals" are the subjects we are dealing with for almost the whole of evolution, any "genetic theory" inconsistent with their capacities will have to be revised (p. 444). I would have been surprised if Wilson had really invoked the lack of calculation in animals, and indeed, as far as I can see, he does not. What he does suggest is that 'in animals relationships are not sufficiently enduring, or memories of personal behavior reliable enough, to permit the highly personal contracts associated with the more human forms of reciprocal altruism (Sociobiology, p. 120). I think Wilson underestimates the power of animals to recognize and remember each other, but, be that as it may, he is talking about memory, which is quite different from Midgleys calculation. More importantly, far from the theory of reciprocal altruism needing calculation, it doesnt even need memory, at least in the ordinary sense of the word. All that is required is some functional equivalent of a memory of past favours. It does not have to be a real memory residing in the nervous system. This is, indeed, the novelty of Trivers contribution, since any fool can see that the principle of reciprocation will work in a species that is capable of remembering past favours and calculating debts. Midgley might have realized this if, instead of relying on her admittedly slightly misleading secondary source, she had gone back to the primary source (R. L. Trivers, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism, Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971), 35 - 57). She might even have got the point from The Selfish Gene (pp. 201-202): Trivers discusses the remarkable symbiosis of the cleaner-fish. Some fifty species, including small fish and shrimps, are known to make their living by picking parasites off the surface of larger fish of other species. The large fish obviously benefit from being cleaned, and the cleaners get a good supply of food... In many cases the large fish open their mouths and allow cleaners right inside to pick their teeth, and then to swim out through the gills which they also clean. One might expect that a large fish would craftily wait until he had been thoroughly cleaned, and then gobble up the cleaner. Yet instead he usually lets the cleaner swim off unmolested. This is a considerable feat of altruism because in many cases the cleaner is of the same size as the large fishs normal prey . . . Each cleaner has his own territory, and large fish have been seen queueing up for attention like customers at a barbers shop (not a real barbers shop with scissors and electric clippers, I suppose I now have to add). It is probably this site-tenacity which makes possible the evolution of delayed reciprocalaltruism in this case. The benefit to a large fish of being able to return repeatedly to the same "barbers shop", rather than continually searching for a new one, must outweigh the cost of refraining from eating the cleaner. The important point is that neither calculation nor memory of past favours need be invoked. Site-tenacity on the part of both kinds of fish is sufficient. The site-tenacity, which, by the way, is a commonplace of fish ethology, acts as a kind of equivalent of a memory. In Darwinian terms we say that, given site-tenacity by both cleaners and cleaned fish, natural selection favours merciful behaviour by large fish towards their cleaners. Calculations of probable future benefit are done by the biologist, not by the fish (they

might be done by the fish, but that is incidental). The fish simply do things which have consequences in given conditions, and natural selection judges them by those consequences. The idea of animals behaving as if calculating odds without really doing so is fundamental to an understanding of the whole of sociobiology: Just as we may use a slide rule without appreciating that we are, in effect, using logarithms, so an animal may be pre-programmed in such a way that it behaves as if it had made a complicated calculation . . . This is not so difficult to imagine as it appears. When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball (The Selfish Gene, pp. 103-104; see also my reply to Marshall Sablins: misunderstanding number 3 in R. Dawkins, Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection, Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 51 (1979), 184-200). There are other odd things in Midgleys section on reciprocal altruism. For instance she devotes a paragraph to a trenchant and forceful advocacy of the obviously undisputed proposition that The main source and focus of altruistic behaviour in animals is the care of the young, which in most species will certainly never be repaid (p. 440, my italics). Who is supposed to be surprised? Not me, I am relieved to note, since reciprocation occupies a very small part of my book and kin-selected parental care rather a large one. Midgleys target in this case is J. L. Mackie (The Law of the Jungle, Philosophy 53 (October 1978)), but her shot is aimed not at his main point (which she seems to have overlooked), but at his little aside about Nietzsche. Before explaining why I think Mackies paper may be an important contribution to biology, I cannot leave the subject of parental care without calling attention to the following, from Midgley: This persistent difficulty in reducing parents to the egoist pattern is just the kind of thing which makes Dawkinss typical readers - people with vaguely egoist leanings about individual human psychology - willing to follow him in losing touch with the observed facts of motivation altogether and taking off for the empyrean with the Gene (pp. 443-444). It is one thing to insult the author of a book, but how dare Midgley pontificate about its typical readers? I dont think I have had the pleasure of meeting any readers of Mrs Midgleys book, but no doubt they vary and would resent prejudiced generalizations about their leanings and ill-informed slurs against their critical faculties. Mackies Contribution Midgleys emotional reaction to a few words and phrases used by Mackie seems to have blinded her to the potentially important suggestion he was making. I shall explain this, since Mackie himself did not follow his train of thought to its conclusion. Group selection is the hypothetical process whereby natural selection chooses among whole groups of organisms, as opposed to choosing among individuals (see J. Maynard Smith, Group Selection, Quarterly Review of Biology 31, 277-283). As I have explained, it is widely agreed to be an unworkable theory, but if it did work it would be important since it could explain altruistic behaviour: groups containing altruistic individuals are less likely to go

extinct than groups of selfish individuals. Mathematical models by Maynard Smith himself and others have shown that the theoretical objections to group selection would largely vanish if we were allowed to assume the existence of high genetic variance among groups compared to within-group variance. This is a technical way of saying that there has to be a tendency for fellow group members to share more genes with each other than they share with random members of the population at large. This assumption will clearly be met if genetic relatives go about in family groups, but then we are dealing with the wellunderstood phenomenon of kin selection, not group selection at all. Mackies contribution, though he does not put it like this, is to have offered us a new mechanism whereby the variance-differential necessary for group selection could be maintained. The argument is as follows. My game-theoretic analysis of cheats, suckers and grudgers led to two alternative stable solutions. A population dominated by cheats would not be invaded (evolutionarily speaking) by suckers or grudgers. If, however, a population chanced to acquire more than a critical frequency of grudgers, natural selection would suddenly start favouring grudgers, until they became a runaway majority. The concept of a bistable system is a slightly subtle one, and it is not surprising that Midgley misunderstood it in her summary: Dawkins concludes that Cheats and Grudgers would exterminate Suckers, and Grudgers might well do best of all (p. 440). The whole point is not that grudgers might do better or worse than cheats, but rather that whichever of the two happened to attain more than a critical frequency in the population would, by virtue of that fact, do better than the other. For the present argument, the important consequence is that such a bistable system is a recipe for high between-group variance: some populations would stabilize at the grudger equilibrium; others would stabilize at the cheat equilibrium. Populations with intermediate relative frequencies would be inherently unstable, and natural selection at the individual level would push them to one extreme or the other. Selection within groups would thus see to it that variance between groups was high. Mackies argument is that group selection would now have a real chance to work, differentially extinguishing groups of cheats at the expense of groups of grudgers (reciprocal altruists). It is too early to say, yet, whether formal mathematical models will uphold this possibility, but if they do, Mackies paper in Philosophy will have to be seen as a useful contribution to biology. I should add that a brief similar suggestion has been made independently by M. J. Wade (A Critical Review of the Models of Group Selection, Quarterly Review of Biology 53 (1978)). Models Midgley describes my model of cheats, suckers and grudgers as an absurdly abstract and genetically quite impossible situation (p. 440), and as a grossly simplified and distorted scheme (p. 441). But of course it is abstract, simplified and distorted. This is what models are, and that is what gives them their usefulness. It is the very property which made my model useful to Mackie and which stimulated his useful contribution. Models do not aspire to mimic reality faithfully. If they did, they would not be models, they would be reality. In physics, for instance, it is sometimes convenient to imagine a body - it may even be described as a train - travelling at nearly the speed of light past an observer, who sees the passengers hideously foreshortened. Only a pedant would point out that trains cant go that

fast, and that in any case the observer wouldnt have time to see the passengers. If a philosopher made such an objection against the writings of a particular physicist, we could justly conclude that he or she did not understand the first thing about physics, since all physicists make use of such simplified models. Yet this is almost exactly the nature of Midgleys objection to my grudger/sucker/cheat model. If she had objected that it was a bad model I would have listened sympathetically, but that is not what she did. She appears not to have understood that it was a model at all. In the present state of evolutionary biology, the preferred models embody various kinds of deliberate simplification, and one of the most fashionable of these deliberate simplifications is the one gene one strategy model that worries Midgley so much. I am only one of many biologists for whom it is a convenient weapon in our theoretical armoury. Others who frequently wield it include J. Maynard Smith and E.O. Wilson, to name two biologists whom Midgley singles out for special praise in her article. It is ironic that she should compare my gene-selection treatment of the paradox of sex, to its disadvantage, with a passage from John Maynard Smiths rightly praised The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge University Press, 1978). Like nearly all Maynard Smiths works, this book abounds in simplified models of exactly the kind Midgley castigates. If she had read beyond the Preface to page 113, Midgley would have found Maynard Smith specifically endorsing gene-selection models of sexuality, invoking in his support the very passage from The Selfish Gene which Midgley describes as a danger. If a philosopher attacked modern evolutionary biology as a whole for its reliance on oversimple models, again we would have to listen. But a philosopher who intemperately attacks one particular biologist for doing exactly what most of his professional colleagues do, and have done for decades, displays fundamental and profound ignorance of the methods of biology. It may be that we shall eventually find todays one gene one strategy models too simple to be useful. The intuition of professionals varies here. My own hunch, for what it is worth, it that most of the major principles of present day strategy models will survive future injections of genetic complexity, while the quantitative details of their predictions will not. We must patiently wait and see. Genes There is nothing empirical about Dawkins. Critics have repeatedly pointed out that his notions of genetics are unworkable (p. 439). No critic is named. The footnote refers only to a 1978 paper of mine.[3] Midgley says that in this paper I have eventually made an attempt to answer some of these criticisms. In fact I made no such attempt, because no such criticisms were known to me. If Midgley will cite the repeated criticisms I will read them with attention and, if appropriate, reply to them. My notions of genetics are actually much more conventional than Midgley thinks. She herself would have a great deal of trouble with the concept of the gene, as it is ordinarily used by geneticists: For selection to work as [Dawkins] suggests by direct competition between individual genes, the whole of behaviour would have to be divisible into units of action inherited separately and each governed by a single gene . . . To convince us that this is so, Dawkins brings up once more the case of Rothenbuhlers Hygienic Bees, creatures

which have been appearing in suspicious isolation as a stage army in all such arguments for some time. Actually, not only does the bees case stand alone, but it is certainly not proven. To show that even the simple behaviour it involves is really governed by only two genes would take something like seventy generations of outbreeding experiments to ensure that the effects described are not due to the close linkage of genes at a whole series of adjacent loci, and even this would not show that these genes affected nothing else (p. 449). There are so many muddles interwoven here, it is hard to know where to start unravelling. Probably the first point to make is that whenever a geneticist speaks of a gene for such and such a characteristic, say brown eyes, he never means that this gene affects nothing else, nor that it is the only gene contributing to the brown pigmentation. Most genes have many distantly ramified and apparently unconnected effects. A vast number of genes are necessary for the development of eyes and their pigment. When a geneticist talks about a single gene effect, he is always talking about a difference between individuals. A gene for brown eyes is not a gene that, alone and unaided, manufactures brown pigment. It is a gene that, when compared with its alleles (alternatives at the same chromosomal locus), in a normal environment, is responsible for the difference in eye colour between individuals possessing the gene and individuals not possessing the gene. The statement G1 is a gene for phenotypic characteristic P1 is always a shorthand. It always implies the existence, or potential existence, of at least one alternative gene 2, and at least one alternative characteristic P2. It also implies a normal developmental environment, including the presence of the other genes which are common in the gene pool as a whole, and therefore likely to be in the same body. If all individuals had two copies of the gene for brown eyes and if no other eye colour ever occurred, the gene for brown eyes would strictly be a meaningless concept. It can only be defined by reference to at least one potential alternative. Of course any gene exists physically in the sense of being a length of DNA; but it is only properly called a gene for X', if there is at least one alternative gene at the same chromosomal locus, which leads to not X. It follows that there is no clear limit to the complexity of the X which we may substitute in the phrase a gene for X. Reading, for example, is a learned skill of immense and subtle complexity. A gene for reading would, to naive common sense, be an absurd notion. Yet, if we follow genetic terminological convention to its logical conclusion, all that would be necessary in order to establish the existence of a gene for reading is the existence of a gene for not reading. If a gene G2 could be found which infallibly caused in its possessors the particular brain lesion necessary to induce specific dyslexia, it would follow that G1, the gene which all the rest of us have in double dose at that chromosomal locus, would by definition have to be called a gene for reading. Imagine a tribe in which almost everybody had G2 and therefore could not learn to read. Now the rare possessors of G1 would be the sole literates and, provided adequate educational opportunities were available to all, reading behaviour would be inherited according to the elementary laws of Mendelian genetics. Dyslexia would not, of course, be the only describable effect of such a gene. All genes are fundamentally genes for making proteins, but it is a routine convenience in genetics to accept other labels such as gene for brown eyes. Which of the intricately ramified consequences of the fundamental protein effect we choose to use as a label is simply a matter of convenience. The hypothetical gene for dyslexia would almost certainly have other psychological or perceptual effects, but in our world where reading is so important dyslexia might well be its most salient effect, and the dyslexia label would

therefore be convenient. The same gene, in a Pleistocene environment, might earn a different label, say gene for being unable to read animal footprints. Similarly, a gene for total blindness would obviously prevent reading, but it would not be convenient to label it by this property since other effects of total blindness would be more noticeable. The normal alternative to a gene for total blindness could sensibly be called a gene for seeing, but not a gene for reading. This is, of course, a hypothetical example. I know of no evidence of a gene for dyslexia. My only point is that the complexity, per se, of a behaviour pattern such as reading is irrelevant to the plausibility of there being a single gene for that behaviour pattern. To summarize the reason for this, it is that differences between behaviour patterns can have unitary and simple causes, even if the behaviour patterns themselves are highly complex. It is no part of my world view that the whole of behaviour must be divisible into units of action inherited separately and each governed by a single gene. Since Midgley is not the only person to have had trouble in grasping this point, let me use an analogy which others seem to have found helpful. The genetic code is not a blueprint for assembling a body from a set of bits; it is more like a recipe for baking one from a set of ingredients. If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc. With minor exceptions such as the cherry on top, there is no oneto-one mapping from words of recipe to bits of cake. The whole recipe maps on to the whole cake. But suppose we change one word in the recipe; what now emerges from the oven is a different cake, different through its whole substance. If we have 100 cakes baked according to the first version of the recipe and 100 cakes baked according to the second version of the recipe, it will be possible to say: although there is no one-word-one-crumb mapping from recipe to either cake, it is true that a one word difference between these two recipes is solely responsible for the only consistent differences between this set of 100 cakes and that set of 100 cakes. To repeat, then, geneticists are not concerned with one gene one bit-of-animal mapping. They are concerned with one gene-difference one animal-difference mapping. And just as geneticists are concerned with inter-individual differences, so is natural selection. Natural selection can be said to choose individuals versus rival individuals, but it is only if the responsible differences between the individuals are due to genes that natural selection can have any evolutionary consequences. For instance, if selection favours fleetness of foot within a preyed-upon species, but individual differences in fleetness of foot are entirely non-genetic in origin, no evolutionary change will result from the selection: fast runners will come to predominate among the survivors of each generation, but they will not pass their fleetness of foot on to the next generation, so no evolution will be seen. It follows that if we believe that X is a Darwinian adaptation, we are committing ourselves to the belief that, in the past anyway, there must have been at least one gene for X. And Midgleys implication that the hygienic honey bee is the only known example of a gene effect on behaviour (it isnt, of course; it is just the most spectacular), and that even it may be suspect, is tantamount to a disavowal of the entire principle of the evolution of behavioural adaptation by natural selection!

