The Solitary Self

Darwin and the Selfish Gene

Mary Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the nature of our moral constitution to challenge the view that reduces human motivation to self-interest. Midgley argues cogently and convincingly that simple, one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the 'selfish gene' tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic. Such neatness, she shows, cannot be imposed on human psychology. She returns to Darwin's original writings to show how the reductive individualism which is now presented as Darwinism does not derive from Darwin but from a wider, Hobbesian tradition in Enlightenment thinking. She reveals the selfish gene hypothesis as a cultural accretion that is just not seen in nature. Heroic independence is not a realistic aim for Homo sapiens. We are, as Darwin saw, earthly organisms, framed to interact constantly with one another and with the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part. For us, bonds are not just restraints but also lifelines.

1 Pseudo-Darwinism and social atomism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315710204-2

The mysterious roots of ethics

Amid all the celebrations in the year in which I write – the year of two great Darwinian anniversaries; the 150th of the publication of his great book, the 200th of his birth – it is rather striking that so little has been heard about Darwin’s idea of morality. Indeed, people reading modern neo-Darwinist writings might well suppose that he took little interest in the matter or was unwilling to discuss it. Far from this, it was central to his understanding of human life, as he made clear at the start of the third chapter of The Descent of Man. There, after analysing the intellectual capacities of humans, he turned to consider their active tendencies and found there something even more important. He wrote:

I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, “has a rightful supremacy overevery other principle of human action”; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought , so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment’s hesitation to risk his life for a fellow–creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause.

(Darwin 1981: 70, first emphasis added)¹

1. All further quotations from Darwin are from this book, The Descent of Man, unless another one is named.

He pointed out the difficulty that philosophers have always found in understanding the source and meaning of this compulsion. Properly hesitant about approaching so vast a question, he explained what would be his own, quite limited, angle on it:

This great question has been discussed by many writers of consummate ability; and my sole excuse for touching on it is the impossibility of here passing it over and because, as far as I know, no–one has approached it from the point of view of natural history.

(Ibid.: 71, emphasis added)

This, indeed, he does. And the remarkable thing is that he avoids the usual kinds of reduction in doing it. He does not explain morality away by pretending that it is really something else. Nor does he “explain” it by reciting scientific facts that are not relevant to it. What he does is to put it in context: to show it as an intelligible reaction for social creatures who live, as we do, on an earth that constantly confronts them with difficulties and who have developed there in the kind of way that we have.

Understanding that natural context does, however, deeply affect the meaning of morality itself. It throws a new light on the relation between reason and feeling, something that has always been a stumbling block to moral philosophers. Unlike most modern evolutionary psychologists, who assume that we fully understand the institutions we have now and merely speculate about their evolutionary causes, Darwin grapples with real contemporary issues about our moral constitution. This means that he can paint a picture of our social nature that is both shrewd and original, a picture that fits better both with evolutionary considerations and with actual human behaviour than those we are most familiar with