We now come to the allegedly important distinction between a single gene and a linked series of adjacent genes, and the statement that it would take something like seventy generations of outbreeding experiments to demonstrate a single gene effect as opposed to a close linkage effect. I hope nobody was impressed by the spurious impression of scientific precision conveyed by that seventy generations. Why seventy, not seven hundred or seven thousand? No magic number of outbreeding experiments can settle the issue, because it is a non-issue, or, more precisely, because the gene, as I use the term, is an asymptotic, not an all or none, concept. If a series of adjacent genes is so closely linked that it takes n generations of breeding experiments to separate them, then for practical purposes we can treat them as one gene (supergene it is sometimes called), provided n is large in relation to the time span we are interested in. And the time span we are interested in here is the evolutionary time span. If we are examining a particular behaviour pattern as a possible Darwinian adaptation, we will be content to regard it as controlled by a single gene provided natural selection, too, regards it as controlled by a single gene - that is, provided the risk of the supergenes being split into its component sub-genes is small compared to the risk of its being eliminated by the natural selection pressures we are investigating. It is admittedly true that the gene is an asymptotic rather than an all or none concept only if defined in a particular way. A molecular biologist might define it so that it became an all or none concept. But I am not a molecular biologist, and I made my definition very clear: A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material which potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection (The Selfish Gene, p. 30). Midgley quotes this definition, expressing surprise that I got it from George Williams (whom she rightly admires), and adding, as though it were an objection, that I might be talking about any section of the DNA (p. 451).[4] That is my point. I am not searching for an ideal, indivisible, atom-like unit. I am searching for a chunk of chromosomal material which, in practice, behaves as a unit for long enough to be naturally selected at the expense of another such fuzzy unit. I agree that there are difficulties in this way of looking at evolution, but I believe I have shown them to be less great than the difficulties inherent in any other way that has been suggested. The individual organism is a fuzzy unit too (think of vegetatively propagating plants), yet it is current orthodoxy that the individual is the unit of selection. The group of individuals is even more fuzzy, and it is partly for this reason that it is no longer regarded as a significant unit of selection. The truth is that there is no hard atomic unit of natural selection, but I believe my fuzzy gene or replicator is the most convenient approximation. Once again, philosophers should be particularly sympathetic towards special-purpose redefinitions of words, but actually the present case hardly deserves to be called re-definition at all. There never has been a generally agreed definition of the gene. Pre-molecular usage, in practice, amounted to the gene of the Williams definition, although in principle it was thought of as an indivisible bead on a chromosomal string. In the 1950s, molecular biology showed that there were no atomistic beads, and Seymour Benzer [5] suggested that the gene should be replaced by three terms: the muton was the minimum unit of mutational change; the recon was the minimum unit of recombination; and the cistron was defined in a way that was strictly applicable only to micro-organisms, but for practical purposes it amounted to the unit of protein synthesis. Which of the three gene definitions

one used was to depend on ones purposes. But Benzers purposes were all molecular. For the student of adaptation in whole organisms yet another unit, which I shall call the optimon, is required. The optimon is that unit to which we refer when we speak of a Darwinian adaptation as being for the good of something. Williams, in effect, defined the gene as equivalent to what I am calling the optimon. In The Selfish Gene I followed him, but I have since suggested substituting the more general term replicator, since gene gives rise to confusion (and how!). This whole area of units of genetic function and units of adaptive benefit is fraught with important difficulties, but the alleged difficulties manufactured by Midgley are not among them. I do not claim that my essay on replicator selection [3] solves all the problems, but I think that it, and the paper of the philosopher David Hull [6] that follows it, are honest attempts to face up to the difficulties, and that some progress is being made. Midgley (p. 454) quotes with approval Stephen Jay Goulds courteously expressed criticism: No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them - direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary . . .[7] I find it impossible to imagine what it would even mean to say that genes were directly visible to natural selection. Of course they have to use bodies as an intermediary. That is why my book is mostly about the behaviour of individual bodies (see especially Chapter 4 for a discussion of the role of bodies as machines programmed to preserve genes, like computers programmed to win games of chess). Natural selection favours genes (replicators) versus their alleles by virtue of those genes effects on bodies. But it is not the bodies that survive; they reproduce their genes and die. Only genes survive, in the form of information copies of themselves (why, by the way, does Midgley think the perfectly obvious fact that a gene cannot perpetuate itself but only likenesses of itself (p. 446) is such a crashing disaster for my case? It is one of the very linch-pins of my case!). Evolution consists in the differential copying success of genes relative to their alleles. The genes which exist in the world are, obviously, the genes whose replicas in previous generations were successful in getting themselves copied. Such success is achieved by means of influence on the development of bodies. Bodies, therefore, tend to have what it takes to propagate genes, and may properly be regarded as engines of gene propagation - survival machines. Sociobiology Midgleys malice at times becomes positively catty, as, for instance, when she gratuitously remarks that my pages are virgin of originality' (p. 444), my material having all been drawn from evolutionists such as W. D. Hamilton, Edward O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith who are not directly interested in individual psychology at all. In another place she quotes a sentence from Wilsons Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1975; ironically the sentence is the very one on reciprocal altruism, which, as I showed above, Midgley so pathetically misunderstood). She then adds: Dawkins . .. ignores Wilsons reasoning here, as he does most other things that do not suit him (p. 444). I did not ignore Wilsons reasoning: at the time of writing (1975) I, together with most other people, had not had an opportunity of seeing Wilsons book. After completing my book in essentially its final

form I obtained a copy of Sociobiology, and managed to slip into my final draft a brief mention of it (a criticism of Wilsons treatment of the theory of kin selection: I prophesied that he would muddle people, and p. 140 of Midgleys Beast and Man shows my forecast to have been amply fulfilled). This was the only change Sociobiology caused in my entire text. Only after The Selfish Gene had gone to press did I read Wilsons excellent work from cover to cover, and even then (early 1976) I must have been one of the first people in Britain to do so. Any claim that I was influenced by Wilson is simply false. The claim that I drew material from Hamilton and Maynard Smith is, of course, true. I am proud of it, and acknowledged my debt to them, and to George Williams and Robert Trivers. Like E. O. Wilson, I was trying primarily to synthesize and interpret our field (it wasnt called sociobiology then), and only incidentally trying to break new ground (although I think both Wilson and I would be disappointed if we were thought to have broken no new ground). Both Wilson and I would have been sadly remiss if we had not given great prominence to Hamiltons ideas on kinship and other topics. In my opinion [8] Wilson was rather remiss in virtually ignoring Maynard Smiths game-theoretic concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy. As for the statement that Wilson is not directly interested in individual psychology at all, hollow laughter seems the only appropriate response. Whatever does Midgley think the ballyhoo, the political demonstrations, the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People are all about? If anyone remains in doubt, I recommend Wilsons On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978). Concluding Remarks If the reader discerns in my reply signs of what appears to be undue rancour, I beg him or her to scan a few random sentences of Midgleys paper and judge the provocation. It is not an invited book review, remember, but a voluntarily contributed article. Her concluding footnote would be hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronizing condescension toward a fellow academic (a fellow academic, moreover, who is a professional in the field under discussion, a field in which the critic herself is most charitably described as trying hard): Up till now, I have not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackies article is not the only indication I have lately met of serious attention being paid to his fantasies (p. 458). Incidentally, when Midgley says she has not attended to me before, this is not strictly accurate. In Beast and Man (e.g. p.131) will be found criticisms of the concept of the selfish gene, but it is an orphaned concept, named but without a responsible author. Her readers were served up with the criticism, without being trusted with the information that the selfish gene being criticized is, in fact, a real book, with an author, a date, and a publishera book that they might go away and judge for themselves against her criticism. Worse, in her Introduction (p. xxii), the concept of the selfish gene is solemnly attributed to Edward Wilson, a fact which probably annoys him even more than it annoys me (he tells me he finds my ideas reductionist). What, in the circumstances, are we to make of her publishers claim on the dustjacket that Midgleys comments on Wilsons concept of "the selfish gene are the most serious and sustained criticism of Wilson yet published? Let me not end on a negative note. Midgley has a lot to say about metaphor, and I can end constructively by explaining why it was unnecessary for her to say it. She thought that I

would defend my selfish genes by claiming that they were intended only as a metaphor, and assumed that I was speaking metaphorically when I wrote, We are survival machinesrobot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment (The Selfish Gene, p. ix). But that was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular ways favoured by biologists. Of course it is a hard truth to swallow at first gulp. As Dr Christopher Evans has remarked, This horrendous concept - the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances - is so desperately at odds with almost every other view that Man has of himself, that Dawkins book has received a bleak reception in many quarters. Nevertheless his argument is virtually irrefutable (The Mighty Micro, London: Gollancz, 1979, 171). For my part, what has gratified me is that the anticipated bleak reception has, in the event, been confined to so few quarters, and such unpersuasive ones.[9] New College, Oxford

References

1 M. Midgley, Gene-juggling, Philosophy 54 (October 1979). 2 She recommends her own book (M. Midgley, Beast and Man, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979) For a fuller discussion of sociobiological ideas'. 3 R. Dawkins, Replicator Selection and the Extended Phenotype, Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 47, 61-76. 4 It is hard to resist a flourish as I quote almost exactly the same words from a recent, forward-looking review by Francis Crick, architect (with J. D. Watson) of the modern molecular concept of the gene: The theory of the "selfish gene" will have to be extended to any stretch of DNA (F. H. C. Crick, Split Genes and RNA Splicing, Science 204 (1979), 270). Cricks point is elaborated in two further molecular biological papers whose titles betray no coy reticence about applying the word selfish to DNA molecules! (L. E. Orgel and F. H. C. Crick, Selfish DNA: the Ultimate Parasite, Nature 284 (1980); W. F. Doolittle and C. Sapienza, Selfish Genes, the Phenotype Paradigm and Genome Evolution, Na lure 284 (1980). As for my definition of the gene, its derivation from Williams is not word for word, but I have conveyed the clear message of pp. 22-25 of his Adaptation and Natural Selection (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966). My definition is a rendering, for laymen, of two technical sentences from these pages of Williams: I use the term gene to mean "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency" '; and a gene could be defined as any hereditary information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change.

5 S. Benzer, The Elementary Units of Heredity, The Chemical Basis of Heredity, W. D. McElroy and B. Glass (eds) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1957). 6 D. L. Hull, The Units of Evolution: a Metaphysical Essay, Studies in the Concept of Evolution, U. J. Jensen and R. Harr (eds) (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, in press). In view of her spirited remark that I should either learn to do metaphysics or retreat out of sight altogether, Midgley might be amused at the following from Hulls manuscript: Although he is likely to be shocked, if not offended, at being told so, Dawkins (1976, 1978) has made an important contribution to the metaphysics of evolution in his explication of "replicators". Like Monsieur Jourdain, who was astonished to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, Dawkins may well be equally surprised to discover that he has committed an act of metaphysics. 7 S. J. Gould, Caring Groups and Selfish Genes, Natural History 86 (December 1977). Gould is a well-known palaeontologist who would probably be surprised at Midgleys description of him as a geneticist (Beast and Man, 66). Midgley, in turn, might be surprised at some of the things Gould has written elsewhere, for instance: Natural selection dictates that organisms act in their own self-interest. They know nothing of such abstract concepts as "the good of the species". They "struggle" continuously to increase the representation of their genes at the expense of their fellows. And that, for all its baldness, is all there is to it; we have discovered no higher principle in nature (S. J. Gould, Ever Since Darwin (London: Burnett Books, 1978), 261). 8 In Hamiltons opinion too, as is clear from his reviews of both our books (and by the way, nobody in the world is better qualified to review either of them): W. D. Hamilton, review of The Selfish Gene (Science 196, 1977, 757-759); W. D. Hamilton, review of Sociobiology (Journal of Animal Ecology 46, 1977, 975-983). 9 Some of the more constructive arguments in this paper are developed further in my forthcoming book, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1982).

Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism

By Mary Midgley

Exchanging views in Philosophy with a two-year time-lag is getting rather like conversation with the Andromeda Nebula. I am distressed that my reply to Messrs Mackie and Dawkins, explaining what made me write so crossly about The Selfish Gene, has been so long delayed.[1] Mr Mackies sudden death in December 1981 adds a further dimension to this distress. Apology is due, not only for the delay but for the impatient tone of my article. One should not lose ones temper, and doing so always makes for confused argument. My basic objections remain. But I certainly ought to have expressed them more clearly and temperately. This reply must, I think, concentrate simply on explaining the background of reasons why these objections matter. I shall have very little to say directly about Mackies argument, since it was chiefly just a very fair and sympathetic exposition of Dawkins' views. Mackie himself drew only very modest conclusions from them, and avoided the excesses of psychological egoism, as of course he also does in his own book. But this still leaves two serious worries. In the first place I do not think that The Selfish Gene itself, on any natural interpretation, does avoid those excesses. In the second, even when modestly interpreted, I think it is far too one-sided a book to be picked out and used in isolation for the re-education of moral philosophy in the biological facts of life. My own central philosophic concern - which I think Dawkins shares - is to make possible a more realistic attitude about the place of Homo sapiens in the world. I think we need to see, far more clearly than we now do, how small and transient a phenomenon we are in the cosmos. We need a much more realistic idea of our own mental and physical inheritance, of the constitution which relates us so closely to the other animal species of this planet. And since Darwins theory of natural selection, incomplete though it is, is much the best guide we have to understanding that constitution, it is urgent to try to use it fully for that purpose. I therefore wholly agree with Dawkins in wanting people as fully informed as possible about the workings of evolution. And I welcome those parts of his book which simply explain them. Why, however, has this project not so far been more successful? The unwillingness of many educated people to accept evolutionary concepts fully and apply them to Homo sapiens does not just flow from lack of information, which could be remedied by a good clear textbook. It flows from that early, widespread and deep-rooted bunch of misunderstandings of Darwins ideas, which is called (somewhat misleadingly) Social Darwinism. This consists in supposing that evolution endorses the simple social ethic of devil-take-the-hindmost. That ethic was in fact already provided with a theory long before Darwin wrote, as a spin-off from free-enterprise economics. But since the word fit can unfortunately mean deserving or suitable as well as healthy, Herbert Spencers concept of the survival of the fittest seemed to slot admirably into this

framework, and to supplement what had before been merely prudential advice by deriving it from a universal law of life. Darwin himself, though he accepted the phrase, rejected such applications. But Spencer had full confidence in them, and toured the United States giving the explicit scientific blessing of evolutionary theory to the wilder excesses of freeenterprise capitalism.[2] The damage was deep and lasting. It remains to plague us today. And sociobiological thinking, especially in its Dawkinsian form, actually reinforces Social Darwinism, both by its language and by some of its substance. This, and not some mysterious personal spite, was what made me indignant. Out of a vast range of possible examples I select a case which brings out specially well the fatalistic side of the error: Acceptance of the Spencerian philosophy brought with it a paralysis of the will to reform. Youmans (an influential American popularizer of H. Spencers views) in Henry Georges presence denounced with great fervour the political corruption of New York and the selfishness of the rich in ignoring or promoting it when they found it profitable to do so. What are you going to do about it? George asked. Youmans replied Nothing. You and I can do nothing at all. Its all a matter of evolution. We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things.' [3] Actually, Dawkins may very well by now have grasped this point as far as it concerns Fatalism. The Extended Phenotype contains an admirable chapter on what is called Genetic Determinism in which he spells out well the difference between determinism and fatalism, and points out that genetic determinism is no worse than the sociological kind.[4] He now sees, he says, that he has unwittingly stumbled over a myth. But of course what is involved is much more than a myth. It is a whole coherent web of powerful political and psychological ideas, rooted in large and bloody historical facts. To sidestep it demands more than tact. It calls for rethinking. This way of regarding evolution has not died. Indeed, it has been plausibly said that Social Darwinism is still the unofficial religion of the West. The amount of reasonable alarm which this raises becomes clear to anyone who reads the indignant responses of people of radical or liberal sympathies, particularly in the social sciences, first to ethological thinking and then to sociobiology, whenever those methods are applied to man. A kind of truce was maintained in the early part of this century - helped out no doubt by the bizarre Lamarckism of Freud - which allowed Darwin's ideas to apply in theory even to human beings, provided that no one actually suggested in detail how they might work. But any attempt at such specific suggestions was at once seen - not universally but surprisingly widely - as Social Darwinism. The accusation is mostly now phrased as one of biological determinism, which sounds metaphysical. But the quotations and examples show that the real objection is political and moral. The real opponent is still Spencer. So strong is this expectation that the slightest carelessness of language is enough to confirm it. One cannot exorcize this trouble merely by disclaiming the intention of drawing moral conclusions. [5] This cannot help, because the central doctrine at issue is not moral but factual. It is that conflict is universal and is in fact the only kind of interaction which is possible for us. To correct this error, what is chiefly needed is attention to the sociality of the higher animals, which shows us the roots of human co-operation, without in any way compromising the uniqueness of the tree which has grown from those roots. It then

becomes possible for us to see ourselves, without distortion or reduction, as part of the animal creation. I have some sympathy with Dawkins when he repeatedly disclaims interest in human psychology, and wants its complications kept out of the way of evolutionary theory. But this is scarcely possible. In the first place he actually invites a human application. In the second, readers of a given species must naturally apply such theories to their own case, even if they were not asked to, and they have a right to expect that it will make sense there. If they are inclined to suspect before they start that everything good in their own species is exclusive to it, accounts of evolution which emphasize only what they regard as evil are bound to confirm their opinion. Any writer who lays all the emphasis on conflict is inviting misunderstanding. And if he adds to this a language like the sociobiological one, drawn from everyday morality, he guarantees it. Foremost among the snags of this sociobiological language is the equivocal use of words like selfish, altruistic, spite and manipulate, a use which not only suggests psychological egoism to the surrounding peasants, but clearly at times misleads the writers themselves. It is because the word selfish, with this sense, is the key term of The Selfish Gene, and receives a poetic celebration there unparalleled in other sociobiological writings, that the book struck me as exceptionally likely to block the acceptance of Darwinism. Since my main controversial business is to prevent this blocking, and to show people that they can use Darwins methods on human behaviour without being committed to a shoddy psychology and a bogus political morality, this upset me, and doubly so when I found this particular book-out of the enormous wealth of books now available on evolution - being recommended on its own as a source for moral philosophy. Is this language however a mere formality? Dr Dawkins tells us that he is obviously not using the word selfish in any sense which could excuse this interpretation. It is, he says, a harmless, well-known technical term, referring only to behaviour, viz, to that which in fact increases an entitys own chance of survival. Selfish, then, means here something like actually self-preserving in the long run. He correctly points out that biologists writing on evolution do now use the term in what he calls this special, restricted sense. Accordingly, a philosopher who wishes to understand biologists must therefore learn this basic feature of biological language (IDSG, 558). He wants us to treat such redefinition as normal, since philosophers of all people know that words may be redefined in special ways for technical purposes(557). The question whether this usage is a bad one must be separated from that of what we can do about a bad usage once it exists. Is it a bad one? I suggest that it plainly is. It is true that philosophers are used to special technical definitions. But that does not mean that no standards apply to their manufacture. A restricted sense ought to be one which forms part of the normal meaning of the word. It cannot be one which falls, as this does, right outside it. When it does that, it becomes reasonable to ask, why use that word rather than a more suitable one? It is true (and I should have made it clearer) that this question should be put here to a whole school of biologists, not just to Dawkins, though most of them do not rest anything like so much weight on this particular word. But the question why say selfish rather than selfpreserving or self-replicating or self-perpetuating or competitive or the like? is still serious. The use is a specially unlucky one for people who really do not want to talk about motivation. As B. F. Skinner rightly remarked, [6] behaviourists in general do well to

avoid using terms suggesting motives. And the term selfish is one which centres its normal meaning on motive, not on a fixed range of acts. In any case, however, as Dawkins himself now remarks (558) the taboo on taking animal subjectivity into account when discussing motivation is at present breaking up, because the attempt to explain action in puritanically behaviouristic terms has proved so disappointing. The use is probably doomed along with other perverse behaviouristic uses. So it can scarcely be a basic feature of biological language. And it is certainly a real question why such rankly misleading language was ever chosen. One could of course attribute it merely to clumsiness. But it has always seemed to me more plausible, as well as politer, to suppose that a real bias towards psychological egoism made this use seem actually enlightening and suitable. While the use remains, however, it poses a problem of a familiar kind for biologists who want to talk to the general reader, to whom The Selfish Gene is explicitly addressed. It is by no means enough, in such cases, simply to give a new definition and repeat it from time to time. When a term is drawn from everyday speech like this, the force of habitual usage is far too strong for that. (It can be seen at work for instance in the tendentious use sometimes made by crusading economists of terms like freedom. But this case is much less extreme, since the special economic sense of such terms is only a restricted one, not a total change of meaning.) To minimize the danger of misunderstanding in these cases, there are some obvious precepts which writers normally follow. For instance: avoid all emotive uses. Do not combine the word with others which must fix it in the everyday sense (as in ruthless selfishness (p. 2), tyranny of the selfish replicators (p. 3), etc.). Avoid doing this with particular care at the outset of the book, before the special definition has yet been introduced. (It appears on p. 4.) Instead, constantly correct the readers inevitable bias by adding near-synonyms which take out the heat and move the meaning, if anything, the other way. Avoid examples which can conceivably look like examples of the everyday sense. If you feel a purple passage coming on, make sure that you keep this word out of it. And, above all, do not use it in your title. By these and similar precautions, many biologists do contrive to use this language without disaster. But one thing which they cannot effectively do in it is to talk about man. Any writer who attempts this runs into impossible difficulties. He has returned the transplanted language to its home ground. This means that it cannot possibly avoid taking on again the familiar sense which was supposed to have been purged away from it. Enormous problems arise. Nobody wants to deal with them. The effect is that the evolution of human traits is becoming increasingly unthinkable and indescribable, cut off by this linguistic reinforcement of its Wilberforcian barrier from the terms used to describe the rest of nature. Biologists who dont want trouble simply avoid the topic. But this is not Dr Dawkinss practice in The Selfish Gene. Without wasting time illustrating this again at length, I mention only the last point, the title. Would it be a good idea for a physicist to publish a book called The Charm and Strangeness of Quarks? Dawkins gives the example of charm in his justification and it is an interesting one (IDSG, 557). Physicists can only use these terms because their new use is so far removed from their old one that there can be no possibility of interpreting their sentences in the old sense. So far from this being the case with selfishness, many if not most of the remarks made about it in the new sense admit of an interpretation in the old sense which sounds, not only intelligible, but attractively familiar. They read as ordinary statements and developments

of psychological egoism. I am entirely prepared to believe that these interpretations come as a complete surprise to Dawkins in his capacity as Dr Jekyll, the honourable and singleminded expounder of biological truths. Jekyll writes about half the book, and I ought to have paid tribute to him before, for doing it so well. Instead, perversely enough, I not only took him for granted but thought that his presence actually made things worse. How can a writer who can do this work so admirably then go on to spoil it with irrelevant rhetoric? And how is it possible for readers to feel that, with those powers of exposition, he does not know what he is saying? Much of Dr Dawkinss reply is devoted to spelling out fully the technical meaning of what he has said, and to claiming that I have misunderstood it in bringing non-biological objections. Is his purpose then actually just a scientific one? Is the book really just an unpretentious, neutral textbook of evolutionary biology, which my lurid imagination has no right to saddle with any wider implications? Is the non-technical part of it just a bit of standard flannel, used to wrap popular science for the benefit of publishers, and meant to be ignored by serious readers? It is printed without any health warning to the reader not to swallow it, and accordingly my criticisms, however ill-expressed, become relevant. Arguments which would be perfectly in place in purely theoretical biological discussions (such as those of John Maynard Smith) have a quite different function here. Points such as the bias of examples and the over-abstractness of models now come under a quite different standard of criticism. The claims being made are immensely larger, and gaps in the argument are therefore far graver. What then actually are these claims? The books first chapter, called Why are People? opens with this remarkable manifesto: Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely (p. 1 my italics). Simpson, of course, was talking about the causal story, which does not involve the first two questions. But Dawkins, though he does not discuss or analyse these questions, does repeatedly answer at least the second of them in his book, and he would scarcely mention the first if he did not think that his answer served for that as well. He must mean that all of them received in 1859 a new and revolutionary answer. In response to my complaint about loose use of metaphor, he now emphatically repeats what he takes this answer to be. It runs: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment (p. ix). He now comments That was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular way favoured by biologists (IDSG, 572-573) (This caveat can apply only to gene and selfish, since the other words have not been discussed. The ones that really need attention, of course, are machine, vehicle and blindly programmed.) What concerns me is the meaning of this and the argument by which it is supposed to follow from the theory of evolution. As to the meaning, one quite sensible point emerges,

but it is a small one - namely, that we have not programmed ourselves. We are not selfcreating beings inventing our own destinies from scratch. We are weak, ignorant and selfdeceiving, and ought to make a much greater effort to understand our limitations. True. But this point cannot be made in the language of fatalism, which declares that all human effort is useless, since we are only pawns in the grip of an alien power. And fatalism of the most extreme sort seems central to the meaning of these numerous passages. How is this fatalism really intended? Can it be read as mere determinism, a scientific belief in regularity with all reference to the distinctive agency of the genes removed? It will not normally be so read, because fatalism is one of the strongest and most seductive of popular thought-schemes. And to say that the remark about survival machines is literal truth seems to put the matter past doubt, since literal programming can only be done by agents, and conscious ones at that. The fatalistic point, of course, is not that a new, conscious external agent has been found, but that those who have so far believed themselves to be agents are shown not really to be so. The personification of the controlling force is merely a way of dramatizing their helplessness. The message which any unsophisticated reader must receive is that he is a helpless pawn in the hands of his physical inheritance and can therefore stop trying, because he has a universal excuse. Or to look at it another way - any states of discouragement and depression which may overwhelm him are veridical. What he feels when in their grip is the truth. He really is not capable of acting, and the sense of agency which he has at other times is a delusion. Paralysis of the will is his real condition. Since people sometimes believe the books they read, this seems a message which one should think twice about printing. To this unofficial message we must return. The official one concerns the units of selection. It is best approached by considering what it means to call organisms survival machines for genes. The language of mechanisms and the like is of course common in science, but it is usually used to describe the relation of parts to whole organisms. The survival or other benefit of those organisms then supplies the purpose needed for all mechanical talk. Outside that context, this language gets obscure. To a certain extent it can be used in wider contexts, in phrases like the mechanisms of evolution. But this use depends on taking some larger unit, such as the biosphere or a part of it, as the whole whose part is in some sense its mechanism, working for its good. This use is not entirely clear, but it is a lot clearer than the reversed one in which genes, which are parts, use their wholes as survival machines or vehicles - like people buying cars. People, after all, are contingently related to their cars. If we are merely expounding determinism, why should we pick out genes from the rest of the causal process? Genes are pieces of matter, programmed along with the rest of the organism - that is, taking shape and acting in a particular way as a result of environmental pressures, of the physical and chemical forces working within them, and of the behaviour of previous organisms. The point of describing them as programmers must be to pick them out as originators, as in some sense the starting-point of explanation. (Genes exert ultimate power over behaviour, p. 64.) But determinism allows of no such ultimate power. A meaning can be found for this special status, but again it is rather a small one, and this time it is involved in current controversy. It can mean simply that genes are specially useful in causal explanation. This claim has two stages. First, evolutionary selection has

formed our nature. (This seems to me plainly true and important, though many people still dispute it.) Second, what evolution selects is not individuals or groups, but genes. I think it is clear that this controversy about units of selection has slipped, in its later stages, into a piece of mistaken metaphysics. It is not obvious why there should be any contest between individuals and genes; both are selected, though in slightly different senses. About groups, however, a genuine mistake was made, and real gratitude is due to the sociobiologists who, following J. B. S. Haldane, corrected it. The problem is about how altruistic traits - that is, traits which benefit others at the expense of the individual displaying them - can evolve. It used to be somewhat casually assumed that they would do so if they benefited the group or species (group-selection). Haldane and his followers pointed out that, if the trait was to be genuinely inherited, this was not enough. Unless enough owners of these traits survive to breed, the traits will be lost, however useful they might have been. Kin selection works only through the survival of kin.[7] Once this was clear the notion of direct group selection was largely dropped except for certain special cases. A hot controversy then developed over which entity, if not the group or species, should be considered the fundamental unit of selection. Was it the individual or the gene? A philosophers first response to this query will probably be to wonder why any single unit should be expected. I do not know of any good reason for this. D. Hull, in a very sympathetic discussion, has pointed out that Dawkinss replicating unit (the gene) is far too parsimonious to be equal to its work, and has offered to make metaphysical sense of it by adding, to supplement it, two further units, first the interactor, which is the organism, mediating between the gene and the environment, and then the lineage.[8] These additions would make it possible to describe those aspects of biological change which do not take place within or between genes - that is, of course, nearly all of them. Dawkins, however, rejects this.[9] What, however, might all this have to do with the meaning and purpose of life? Now in the case of kin-selection there is a clear answer. Kin-selection has practical importance because it refutes psychological egoism. It shows that we cannot actually be creatures designed only to pursue each our own individual safety and advantage, because such creatures would have become extinct as soon as they grew complex enough for their childrens development to require a long and demanding nurture. Since theorists like Hobbes have built a great deal of our political theory on psychological egoism it would be a good idea to spell out this message plainly. Instead, however, sociobiology does its best to conceal its central discovery by cloaking it in unsuitable egoistic language, and by hunting for an entity which can still be made to fit the old, exclusively self-benefiting model. The effect is to convey the notion that altruistic and sociable behaviour is somehow an unreal facade, behind which the reality is always competition and hostility. Thus Dawkins attacks Lorenz and his followers, who have emphasized social motivation: They got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or gene) (SG, p. 2). But how could there only be one important thing in evolution? Again, he brackets Lorenz with Ashley Montagu as a soft-headed ignoramus, unable to face the gory facts of evolution:

Unlike both of them, I think that nature red in tooth and claw sums up our modern understanding of evolution admirably. The redness of tooth and claw, however, does not vary by a single shade according to different views about the units of evolutionary selection. On all such views, the social life of animals has developed gradually out of solitary life, and the motivation which makes it possible has only been able to prevail because it actually promoted differential survival, not because it met a pre-existing standard of value.[10] That origin is disputed by no one - unless, perhaps, by surviving champions of vitalism, to which Lorenz is implacably opposed. Neither is the amount of destruction and waste which has accompanied the process. What, then, has an acceptance of the undoubted bloodiness of nature got to do with the victory of gene-selection? Dawkins insists on a pre-Socratic, black-or-white antithesis: universal self-interest or universal altruism. This makes it impossible to discuss the motivation of group-living creatures. Mackie, correctly following Dawkinss argument, quotes Kiplings line on the Law of the Jungle: The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and he says that this has been shown to be an error, equally with the extreme red in tooth and claw notion of jungle behaviour. Neither of these, he says, is the law by which nature works, since that law actually turns upon the self-preservation of gene-clones (TLJ, p. 460). This assumes that there is only a single law by which nature works, and that Kiplings lines are meant to formulate it. But they are not.[11] The lines are simply about wolves and other equally social creatures, and they state a principle which is entirely necessary for understanding the behaviour, the mentality and even the physique of these animals. Solitary hunters like jaguars are different in innumerable ways, notably in communicative power. Mackies question whether the good of the group or the species would ever figure in a correct evolutionary account of such creatures cannot therefore have the negative answer which he gives it (TLJ, 456). Groups have to figure there. References to groups do not of course have to displace those of genes and individuals, but they do have to supplement them. There is not group-selection, meaning selection which works directly for the good of the group. But there is kin-selection. And since most social animals, including wolves, have groups which consist largely of kin, this comes in practice to very much the same thing. How far social behaviour, having developed toward kin, then extends beyond it is something I cannot go into here. But the important thing is that this is an empirical question about existing behaviour, which cannot be settled in advance by any theory of selection processes. If altruistic behaviour occurs, then it has somehow managed to develop. Evolutionary processes must be such as to make this possible. Is The Selfish Gene, however, really just a straightforward scientific treatise on these processes, claiming no implications about human psychology? The following passages seem relevant If you would extract a moral from this book, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs

(SG, 3). We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birthWe can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world (215). If we take seriously the view that we are nothing but gene-machines, the advice given seems as futile as inviting a chess-machine to play leap-frog. Besides, and more to our present point, it must surely be needless. The existence of altruism at an ordinary level has been admitted throughout the book and often stressed. So it cannot be this altruism which has no place in nature and has never existed in the world. Nor can the point be just the clich that we are not generous, altruistic or co-operative enough. Of that obvious, but not very exciting, fact psychological egoism is the exciting, but false, overstatement. But what is really mysterious is how, either in its mild or its extreme form, this point can be the moral of a book which is not supposed to be about motives at all, let alone human motives. It can only be so if the controversy about units of selection - which really is central to the book - is seen as also deciding the true nature of motivation. The victory of gene-selection is taken to establish egoism, to prove that existing forms of altruism, though present, are not what they seem, and are really only forms of self-interest. The new kind, which we are invited to invent, will be something completely different. The conjecture that human beings may even be capable of this genuine, disinterested, pure altruism (215) is presented as a rash one. The kind we have now, then, is a sham. Dr Jekyll, of course, disowns this view (5). But Messrs Hyde and Hyde, the poet and moralist, cannot possibly get on without it. In its absence, no large and dashing views about the meaning and purpose of life would emerge at all. As it is, what are those views? As far as I can see, they can amount only to one thing, namely, to a demand for a total distrust of feeling. The reader is told that all his natural feelings - but particularly those outgoing ones which seem to link him with others - are false and misleading guides. They are not really aspects of himself at all, but devices placed in him by alien beings in order to manipulate him. Or, less mythologically, but no less alarmingly, they are the physical effects produced by parasites which have lodged irremovably in his body, and whose chemistry continually distorts his mental processes in a way adapted only to secure their own survival.[12] Now for people to fear their feelings and regard them as alien forces is nothing new. It is already one of the commonest causes of human misery and confusion. The trouble, of course, is that all hope of developing better feelings depends on acknowledging the existing ones honestly as parts of oneself. But if they are not part of oneself, this is impossible. Besides, if genes really have the ultimate power they are credited with, all such escape routes must surely be blocked and all possible feelings would be equally alien. What alternative are we supposed to turn to? We might hope to have recourse to culture (let us try to teach generosity and altruism). But Chapter 11 explains that culture is itself a product of a further set of alien and parasitical entities, called memes or genes of culture, which are just as ruthlessly selfish as genes. Nothing seems left to us except that well-worn asset our conscious foresight (215), our power of planning for our own good. But since what we count as good will depend on our natural feelings and our culture, that is not very helpful. We have no real alternative to the paralysis of complete despair. University of Newcastle upon Tyne

References 1 See their Discussion Notes, Genes and Egoism by J. L. Mackie and In Defence of Selfish Genes by Richard Dawkins, in Philosophy No. 218 (October 1981). These answered my article Gene-Juggling (Philosophy N0. 210 (October 1979)), which referred to The Law of the Jungle by J. L. Mackie (Philosophy No. 206 (October 1978)). Initials used henceforward refer to these articles and to Richard Dawkinss books, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976) and The Extended Phenotype (London: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1982). 2 For this painful story, see Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: Braziller, 1959), Ch. 2, The Vogue of Spencer, and James R. Moore The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge University Press, 1979), Ch. 7, The Vogue of Herbert Spencer. 3 Hofstadter, op. cit., 47. 4 Chapter 2, much of which is reprinted under the title The Myth of Genetic Determinism' in New Scientist 93, No. 1287 (7 January 1982). 5 Dawkins gives this disclaimer at SG, p. 3, but unfortunately goes on to neutralize it. He writes: My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the genes law of universal selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true. This seems to concede the factual point I now discuss, not only about genes but about people. 6 See The Behaviour of Organisms (New York: Appleton Century, 1938), Chapter 1, 6-7. Skinner adds The sole criterion for the rejection of a popular term is the implication of a system or of a formulation extending beyond immediate observations. 7 The most comprehensive and convenient source for this history is Edward O. Wilsons Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1976) which gives many other sources. The latter stages of the dispute can be followed in The Extended Phenotype. 8 Units of Evolution, a Metaphysical Essay, in The Philosophy of Evolution, U. J. Jensen and R. Harr (eds) (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981). Hulls extreme politeness, in the remarks which Dawkins cites (IDSG, 570), does not obscure the fact that what Hull is pointing out is a metaphysical difficulty raised by the doctrine of gene-selection, a difficulty which, if not cured, will sink it. It is not really too hard to commit a single act of metaphysics. What is hard is to extract oneself from its consequences. 9 In some parts of the new book, especially at the opening, he concedes that geneselectionism may be only one way of looking at things, a refreshing alternative idea which does not need to establish itself as an exclusive ruler. But most of the time, zeal for its final victory seems to remain undiminished. 10 Dawkins seems to think that I doubt this, for he attributes to me (IDSG, 558) the old, biology A-level reflex of explaining animal adaptations, altruistic behaviour among them, as "for the good of the species" .He bases this charge on my remarks that what is maladaptivedamages the species chance of surviving, and that there is a problem about evolution which runs "Can a species survive if each member of it sometimes does things which do not (in fact) pay him?"' (Beast & Man, 149). The first of these remarks seems to be a matter of logic, and the second simply states in neutral terms the central

question of sociobiology, as it affects species. The idea that there might be a direct, Lamarckian mechanism, ensuring that what helped the group or species would prevail regardless of the fate of individuals, never occurred to me, so I took no trouble to deny it. I rather suspect that others accused of group-selectionism may be in the same boat, including Lorenz. 11 What Kipling gives is, he says, only a few of the laws that apply to the wolves . . . specimens of the simpler rulings which Baloo gave to Mowgli (see The Law of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book, and the story before it, How Fear Came). 12 This idea may seem to recall an interesting science-fiction story by Cohn Wilson, The Mind Parasites, where human faults are found to be the work of mental parasites which are (I think) then eliminated by some kind of transcendental DDT, returning the human race to the innocence which was its original condition. But Dawkinss idea is much more obscure than this, as well as more sinister. It shows all contents of the mind, equally and indiscriminately, as parasitical. Dawkins cites with approval a colleagues remark that When you plant a meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brainin just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isnt just a way of talking (SG, 207, my italics). But the idea of parasite and host requires separate, distinct individuals. If each individual is only a locus for innumerable warring parasites, how is there anyone to talk of my brain or of you as the parasitizer?

(1983) Philosophy 58, 365-377

A New Religion
By David Stove I Dolphins and some other animals have lately turned out to be more intelligent than was formerly thought, and present-day computers are capable of some amazing things. Still, if the question is asked, what are the most intelligent and all-round-capable things on earth, the answer is obvious: human beings. Everyone knows this, except certain religious people. A person is certainly a believer in some religion if be thinks, for example, that there are on earth millions of invisible and immortal nonhuman beings which are far more intelligent and capable than we are. But that is exactly what sociobiologists do think, about genes. Sociobiology, then, is a religion: one which has genes as its gods. Yet this conclusion seems incredible. Was not religion banished from biological science a long time ago? Why, yes. And is not sociobiology a part of biological science (even if a very new part, and a controversial one)? No. Sociobiologists really are committed to genes being gods, as I will show in a moment. But first consider the following. We would all say, because we all know it to be true, that calculating-machines, automobiles, screwdrivers and the like, are just tools or devices which are designed, made, and manipulated by human beings for their own ends. Now, you cannot say this without implying that human beings are more intelligent and capable than calculators, automobiles, screwdrivers, etc. For if we designed and made something as intelligent and capable as ourselves, or more so, it would be precisely not just a tool which we could manipulate for our own ends: it would have ends of its own, and be at least as good at achieving those ends, too, as we are at achieving ours. Similarly, suppose someone says that human beings and all other organisms are just tools or devices designed, made and manipulated by so-and-sos for their own ends. Then he implies that so-and-sos are more intelligent and capable than human beings. With that in mind, consider the following representative statements made by leading sociobiologists. Richard Dawkins, easily the best-known spokesman for this movement, writes that we are . . . robot-vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes',[1] and again that we are manipulated to ensure the survival of [our] genes.[2] The same writer also says that the fundamental truth [is] that an organism is a tool of DNA.[3] (That is, of the DNA molecules which are the organisms genes.) Again, Dawkins says that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA.[4] Similarly, E. O. Wilson, an equal or higher sociobiological authority, says that the individual organism is only the vehicle [of genes], part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread themThe organism is only DNAs way of making more DNA.[5]

I will mention in a moment some other passages in which sociobiologists imply that genes are beings of more-than-human intelligence and power, but that implication should be clear enough already from the passages just quoted. According to the Christian religion, human beings and all other created things exist for the greater glory of God; according to sociobiology, human beings and all other living things exist for the benefit of their genes. The expression their genes' is probably not perfectly orthodox, from the strict sociobiological point of view; being rather too apt to suggest that genes are part of our equipment, whereas (according to sociobiology) we are part of theirs. All the same, the religious implication is unmistakable: that there exist, in us and around us, beings to whom we stand in the same humble relation as calculators, cars, and screwdrivers stand in to us. It must be admitted that sociobiologists sometimes say other things which are inconsistent with statements like the ones I have just quoted. Dawkins, for example, sometimes protests that he does not at all believe that genes are 'conscious, purposeful agents.[6] But these disclaimers are in vain. Of course genes are not conscious purposeful agents: everyone will agree with that. Where sociobiologists differ from other people is just that they also say, over and over again, things which imply that genes are conscious purposeful agents; and agents, at that, of so much intelligence and power that human beings are merely among the tools they make and use. It is in Richard Dawkins book, The Extended Phenotype, that the apotheosis of genes has been carried furthest. Manipulation is the central idea of this book (as the author himself acknowledges),[7] and more specifically, manipulation by genes. Genes are here represented as manipulating, in their own interest, not only the bodies and behaviour of the organisms in which they sit, but just about everything under the sun. Genes manipulate external objects. For example, spider-genes (not spiders) manipulate webs, termite-genes (not termites) manipulate mud to make their mounds, beaver-genes (not beavers) manipulate logs and water to make a dam, and so on.[8] Action at a distance, something which is usually considered to be difficult or impossible, is no trouble at all to genes.[9] No job is too big for them, either: beaver-genes can easily build a lake miles wide.[10] Genes also manipulate the behaviour of other organisms, and the victims of their manipulation need not at all be of the same species as the organisms which carry the manipulating genes. For example, a certain kind of cuckoo deposits its egg among the eggs laid by a reedwarbler. Once the eggs hatch, the exceptionally loud begging-cry of the young cuckoo, and its exceptionally colourful 'gape, induce the parent reed-warblers to give it more food than they give to their own young. According to Dawkins, this is a case of the genes of the cuckoo-parents manipulating the behaviour of reed-warbler parents, to the advantage of the former and the disadvantage of the latter.[11] Now, think what this kind of description commits the user of it to. Just as maternity implies parenthood but not conversely, so manipulation implies causal influence but not conversely. The moon causally influences the tides, but it cannot manipulate them. Even if causal influence results in some advantage to the influencing agent, that is still not enough to constitute manipulation. If you and I are competing to catch the greater number of fish from our boat, and I by accident knock you overboard, then I influence your behaviour but do not manipulate it, even though your mishap improves my chances of winning the

competition. To constitute manipulation, there must be the element of intended purposeful causal influence. Most biologists would see, in a case like nest-parasitism, nothing more than an extremely complex example of causal influence. They might ascribe to the genes of the cuckoo exactly the same causal influence as sociobiologists do. What distinguishes the sociobiologists description of the case is his insistence that those genes are manipulating the reed-warblers behaviour for their own benefit. Well, cuckoos do benefit, and reedwarblers lose, by nest-parasitism. But, as we just saw in the boat case, causal influence plus resulting advantage are not enough to constitute manipulation. The causal influence must also be purposeful or intended. But is that condition satisfied in this case? If the nest-parasitism of cuckoos is a case of manipulation, it is certainly a staggeringlyclever one: far too clever for cuckoos, in particular, to be capable of. Can a cuckoo have a purpose as complicated as that of it-feeds-its-own-young? That must be extremely doubtful. Still, let us suppose that a cuckoo is clever enough for that. He would need to be cleverer still, to be able to think up a way of achieving this purpose. In particular, could he think up a way of achieving it which did not involve any cuckoos ever going even within a mile of a reed-warbler? No: there is no one who will credit cuckoos with so great an intellectual feat. Yet even if a cuckoo could manage that part too, the hardest job would still lie ahead of him. For he would need, not just to have this brilliant idea, but to be able to implement it. But how is a cuckoo to do whatever engineering is required? He has no hope. Manipulative ability of any kind is not highly developed in birds, and cuckoos are distinctly below the bird-average in this respect. After all, hardly any of them can even build a nest. But the feat of manipulation in question would not only be too hard for cuckoos: it would be too hard for us. Suppose that nest-parasitism has not yet evolved among birds, and that young cuckoos have not yet acquired their special adaptations for it. Cuckoos (we will suppose) raise their own young, but are extremely slapdash parents. In these circumstances, we might become anxious about the survival of cuckoos, and decide to take steps to improve their reproductive performance. Now, would you or I be clever enough to think of nest-parasitism as a means to this end? I know I never would; but perhaps you would. But would even you be able to think of a way of getting the host-birds not only to feed the young cuckoos, but to feed them better than their own offspring? A way, at that, which does not require any human cuckoo-helper ever to go near a member of the host-species? With all due respect to human intelligence, this seems hardly possible. Still, let us suppose that we did think up such a way, and that in particular we came up with the brilliant idea of endowing young cuckoos with exceptional voice and gape. Even then, the hardest part of the job would still remain: that is, to implement this idea. Well, human beings are as pre-eminent on earth for engineering ability as they are for intelligence, but we could not do this. We cannot build young cuckoos, or breed them, to precise specifications. And no genetic engineer could as yet undertake this particular task with rational confidence of success. It would, then, be a feat of manipulation, not only far beyond cuckoo capabilities, but beyond present human capabilities, to prevail on reedwarblers, without having to go near

them, to feed cuckoo-young at the expense of their own young. Yet this feat is one which, if Dawkins is right, cuckoo-genes first performed long ago, and have practised ever since without the smallest difficulty. The implication could hardly be plainer: cuckoo-genes are more intelligent and capable than human beings. The same presumably holds a fortiori for human genes. The only way in which sociobiologists could avoid this implication would be, if they used the word manipulation, when they ascribe manipulation to genes, in some sense which does not imply purpose, as its ordinary sense does. But they do not do any such thing. Dawkins, for example, makes no distinction whatever between the manipulation which he ascribes to genes, and the ordinary sense of the word, in which he says (as we all say) that pigeons manipulate twigs and other nest-materials, beavers manipulate logs to build a dam,[12] and so on. Gods, in addition to being thought of as more intelligent and powerful than we are, are always thought of as being immortal. It was therefore to be expected that sociobiologists would wish to ascribe this attribute too, to genes. Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins on this subject. The genedoes not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death. The genes are the immortals'.[13] II Most people would like some religion to be true. This may seem strange, when you consider that every religion is and must be more or less terrifying. But then, there are various things which can outweigh terror. One of them is depression, and if religion is terrifying, atheism is depressing. It is an intensely depressing thought that the brightest and best things the universe has to show are certain members of our species. The trouble is, though, that every religion (or at any rate every one I know of) is incomprehensible when it is not obviously false. Of course, something which is incomprehensible to us might nevertheless be true, and religious people often remind the non-religious of this fact. But, though it is a fact, it is no help, because there are always many competing incomprehensibilities, from religious and other sources, vying for our acceptance. Tertullian said that he believed the Christian religion because of its absurdity. But alas, every other religion possesses the same claim on our belief (if absurdity really is a claim on our belief). Sociobiology is not incomprehensible, but it is one of the religions which are obviously false. The only part of it that is true is the doctrine that genes are invisible. But this is not something peculiar to sociobiology. Everyone agrees that genes are invisible, at least to the naked eye and to old-fashioned microscopes. Given present-day microscopy, however, any invisibility which genes can still be said to possess is invisibility of no very deep or interesting kind. (It is not at all like the invisibility of numbers, for example.) Sociobiologists have consciously and avowedly revived the doctrine of the immortality of the germ-plasm (or of the germ-line), which August Weismann first published about a hundred years ago. (Dawkins, indeed, correctly describes his own overall position as

extreme Weismannism'[14]) But that famous doctrine is, and always was, true only in a highly special and indeed idiosyncratic sense. The extinction of a species (that is, its last member dying), is a common-enough occurrence in evolutionary history; and every time it happens, every gene-line peculiar to that species comes to an end too. When you die, that is also the end of every gene-line which any cell of yours had been carrying-on until then. If a man has no sons, then many of his genes - namely, at least all the ones on his Y-chromosome - are not transmitted any further. If you have no children at all, you are not a node on any gene-line which extends into the future. Not a very robust kind of immortality, this! In fact I would be thinking seriously, if I were a gene, of bringing a suit for misleading advertising against Richard Dawkins and the Weismann estate. The immortality of genes or of gene-lines, then, if not an obvious falsity, is an exceedingly misleading expression. (Dawkins himself, having said in the passage quoted earlier, that the genes are the immortals, was prudent enough to add at once that they are not really.[15]) The grain of truth in the doctrine of gene-immortality is that genes, unlike most organisms, do not have a natural life-cycle ending in death. But this truth was never anything to write home about, since genes are not organisms, are not alive, and (as far as I know) have never even been thought to be so. The word immortal means alive and not subject to death, and it therefore can be properly applied only to something living. To apply it to things which are not alive, such as DNA molecules, can only serve to bewilder oneself and other people; for example, by encouraging misplaced feelings of awe towards genes. Genes thus lack both the durability and the life which would be needed to justify calling them the immortals. But even if they had been alive, and much more durable than in fact they are, this would do little to make the gene-religion credible. In the god-hood stakes, the superior durability of a life-form, if not accompanied by superior intelligence and capability, does not count for much. If it did, carp would be more god-like than horses, and it would be a close-run thing between human beings and elephants. But it is not so. The main reason, however, for thinking that sociobiology is false, is the simple one I gave at the beginning: that it is obvious that human beings are the most intelligent and capable things on earth. But genes are not human. Therefore (etc.). Genes are so far from being the winners in the intelligence-capability stakes, that they are not even starters. They are just molecules of DNA, after all, and DNA molecules have exactly as much intelligence and purpose as (say) H2O or NaC1 molecules: namely none. They differ from almost all other molecules in having a strong tendency to produce copies of themselves. But then, ever since we first noticed that the offspring of human beings are human, that the offspring of mice are mice, etc., we might have known that there must be some physical mechanism by which parental characters are transmitted to offspring. It need not have been gene-replication, but it did have to be some sort of machinery for producing the-same-thing-again. Of the details of this machinery, a great deal is now known. But this part of science has not brought any gods to light. On the contrary, like every other part of science, it has only served to drive those elusive beings still further into the shade.

Genes, even if they were alive, and did possess intelligence and purpose, would still be hopelessly miscast in the role of the worlds greatest manipulators. Manipulation requires, not only influence and intention-to-influence, but means. Yet what means of manipulation have genes got? They are sans limbs, sans organs, sans tissues, sans nerves, sans brainssans everything. If they were capable, under these crushing handicaps, of any sort of manipulation, they really would have a good deal of the god about them. III It is logically possible (as should go without saying), that the sociobiologists are right and I am wrong. There is nothing objectionable a priori, or philosophically, about the proposition that genes are the most intelligent and capable things on earth. It is a question of fact, and nothing else, whether they are or not. If they are, it will be an immense historical irony. Religion, which was driven out of biology by nineteenth-century Darwinism, will have been put back by - of all people - the extremists of neo-Darwinism. This seems hardly conceivable, because for more than two thousand years science has been at war with religion. Yet if the sociobiologists are right, science has actually now brought us what the human heart has always yearned for but never before achieved: knowledge of beings which, in virtue of their immense superiority to ourselves, are proper objects of our reverence and worship. References 1 The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976, reprinted in Paladin Books, 1979), p. x. 2 Op. cit., 185. 3 The Extended Phenotype (Oxford and San Francisco: Freeman & Co, 1982), 158. 4 The Blind Watchmaker (Longman, 1986), 126. 5 Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975), 3. 6 The Selfish Gene, 210. 7 See The Extended Phenotype, 57. 8 Op. cit., ch. 4. 9 Op. cit., ch. 13. 10 Op. cit., 200. 11 Op. cit., 68-70. 12 Op. cit., 59. 13 The Selfish Gene, 36. 14 The Extended Phenotype, 164. 15 The Selfish Gene, 36.

So You Think You Are a Darwinian?

By David Stove

Most educated people nowadays, I believe, think of themselves as Darwinians. If they do, however, it can only be from ignorance: from not knowing enough about what Darwinism says. For Darwinism says many things, especially about our species, which are too obviously false to be believed by any educated person; or at least by an educated person who retains any capacity at all for critical thought on the subject of Darwinism. Of course most educated people now are Darwinians, in the sense that they believe our species to have originated, not in a creative act of the Divine Will, but by evolution from other animals. But believing that proposition is not enough to make someone a Darwinian. It had been believed, as may be learnt from any history of biology, by very many people long before Darwinism, or Darwin, was born. What is needed to make someone an adherent of a certain school of thought is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to that school, and are believed either by all of its adherents, or at least by the more thoroughgoing ones. In any large school of thought, there is always a minority who adhere more exclusively than most to the characteristic beliefs of the school: they are the purists or ultras of that school. What is needed and sufficient, then, to make a person a Darwinian, is belief in all or most of the propositions which are peculiar to Darwinians, and believed either by all of them, or at least by ultraDarwinians. I give below ten propositions which are all Darwinian beliefs in the sense just specified. Each of them is obviously false: either a direct falsity about our species or, where the proposition is a general one, obviously false in the case of our species, at least. Some of the ten propositions are quotations; all the others are paraphrases. The quotations are all from authors who are so well-known, at least in Darwinian circles, as spokesmen for Darwinism or ultra-Darwinism, that their names alone will be sufficient evidence that the proposition is a Darwinian one. Where the proposition is a paraphrase, I give quotations or other information which will, I think, suffice to establish its Darwinian credentials. My ten propositions are nearly in reverse historical order. Thus, I start from the present day, and from the inferno-scene - like something by Hieronymus Bosch - which the 'selfish gene theory makes of all life. Then I go back a bit to some of the falsities which, beginning in the 1960s, were contributed to Darwinism by the theory of inclusive fitness. And finally I get back to some of the falsities, more pedestrian though no less obvious, of the Darwinism of the 19th or early-20th century. 1. The truth is, the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances, genes.

This is a thumbnail-sketch, and an accurate one, of the contents of The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. It was not written by Dawkins, but he quoted it with manifest enthusiasm in a defence of The Selfish Gene which he wrote in this journal in 1981. Dawkins status, as a widely admired spokesman for ultra-Darwinism, is too well-known to need evidence of it adduced here. His admirers even include some philosophers who have carried their airs and graces to the length of writing good books on such rarefied subjects as universals, or induction, or the mind. Dawkins can scarcely have gratified these admirers by telling them that, even when engaged in writing those books, they were totally prostituted to the blind purposiveness of their genes Still, you have to hand it to genes which can write, even if only through their slaves, a good book on subjects like universals or induction. Those genes must have brains all right, as well as purposes. At least, they must, if genes can have brains and purposes. But in fact, of course, DNA molecules no more have such things than H20 molecules do. 2 'it is, after all, to [a mothers] advantage that her child should be adopted by another woman. This quotation is from Dawkins The Selfish Gene, p. 110. Obviously false though this proposition is, from the point of view of Darwinism it is wellfounded, for the reason which Dawkins gives on the same page: that another womans adopting her baby releases a rival female from the burden of child-rearing, and frees her to have another child more quickly. This, you will say, is a grotesque way of looking at human life; and so, of course, it is. But it is impossible to deny that it is the Darwinian way. 3. All communication is manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender. This profound communication, though it might easily have come from any used-car salesman reflecting on life, was actually sent by Dawkins, (in The Extended Phenotype, (1982), p. 57), to the readers whom he was at that point engaged in manipulating. Much as the devil, in many medieval plays, advises the audience not to take his advice. 4. Homosexuality in social animals is a form of sibling-altruism: that is, your homosexuality is a way of helping your brothers and sisters to raise more children. This very-believable proposition is maintained by Robert Trivers in his book Social Evolution, (1985), pp. 198-9. Professor Trivers is a leading light among ultra-Darwinians, (who are nowadays usually called sociobiologists). Whether he also believes that suicide, for example, and self-castration, are forms of sibling-altruism, I do not know; but I do not see what there is to stop him. What is there to stop anyone believing such propositions? Only common sense: a thing entirely out of the question among sociobiologists. 5. In all social mammals, the altruism (or apparent altruism) of siblings towards one another is about as strong and common as the altruism (or apparent altruism) of parents towards their offspring. This proposition is an immediate consequence, and an admitted one, of the theory of inclusive fitness, which says that the degree of altruism depends on the proportion of genes shared. This theory was first put forward by W. D. Hamilton in The Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1964. Since then it has been accepted by Darwinians almost as one man and has revolutionized evolutionary theory. This acceptance has made Professor Hamilton the most influential Darwinian author of the last thirty years.

6. 'no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or offspring], or four half-brothers, or eight firstcousins.' This is a quotation from the epoch-making article by Professor Hamilton to which I referred a moment ago. The italics are not in the text. Nor are the two words which I have put in square brackets; but their insertion is certainly authorized by the theory of inclusive fitness. 7. Every organism has as many descendants as it can. Compare Darwin, in The Origin of Species, p. 66: every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers; and again, pp. 78-9, each organic being is striving to increase at a geometrical ratio. These page references are to the first edition of the Origin, (1859), but both of the passages just quoted are repeated in all of the five later editions of the book which were published in Darwins lifetime. He also says the same thing in other places. But it would not have mattered if he had not happened to say in print such things as I have just quoted. For it was always obvious, to everyone who understood his theory, that a universal striving-to-the-utmost-to-increase is an essential part of that theory: in fact it is the very motor of evolution, according to the theory. It is the thing which, by creating pressure of population on the supply of food, is supposed to bring about the struggle for life among con-specifics, hence natural selection, and hence evolution. As is well known, and as Darwin himself stated, he had got the idea of population permanently pressing on food, because of the constant tendency to increase, from T. R. Malthuss Essay on Population (1798). Still, that every organism has as many descendants as it can, while it is or may be true of most species of organisms, is obviously not true of ours. Do you know of even one human being who ever had as many descendants as he or she could have had? And yet Darwinism says that every single one of us does. For there can clearly be no question of Darwinism making an exception of man, without openly contradicting itself. Every single organic being, or each organic being: this means you. 8. In every species, child-mortality - that is, the proportion of live births which die before reproductive age - is extremely high. Compare Darwin in the Origin, p. 61: of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive; or p. 5, many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive. Again, these passages, from the first edition, are both repeated unchanged in all the later editions of the Origin. Proposition 8 is not a peripheral or negotiable part of Darwinism. On the contrary it is, like proposition 7, a central part, and one which Darwinians are logically locked-into. For in order to explain evolution, Darwin had adopted (as I have said) Malthuss principle of population: that population always presses on the supply of food, and tends to increase beyond it. And this principle does require child-mortality to be extremely high in all species. Because of the strength and universality of the sexual impulse, animals in general have an exuberant tendency to increase in numbers. This much is obvious, but what Malthuss

principle says is something far more definite. It says that the tendency to increase is so strong that every population, of any species, is at all times already as large as its foodsupply permits, or else is rapidly approaching that impassable limit. Which means of course that, (as Malthus once put it), the young are always born into a world already possessed. In any average year, (assuming that the food-supply does not increase), there is simply not enough food to support any greater number of the newborn than is needed to replace the adults which die. But such is the strength of the tendency to increase that, in any average year, the number of births will greatly exceed the number of adult deaths. Which is to say, the great majority of those born must soon die. Consider a schematic example. Suppose there is a population, with a constant food-supply, of 1000 human beings. Suppose - a very realistic supposition, in fact a conservative one that 700 of them are of reproductive age. Suppose that this population is already at equilibrium, (as Darwinians say): that is, is already as large as its food can support. According to Malthuss principle, people (or flies or fish or whatever) will reproduce if they can. So, since there are 350 females of reproductive age, there will be 350 births this year. But there is no food to support more of these than are needed to replace the adults who die this year; while the highest adult death-rate which we can suppose with any approximation to realism is about 10%. So 100 adults will die this year, but to fill their places, there are 350 applicants. That is, there will this year be a child-mortality of 250 out of 350, or more than 70%. It was undoubtedly reasoning of this kind from Malthuss principle which led Darwin to believe that in every species but a small number of those born can survive, or that many more are born than can survive. What did Darwin mean by these phrases, in percentage, or at least minimum-percentage, terms? Well, we have just seen that Malthuss principle, in a typical case, delivers a child-mortality of at least 70%. And no one, either in 1859 or now, would dream of calling 30 or more, surviving out of 100, 'but a small number surviving. It would be already stretching language violently, to call even 23 (say), surviving out of 100, but a small number surviving. To use this phrase of 30-or-more surviving, would be absolutely out of the question. So Darwin must have meant, by the statements I quoted above, that child-mortality in all species is more than 70%. Which is obviously false in the case of our species. No doubt human child-mortality has often enough been as high as 70%, and often enough higher still. But I do not think that, at any rate within historical times, this can ever have been usual. For under a child-mortality of 70%, a woman would have to give birth 10 times, on the average, to get 3 of her children to puberty, and 30 times to get 9 of them there. Yet a womans getting 9 of her children to puberty has never at any time been anything to write home about; whereas a woman who gives birth 30 times has always been a demographic prodigy. The absolute record is about 32 births. (I neglect multiple births, which make up only 1% of all births.) As for the last 100 years, in any advanced country, to suppose child-mortality 70% or anywhere near it, would be nothing but an outlandish joke. It is important to remember that no one - not even Darwinians - knows anything at all about human demography, except what has been learnt in the last 350 years, principally concerning certain European countries or their colonies. A Darwinian may be tempted, indeed is sure to be tempted, to set all of this knowledge aside, as being of no biological validity, because it concerns only an exceptional time and place. But if we agreed to set

all this knowledge aside, the only result would be that no one knew anything whatever about human demography. And Darwinians would then be no more entitled than anyone else to tell us what the real, or the natural, rate of human child-mortality is. In any case, as I said earlier, Darwinians cannot without contradicting themselves make an exception of man, or of any particular part of human history. Their theory, like Malthuss principle, is one which generalizes about all species, and all places and times, indifferently; while man is a species, the last 350 years are times, and European countries are places. And Darwins assertion, that child-mortality is extremely high, is quite explicitly universal. For he said (as we saw) that of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive, and that many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive. Again, this means us. 9. The more privileged people are the more prolific: if one class in a society is less exposed than another to the misery due to food-shortage, disease, and war, then the members of the more fortunate class will have (on the average) more children than the members of the other class. That this proposition is false, or rather, is the exact reverse of the truth, is not just obvious. It is notorious, and even proverbial. Everyone knows that, as a popular song of the 1930s had it, The rich get rich, and The poor get children. Not that the song is exactly right, because privilege does not quite always require superior wealth, and superior wealth does not quite always confer privilege. The rule should be stated, not in terms of wealth, but in terms of privilege, thus: that the more privileged class is the less prolific. To this rule, as far as I know, there is not a single exception. And yet the exact inverse of it, proposition 9, is an inevitable consequence of Darwinism all right. Malthus had said that the main checks to human population are misery principally due to famine, war, and pestilence - and vice: by which he meant contraception, foeticide, homosexuality, etc. But he also said that famine - that is, deficiency of food - usually outweighs all the other checks put together, and that population-size depends, near enough, only on the supply of food. Darwin agreed. He wrote (in The Descent of Man, second edition, 1874), that the primary or fundamental check to the continued increase of man is the difficulty of gaining subsistence, and that if food were doubled in Britain, for example, population would quickly be doubled. But now, a more-privileged class always suffers less from deficiency of food than a less-privileged class does. Therefore, if food-supply is indeed the fundamental determinant of populationsize, a more-privileged class would always be a more prolific one; just as proposition 9 says. William Godwin, as early as 1820, pointed out that Malthus had managed to get the relationship between privilege and fertility exactly upside-down. In the 1860s and 70s W. R. Greg, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, pointed out that Darwin, by depending on Malthus for his explanation of evolution, had saddled himself with Malthuss mistake

about population and privilege. It is perfectly obvious that all these critics were right. But Darwin never took any notice of the criticism. Well, trying to get Darwin to respond to criticism was always exactly like punching a feather-mattress: suddenly absolutely nothing happened. The eugenics movement, which was founded a little later by Darwins disciple and cousin Francis Galton, was an indirect admission that those critics were right. For what galvanized the eugenists into action was, of course, their realisation that the middle and upper classes in Britain were being out-reproduced by the lowest classes. Such a thing simply could not happen, obviously, if Darwin and Malthus, and proposition 9, had been right. But the eugenists never drew the obvious conclusion, that Darwin and Malthus were wrong, and consequently they never turned their indirect criticism into a direct one. Well, they were fervent Darwinians to the last man and woman, and could not bring themselves to say, or even think, that Darwinism is false. A later Darwinian and eugenist, R. A. Fisher, discussed the relation between privilege and fertility at length, in his important book, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, (1930). But he can hardly be said to have made the falsity of proposition 9 any less of an embarrassment for Darwinism. Fisher acknowledges the fact that there has always been, in all civilized countries an inversion (as he calls it) of fertility-rates: that is, that the more privileged have always and everywhere been the less fertile. His explanation of this fact is that civilized countries have always practised what he calls the social promotion of infertility. That is, people are enabled to succeed better in civilized life, the fewer children they have. But this is evidently just a re-phrasing of the problem, rather than a solution of it. The question, for a Darwinian such as Fisher, is how there can be, consistently with Darwinism, such a thing as the social promotion of infertility? In every other species of organisms, after all, comparative infertility is a sure sign, or even the very criterion, of comparative failure. So how can there be if Darwinism is true, a species of organisms in which comparative infertility is a regular and nearly-necessary aid to success? Fishers constant description of the fertility-rates in civilized countries as inverted, deserves a word to itself. It is a perfect example of an amazingly-arrogant habit of Darwinians, (of which I have collected many examples in my forthcoming book Darwinian Fairytales). This is the habit, when some biological fact inconsistent with Darwinism comes to light, of blaming the fact, instead of blaming their theory. Any such fact Darwinians call a biological error' an error of heredity, a misfire, or some thing of that kind: as though the organism in question had gone wrong, when all that has actually happened, of course, is that Darwinism has gone wrong. When Fisher called the birth-rates in civilized countries inverted, all he meant was that, exactly contrary to Darwinian theory, the more privileged people are the less fertile. From this fact, of course, the only rational conclusion to be drawn is, that Darwinism has got things upside-down. But instead of that Fisher, with typical Darwinian effrontery, concludes that civilised people have got things upside-down! Fisher, who died in 1962, is nowadays the idol of ultra-Darwinians, and he deserves to be so: he was in fact a sociobiologist born out of due time. And the old problem for Darwinism, to which he had at least given some publicity, even if he did nothing to solve

it, remains to this day the central problem for sociobiologists. The problem (to put it vulgarly) of why the rich and famous are such pitiful reproducers as they are. Of course this problem is no problem at all, for anyone except ultra-Darwinians. It is an entirely self-inflicted injury, and as such deserves no sympathy. Who, except an ultraDarwinian, would expect the highly-privileged to be great breeders? No one; just as no one but an ultra-Darwinian would expect women to adopt-out their babies with maximum expedition. For ultra-Darwinians, on the other hand, the infertility of the privileged is a good deal more than a problem. It is a refutation. But they react to it in accordance with a well-tried rule of present-day scientific research. The rule is: When your theory meets with a refutation, call it instead "a problem", and demand additional money in order to enable you to solve it. Experience has shown that this rule is just the thing for keeping a research program afloat, even if it leaks like a sieve. Indeed, the more of these challenging problems you can mention, the more money you are plainly entitled to demand. 10. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This is from The Origin of Species, pp. 80-81. Exactly the same words occur in all the editions. Since this passage expresses the essential idea of natural selection, no further evidence is needed to show that proposition 10 is a Darwinian one. But is it true? In particular, may we really feel sure that every attribute in the least degree injurious to its possessors would be rigidly destroyed by natural selection? On the contrary, the proposition is (saving Darwins reverence) ridiculous. Any educated person can easily think of a hundred characteristics, commonly occurring in our species, which are not only in the least degree injurious to their possessors, but seriously or even extremely injurious to them, which have not been rigidly destroyed, and concerning which there is not the smallest evidence that they are in the process of being destroyed. Here are ten such characteristics, without even going past the first letter of the alphabet. Abortion; adoption; fondness for alcohol; altruism; anal intercourse; respect for ancestors; susceptibility to aneurism; the love of animals; the importance attached to art; asceticism, whether sexual, dietary, or whatever. Each of these characteristics tends, more or less strongly, to shorten our lives, or to lessen the number of children we have, or both. All of them are of extreme antiquity. Some of them are probably older than our species itself. Adoption, for example is practised by some species of chimpanzees: another adult female taking over the care of a baby whose mother has died. Why has not this ancient and gross biological error been rigidly destroyed? There has not been enough time, replies the Darwinian. Well, that could be so: perhaps there has not been enough time. And then again, perhaps there has been enough time: perhaps even twenty times over. How long does it take for natural selection to destroy an injurious attribute, such as adoption or fondness for alcohol? I have not the faintest idea, of

course. I therefore have no positive ground whatever for believing either that there has been enough time for adoption to be destroyed, or that there has not. But then, on this matter, everyone else is in the same state of total ignorance as I am. So how come the Darwinian is so confident that there has not been enough time? What evidence can he point to, for thinking that there has not? Why, nothing but this, that adoption has not been destroyed, despite its being an injurious attribute! But this is palpably arguing in a circle, and taking for granted the very point which is in dispute. The Darwinian has no positive evidence whatever, that there has not been enough time. Mercifully, Darwinians nowadays are much more reluctant than they formerly were, to rely heavily on the not-enough-time defence of their theory against critics. They have benefited from the strictures of philosophers, who have pointed out that it is not good scientific method, to defend Darwinism by a tactic which would always be equally available whatever the state of the evidence, and which will still be equally available to Darwinians a million years hence, if adoption (for example) is still practised then. The cream of the jest, concerning proposition 10, is that Darwinians themselves do not really believe it. Ask a Darwinian whether he actually believes that the fondness for alcoholic drinks is being destroyed now, or that abortion is, or adoption - and watch his face. Well, of course he does not believe it! Why would he? There is not a particle of evidence in its favour, and there is a great mountain of evidence against it. Absolutely the only thing it has in its favour is that Darwinism says it must be so. But (as Descartes said in another connection) this reasoning cannot be presented to infidels, who might consider that it proceeded in a circle. What becomes, then, of the terrifying giant named Natural Selection, which can never sleep, can never fail to detect an attribute which is, even in the least degree, injurious to its possessors in the struggle for life, and can never fail to punish such an attribute with rigid destruction? Why, just that, like so much else in Darwinism, it is an obvious fairytale, at least as far as our species is concerned. It would not be difficult to compile another list of ten obvious Darwinian falsities; or another one after that, either. But on that scale, the thing would be tiresome both to read and to write. Anyway it ought not to be necessary: ten obvious Darwinian falsities should be enough to make the point. The point, namely, that if most educated people now think they are Darwinians, it is only because they have no idea of the multiplied absurdities which belief in Darwinism requires.

I Rather Think I Am A Darwinian

By Simon Blackburn

When I read the late David Stoves essay So You think you are a Darwinian? in this journal, I supposed that biologists or philosophers of biology would have been quick to respond.[1] But the last eighteen months have shown no sign of this happening. Perhaps people professionally involved with evolutionary theory have better things to do, and in some circumstances silence is indeed the best reaction. But not, I think, on this occasion. Darwin himself spoke wearily of the standard of criticism not uncommonly reached by theologians and metaphysicians when they write on scientific subjects; by perpetuating that unfortunate standard we do philosophy a great disservice. Stoves essay is also reprinted in a collection of his works - a collection with accolades by no less than David Lewis and Stephen Stich on the cover.[2] A book-length expansion of his views is now published, although in this paper I shall confine myself to replying to his arguments as they have appeared in this journal.[3] People who do not know better will think that there must be something right in his criticisms. People who do know better may think that philosophy richly deserves its exile to the margins of serious intellectual pursuit. So I hope a very brief comment by a philosopher may do something to restore our tattered dignity. Stove presents a list of ten Darwinian falsities, and tells us that there are many more. The ten are: 1. The truth is the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances, genes. (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene) 2. 'it is, after all to a mothers advantage that her child should be adopted by another woman. (ibid.) 3. All communication is manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender (ibid.) 4. Homosexuality in social animals is a form of sibling-altruism: that is, your homosexuality is a way of helping your brothers and sisters to raise more children. (Robert Trivers, Social Evolution) 5. In all social mammals, the altruism (or apparent altruism) of siblings towards one another is about as strong and common as the altruism (or apparent altruism) of parents towards their offspring. (W. D. Hamilton, The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964) 6. no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers (or offspring), or four half-brothers, or eight firstcousins. (ibid. p. 269) 7. Every organism has as many descendants as it can.

8. In every species child-mortality - that is, the proportion of live births which die before reproductive age - is extremely high. 9. The more privileged people are the more prolific: if one class in a society is less exposed than another to the misery due to food-shortage, disease, and war, then the members of the more fortunate class will have (on the average) more children than the members of the other class. 10. If variations which are useful to their possessors in the struggle for life do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive), that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. (Charles Darwin) These ten are billed as central, indispensable and characteristic theses of Darwinism. However, Stove also notices that some of them are only held by some evolutionary biologists. These he calls ultras, or in other words those who have been most enthusiastic in applying Darwinian explanations to a whole variety of behavioural or other features of people and animals. But although he urges that it is fair to attack a doctrine or approach by attacking its ultras, this is surely false. For whereas Darwinism claims that some features of living things are adaptations, in a sense we define below, the ultras either think that all of them are, or at least that certain favourite (alleged) features of people or animals are. This is not so much an extreme version of Darwinism, as a recipe for misapplication of it. The ultras are also apt to deliver glib interpretations of the significance of Darwinism, and this point becomes important when we return to the first three falsities that Stove presents, all taken from the writings of the ultra Richard Dawkins. But rather than go through his ten Darwinian falsities, in his order, I shall start with the worst example, which also serves to introduce the basics. The sixth of the parade is supposed to come from W. D. Hamilton, whose paper The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour has been the fountainhead of much modern evolutionary theory.[4] Here again is the quotation Stove uses, in the words he gives: no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but everyone will sacrifice it for more than two brothers [or offspring], or four half-brothers, or eight firstcousins. (p. 269) Stove scrupulously explains that the italicization is his own, and so is the insert in square brackets. But they are scarcely necessary to justify his own scathing denunciation of Hamiltons view. It is one of the characteristic Darwinian propositions, Stove tells us, which is obviously false: either a direct falsity about our species or, where the proposition is a general one, obviously false in the case of our species, at least. The publishers advertisement for Stoves book also claims that Stove has falsified the prediction that an animal will sacrifice itself for three siblings. And the unwary reader might well think Stove has a point, for the proposition is obviously false about our species, so if Hamilton and Darwinians believe it, they must be badly astray. But here is the actual quotation from Hamilton: To express the matter more vividly, in the world of our model organisms, whose behaviour is determined strictly by genotype, we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice

his life for any single person, but that everyone will sacrifice it when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins (p. 16) By missing out the first twenty-five words, Stove presents a mathematical truth about Hamiltons model as a contingent falsehood about human beings. If Stove knew what he had done, then I think he can only be defended in the words Sir Peter Medawar used of Teilhard de Chardin in his famous review in Mind, 1950: its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. But if on the other hand he did not see how the omission matters then Stove is in effect committing one of the very fallacies that critics claim lie at the heart of vulgar or pop sociobiology, which is that of inferring actual propensities to behaviour and their explanations, from genetic models (other fallacies imputed include that of inferring the existence of a gene for any aspect of the phenotype, just because it exists, and that of inferring the identity of kinds of behaviour and of evolutionary history, from superficial analogies across species). Why does the omission matter so much? Hamiltons paper was centrally a contribution to population genetics. It was the first formal presentation of the concept of inclusive fitness: roughly, the extent to which the genetic material of an organism is represented in future generations. Hamilton saw that this measure will sometimes increase if a gene codes for self-sacrificial behaviour. In particular, sacrifices of the type described, in a population, such as we are, whose members get half their genetic material from each parent, will actually lead to more of an individuals genetic material being represented in the next generation than a non-sacrificial alternative. So, under stable evolutionary conditions, if there is a variant of a gene (an allele) that codes for such behaviour, then we would expect animals in which it is present to become predominant in a population, compared with those with an allele that does not code for such behaviour. Hamilton went on to apply the model to solve a famous problem for Darwinian theory: how it can be that in species of hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps), sterile workers exist? Why would evolutionary pressures not have weeded them out? The answer is that sterility could have evolved under pressure of selection because, given the particular way genetic material flows through the population, sterility of the worker can actually increase its genetic representation in future generations: the sterile worker farms its mother to produce more sisters, to whom it is more closely related than it would be to its own offspring. So from the standpoint of inclusive fitness sterility can be adaptive and it would not be weeded out by evolution. This is a possibility theorem, similar, for example, to Haldanes earlier answer to the question of how the gene for sickle cell anaemia, which is almost always lethal, could persist in human populations. The answer is that although 80% of people with sickle cell anaemia die before reproducing, the condition requires the homozygote (SS), the person having received the S gene from each parent. However, people with the heterozygote (AS) have other advantages over those who are AA, notably resistance to malaria. It is as if there is an urn in which a proportion of balls are S, and a proportion A. Drawings are made two at a time: SS means none go back, AA means one of the two quite fairly often goes back, but AS or SA means that one of the two much more often goes back, and that explains why S persists in the population in the urn. In fact, the S gene is more prominent in precisely those populations that are more at risk from malaria.

Now return to self-sacrifice. Nothing in the theory so far predicts that we, or any other species should behave self-sacrificially in just the way Haldane and Hamilton described. Why not? Obviously, one reason alone suffices: the naturalized epistemology is too demanding. That is, it is obviously extremely hard to recognize the degrees of relatedness that Hamilton describes, and to adjust any behaviour efficiently to reflect them accurately (especially remembering the smaller fractions involved as degrees of relatedness decrease). A likely economical solution might be an approximation or kludge: sacrifice yourself more readily for animals that look like your parents or that smell familiar, for example. Or even: dont sacrifice yourself at all under any circumstances. But furthermore, we dont know the costs that would attach to having behaviour determined by any more accurate device. In some circumstances, obviously, there would be costs in terms of interference with other interesting and potentially adaptive mechanisms such as that of reciprocal altruism regardless of kin. But quite apart from this, nothing in Darwinian theory allows you to say that because some pattern of behaviour would increase the amount of some type of genetic material in future generations, therefore it will exist. It does not as it were allow you to say that whatever is right, is. Nor does it allow you to say that because some trait exists, therefore it is an adaptation, so that whatever is, is right. Darwin himself was not a Panglossian: he thought that natural selection is 'insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. But he did not think that opportunity is always offered (in fact, he specifically discusses circumstances favourable or unfavourable to the operation of natural selection, in chapter 4 of the Origin). He also thought that natural selection is but one agent of change, and one factor responsible for the features of species and their members at any time. Why does opportunity not always offer? Genes flow through populations through time, their numbers in any generation varying with many factors, but centrally with the reproductive success of organisms that possess them. This means is that if the difference between the presence of one allele at a locus and the presence of another allele, causes a difference in the properties of the organism carrying the gene, and if that difference causes superior reproductive success of the organism, then the frequency of the occurrence of the one allele will rise compared to that of the other. If this is what explains the presence of the phenotypical difference, then the property is called an adaptation. This is just definition and mathematics. The empirical and testable question whether a particular trait is in fact an adaptation. So the first reason why opportunity does not always offer is that it is history and chance that determine whether one allele and another exist, and get into the competitive situation in which natural selection can operate in the first place. All this is standard theory. Even the ultra Dawkins, for instance, offers a list of six constraints on perfection, and discusses still others. The six are: time lags (animals are often out of date); the biological patchwork apt to be generated by historical constraints, or in other words the fact that evolution has to work by degrees on what is already present; the available genetic variation that exists for evolutionary pressure to work upon; constraints of costs and materials, imperfections at one level arising because of adaptations at another; and finally the existence of malevolence in the environment: perfection in the python is death for the monkey.[5] Interestingly, Darwin was well aware of the general nature of these constraints, and himself suggested the principle of functional change in structural

continuity to explain the evolution of incipient forms of structures that only gain their present use later. Hamiltons result certainly led to the search for kin-related sacrificial and altruistic behaviour in nature. It also led to various incautious claims that the phenotypical trait, here a propensity to adjust behaviour to degrees of relationship, is found in various human contexts, although the anthropological consensus is that this is not so (typically social kinship matters to us more than blood ties, although of course they may coincide). It led to the search for other traits that might, if they are the expression of a genetic variation, be likely to stabilize or increase in a population not because of direct reproductive success, but only through factoring in Hamiltons indirect effects, or inclusive fitness: patterns of fighting, warning, mating, caring, adoption, infanticide, and so on. Where does this leave Stove? He certainly finds a familiar target in his first quotation from Richard Dawkins, for nothing in evolutionary biology supports the image of ourselves as blind, or unable to pursue our own purposes, nor do they justify the rhetoric of us as prostituted to other, hidden purposes, possessed by virus-like substances within us. Stove is perfectly within his rights to join many commentators in finding Dawkinss language completely inappropriate. Of course, Dawkins knows and often says that genes have no brains, and hence no purposes and no self-interest. His problem is that he wants to say this, but at the same time to promote an interpretation of the biological facts that is actually inconsistent with it (but formed the core of his populist appeal). Thus he believes that our only hope in moral and political affairs to 'defy the selfish genes of our birth and rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators; had Stove confined himself to pointing out that nothing in the literal science gives any license to us to think that we do, or could do, or need to do, any such thing, then he might have performed a useful service.[6] What he should not do is read the unhappy rhetoric back into the doctrines of evolutionary biology. Dawkinss peculiar vision of us as mere vehicles for purposive genes is of his own making. It is not a tenet of Darwinism. But Stove is not within his rights to ignore Dawkinss technical use of terminology, as Dawkins pointed out in his rebuke to Mary Midgley in this journal a long time ago, and it is this that is at work in the second and third thesis.[7] Hamiltons result led to work, such as that of R. Trivers that Stove goes on to cite, suggesting the we do find direct expression of inclusive fitness in patterns of behaviour.[8] The idea is that there are patterns of behaviour that can be interpreted as illustrating an unconscious calculus of genetic flow. Trivers speculates that the rate of homosexuality in populations is one such. Now although Triverss work is relatively unguarded it is not to be criticized as expressing outright psychological falsity. Trivers does not suppose, as Stove implies (p. 269) that homosexuals are really saying to themselves: let me promote the reproductive success of my relations. How can I do that best? I know, I shall opt out of the reproductive race, by coupling only with others of my own sex.' Sure enough, if this were homosexual psychology, then presumably gays would spend less time cruising and more time nurturing siblings, nieces and nephews (and in fact, could perhaps do better for their genes by just confining themselves to these laudable activities, and giving up sex altogether). But one of the points of Triverss work is to show that a pattern of behaviour can exist without an organism planning, or even having the capacity to plan, in terms of it (in fact, the relevant example in his book Social Evolution is lesbianism amongst gulls).[9] All the homosexuals are doing is finding members of the

same sex attractive. But the theorist asks: why they are doing this? And how is it possible that a gene for doing it (if it is an adaptation) should survive, when it is obviously harmful to direct reproductive success? The answer might, in principle be given by the Hamiltonian calculation, just like the sterility of worker bees or ants. But it might not be: the explanation is speculative, and faces all the obstacles I have mentioned, and perhaps more. A theory such as this is speculative because we have to know the heritability and the plasticity of human patterns of behaviour before even beginning to theorize about which features of it are adaptations, in the sense given above. To take the classic example: if we lived only in an English speaking environment, and observed the remarkable rapidity with which infants learn English, we might conclude that there is a gene for speaking English. We would clearly have been misled; at best there might be a gene for learning whichever language is spoken by those around us. Perhaps the threat of genetic determinism is less troublesome once we realize that in many respects we may only be determined to be flexible. There are certainly genetic, heritable, instructions for growing proteins, and hence for growing the general-purpose cognitive and emotional engine called the brain. Equally certainly the brain imposes some limits: limits on what we can see or hear, or the size of our long or short term memories, for example, just as gravity puts limits on the size we can grow, or the distance we can fly. But more interesting behaviour is a different matter. Psychologically and culturally the empirical evidence shows massive flexibility within whatever limits there are, just as it shows it linguistically. A priori then, homosexuality in humans is at least as likely to be a consequence of various social and cultural factors as any kind of adaptation.[10] This kind of defence may seem too good to be true, and it may be appropriate here to make one remark about the question of whether Darwinism is an empirical, testable scientific theory, or whether it deflates into the tautology that survivors survive. The correct response is that these are not the only alternatives. Darwinism is better seen as a framework within which the right questions can be asked. It does not itself tell us which phenotypical properties are adaptations. But it does imply that some are, and the empirical work comes in discovering which ones these are. It is applying the genetic model in any particular way that leads to falsifiable empirical science, and there are many classic studies showing how it can be done.[11] Stoves main further point (supposed to refute all but the final one of the ten falsities) is that human beings obviously do not reproduce as prolifically as they can. This is certainly true, and the anthropological evidence is that cultural norms show great flexibility and variation in what counts as an appropriate pattern of childbearing. So, says Stove, the human being falsifies a central plank of Darwins theory, which is that every organism has as many descendants as it can. Stove says roundly: there can clearly be no question of Darwinism making an exception of man, without openly contradicting itself (p. 271). Unfortunately it is simply untrue that Darwinism implies that every organism has as many descendants as it can, in the sense Stove intends, in which it means bears or begets as many children as is biologically possible for it to do (Stove must mean this, or the subsequent calculations of mortality rates become irrelevant). A kind of organism that did breed to its biological limit could easily be selected against: most obviously if all its many offspring promptly starved, where fewer would have survived. This is why Stoves gloss is

not at all equivalent to the quotation from Darwin that he actually gives, which talks of the striving (tendency would have been better) to maximize numbers, something which can sometimes best be done by restraint in child-bearing. To understand this situation let us suppose a constant environment in which the number of human beings cannot grow significantly beyond its present level. Suppose the population is one of Trimmers, who find it less costly, more healthy, to restrain their rate of reproduction to roughly two children per couple, and the status quo is thereby maintained. Suppose the population now is invaded by a number of Breeders, who devote a great deal of energy to breeding up to their biological limit of ten or fifteen children per female. Suppose that a propensity to breed or to trim is controlled by a single gene. Would we expect the Breeders to displace the Trimmers? Not at all. We know that in the end, the actual number in the population remains the same: this is Malthuss grim truth. So the question is going to be: who is dying? The environment is one in which two people can be replaced by two people. Breeders are trying to rear ten or fifteen. Their children are less likely to get fed properly, are therefore weaker, more prone to disease, and are less able to survive. Perhaps the parental investment in breeding leads to less investment in upbringing, so that breeders are not intelligent or strong, and therefore fail to be sexually selected by the healthiest partners. Perhaps Trimmers find the reversion to Malthusian controls on population sufficiently abhorrent to mount other strategies against the Breeders, and so on. In fact, in biological theory, producing a small number of intensively cared-for offspring leads to one kind of selection (K-selection); it is distinguished at least by degree, from producing the largest possible number of offspring (r-selection). Birds produce few eggs, and care for them intensively; fish produce huge numbers of eggs, and dont care for them at all. We are like birds, but whereas they have presumably no control over the mechanisms that regulate the size of their clutch, we do. Again Stove might more reasonably have applied the fact that many human beings dont care to reproduce to Dawkins rather than Darwin. That is, a good way of ridding oneself of his image of us as robots under the control of our purposive genes is to reflect that the goal of reproducing at all, let alone reproducing prolifically, is one that many people simply do not have. Nor need there be any huge psychological cost, as if such people were constantly fighting a strong innate urge to reproduce, forced on them by the swarming armies of purposive genes inside them. But when thinking about Darwin himself, we must remember that, quite apart from its description in the Origin of Species (e.g. in chapter 4), parts two and three of The Descent of Man, that is, two thirds of the entire book (and it is not short), concern sexual selection in animals and human beings. Darwin considered sexual selection (the differential preference of members of one sex for members of the other) as a major agent of evolutionary change through time, comparable to human breeding of domesticated animals. A bird, for instance, refrains from mating with another bird who is not preferred; Darwin describes in chapter 14, and returns later to, the vivid case of several peahens who, when debarred from an admired male, remained widows during a whole season rather than pair with another bird (chapter 21). But by exercising sexual selection an animal refrains from the indiscriminate urge to reproduce whenever biologically possible. So Stove is in the extraordinary position of holding that Darwins most discussed agent of evolutionary change is in fact inconsistent with a central, indispensable tenet of the theory.

Because he misinterprets Darwin, Stoves calculations of infant mortality rates in a stable population in which people do reproduce as often as they can, are quite beside the point (pp. 271-272). Of course all human societies take steps to control their fertility, by late marriages, long periods of suckling, restraints on permissible periods of intercourse, and so on, just as in birds there are mechanisms that regulate the size of clutches of eggs. There is no theorem of Darwinian biology that if a variation appears that has larger clutches it will oust the others: it all depends on what happens next. As for Stoves last thrust, in which he finds Darwinism inconsistent with the existence of injurious attributes in animals, it simply depends on taking a rhetorical passage of Darwins for a non-negotiable literal tenet of the science (p. 275). Darwin knew that we get diseases, just as he knew that we have parasites, and eventually die. Injurious traits such as alcoholism and aneurism are not inevitably weeded out, any more than things which are more clearly under genetic control, such as sterility or susceptibility to malaria are weeded out, and, ironically, it is work such as Hamiltons or Haldanes that explains why. The single example above, of the persistence of a gene for the horrible disease of sickle cell anaemia should be enough to show why evolutionary biology is committed to no such optimism. How could it possibly be? As we have already said, typically a success in one organism is a difficulty for another. To anticipate misunderstandings, I should repeat that none of this is any kind of defence of any of the interpretations, or misinterpretations of Darwinian theory that go under the banners of sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology. On the contrary, the point about the evolution of a flexible, multi-purpose brain is precisely intended to unsettle any crude inference from human phenotype (as discovered, for instance, in the tendencies of some human population at some time) back to genetic determination, or from genetic model to actual behaviour. The sociobiologists or ultras may sometimes commit these fallacies (perhaps the second underlies falsity number five, which I have not attempted to defend). But we simply share it with them if we fail to distinguish their misinterpretations of Darwins legacy from the legacy itself. In his paper Stove chose not to attack the perversions of Darwinian theory, but the theory itself. I believe philosophers need to understand that his weapons were hopelessly ill-adapted to doing this.[12] University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill References 1 D. C. Stove, 'So You Think You are a Darwinian? Philosophy 69, 1994, 267277. This is the not the first of Stoves appearances in this journal on the subject: see also A New Religion Philosophy 67, 1992, 233-240. 2 Cricket versus Republicanism (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1995). 3 Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury Books, 1996). 4 W. D. Hamilton, 'The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour, The Journal of Theoretical Biology VII ,1964, 1-52. 5 R. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford University Press 1982), ch 3.

6 R. Dawkins The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976). The quotations are from pp. 200-201 of the 1989 edition. See also p. 332. That Dawkins is in a muddle is evident from the assertion that we, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them: a remarkable feat, one would have thought. We dont rebel against our brains by using them. Of course we can think up a sense in which it might be true: we 'rebel against our genetically coded height, for example, every time we climb a ladder. But in this sense it is not true that we alone on earth rebel against our genes. A bear sheltering in a cave is rebelling against its genetically coded tendency to freeze in bad weather, in just the same sense. Like many others, Dawkins was trying, but failing, to derive some sweeping human or philosophical interest from the biology and of course it was the belief that he had done that which gave the book, interesting as it is in its literal science, its wider reputation. This is also why there is something a little disingenuous in simply sheltering behind the claim that words like 'selfish or advantage, or purpose or 'manipulate are being used in a technical sense. If I write and profit from a book on popular biology which I call, say, The Nazi Within, it is a little cheeky of me to say that I was simply using the term Nazi in a technical sense in which it means bit of chemical that replicates itself over time. This is, I think, the real point buried in Midgleys paper (p. 448) that Dawkins failed to answer. 7 R. Dawkins In Defence of Selfish Genes, Philosophy 56, 1981, 556-573; M. Midgley, Gene Juggling, Philosophy 54, 1979, 439-458. The second and third of Stoves list of Darwinian falsehoods depend upon misreading technical uses of terms 'advantage and 'manipulation as they are used in Dawkinss writings. But see also the previous note. 8 R. L. Trivers, The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35-37. 9 R. L. Trivers, Social Evolution (California: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985) , 198-200. 10 The superficiality of the genetic story is scathingly criticized in Not in Our Genes, Steven Rose, Leon Kamin, and R. Lewontin, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 260-261. 11 H. Kettlewell, The Evolution of Melanism (Oxford University Press, 1973) is one of the most revered. One wonders what Stoves explanation of the relative frequency of black and speckled moths in town and country would be. 12 I would like to thank James Maclaurin and David Braddon-Mitchell for helpful conversation and biological information.

Stove's Anti-Darwinism
By James Franklin

Stove's article, 'So you think you are a Darwinian?'[1] was essentially an advertisement for his book, Darwinian Fairytales.[2] The central argument of the book is that Darwin's theory, in both Darwin's and recent sociobiological versions, asserts many things about the human and other species that are known to be false, but protects itself from refutation by its logical complexity. A great number of ad hoc devices, he claims, are used to protect the theory. If co-operation is observed where the theory predicts competition, then competition is referred to the time of the cavemen, or is reinterpreted as competition between some hidden entities like genes or abstract entities like populations. In a characteristic sally, Stove writes of the sociobiologists' oscillation on the meaning of kin altruism: Any discussion of altruism with an inclusive fitness theorist is, in fact, exactly like dealing with a pair of balloons connected by a tube, one balloon being the belief that kin altruism is an illusion, the other being the belief that kin altruism is caused by shared genes. If a critic puts pressure on the illusion balloon - perhaps by ridiculing the selfish theory of human nature - air is forced into the causal balloon. There is then an increased production of earnest causal explanations of why we love our children, why hymenopteran workers look after their sisters, etc., etc. Then, if the critic puts pressure on the causal balloon perhaps about the weakness of sibling altruism compared with parental, or the absence of sibling altruism in bacteria - then the illusion balloon is forced to expand. There will now be an increased production of cynical scurrilities about parents manipulating their babies for their own advantage, and vice versa, and in general, about the Hobbesian bad times that are had by all. In this way critical pressure, applied to the theory of inclusive fitness at one point, can always be easily absorbed at another point, and the theory as a whole is never endangered.[3] Now, it is uncontroversial to assert that Darwinism is a logically complex theory, and that its relation to empirical evidence is distant and multi-faceted. One does not directly observe chance genetic variations leading to the development of new species, or even continuous variations in the fossil record, but must rely on subtle arguments to the best explanation, scaling up from varieties to species, and so on. The strength or otherwise of these arguments, individually and collectively, is a purely logical question. It is therefore no answer to Stove's attack on Darwinism to sermonise, as Blackburn does,[4] about how disgraceful it is for philosophers to delve in matters that do not concern them. Marxists, or Freudians, or astrologers, or phrenologists are not allowed to 'answer' philosophers' doubts about the relation of their theories to the evidence by saying, 'Trust me, I'm a doctor'. Evolutionists have no such rights either.

Stove's article listed ten propositions that were, he claimed, asserted by Darwinians, and indeed were characteristic of Darwinian theory, but were obviously false. The statements are all universal generalizations - 'every organism has as many descendants as it can'; 'all communication is manipulation of signal-receiver by signal-sender'; 'in every species child-mortality is extremely high', and the like. To answer Stove, it would be initially natural to claim that the 'all' in these statements was not seriously meant. But, obviously, that would be to fall into Stove's trap, since his claim is precisely that Darwinians save their theory by weakening contentful assertions they appear to have made. If they don't mean 'all', why do they say it, if not to dress up a logically flabby theory as much more falsifiable than it is? Yet this is exactly the strategy Blackburn uses in attempting to refute Stove. The problem is most evident in his answer at the point where he thinks Stove has most grossly misrepresented the Darwinians. Stove listed as one of the 'Darwinian falsities': no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but ... everyone will sacrifice it (for) more than two brothers, or four half-brothers, or eight first-cousins.[5] Blackburn points out that the original quote began, 'To express the matter more vividly, in the world of our model organisms, whose behaviour is determined strictly by genotype, we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person, but that everyone ...' He is then much scandalized at Stove's omission of the phrase 'in the world of our model organisms', and treats this correction as a full answer to Stove. But this does not help the Darwinian evade Stove's attack. What is the point of 'model organisms' unless they model organisms? As Blackburn himself says, 'Hamilton went on to apply (my italics) the model to solve a famous problem for Darwinian theory: how it can be that in species of hymenoptera, sterile workers exist?' If Hamilton is speaking about a purely mathematical world of model organisms, then he has said nothing about biological evolution, while if real organisms satisfy the assumptions of the model, then there can be no objection to taking the predictions of the model as literally asserted of the organisms. It was a point not lost on Stove, who wrote: It is true I have omitted a qualification which Hamilton prefixed to the words just quoted: namely, '... in the world of our model organisms, whose behaviour is determined strictly by genotype .'. But Professor Hamilton could hardly object to this omission. For his disciples such as Dawkins constantly do the same thing: that is, read off the results of Hamilton's 'model', as being true descriptions of biological reality. No doubt the reason is, that they believe that the proviso - behaviour being determined strictly by genotype - is satisfied everywhere in fact.[6] If Stove is to be criticized for omitting the words of others, it is fair to ask that others criticize him only after having all his own words on the subject to hand. Of course, it is perfectly true that models do not fit real cases perfectly, and a degree of looseness of fit has to be allowed to any theory. But there is little comfort for Darwinians in this line of thought. To the extent that organisms do satisfy the model, to that extent failure of the predictions tells against the theory; and to the extent that organisms do not satisfy the model, to that extent Darwinians are asserting something apparently contentful, then withdrawing it under pressure. And this particular model would be ill-advised to compare itself with respectable mathematical models. In a case like Newton's theory of

gravity, there is a clear sense of numerical approximation, and the predictions of the theory can be measured to be true to within so many percent. Nothing could be further from the situation that obtains with Hamilton's 'prediction'. It is not as if the model predicts that animals will sacrifice themselves for 8 first cousins, whereas observation shows the true figure is 8.3. The truth is more, as Stove says, that a robin red breast cannot tell the difference between his first cousin and a bit of red wool on a wire.[7] In the rest of his paper, Blackburn strives to assure us that Darwinian theory deals only in possible explanations, and that 'nothing in Darwinian theory allows you to say that because some pattern of behaviour would increase the amount of genetic material in future generations, therefore it will exist'. Dawkins does not really mean what his extreme rhetoric seems to mean, while Trivers' explanation of lesbianism in gulls is merely 'speculative', and it is quite easy for Darwinism to explain why some species have low birthrates, even though they are trying to maximize their descendants. All of which is true, and confirms Stove's central thesis that Darwinism can 'explain' anything. It is sad that he is no longer around to enjoy such 'refutation'.

University of New South Wales

1. D.C. Stove, 'So you think you are a Darwinian?', Philosophy 69, 1994, 267-277. 2. Darwinian Fairytales (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996). 3. 167. 4. S. Blackburn, 'I rather think I am a Darwinian', Philosophy 71, 1994, 605-616. 5. 'W. D. Hamilton, 'The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour', The Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1, 1964, 1-52, at p.16. 6. Darwinian Fairytales, 156. 7. 152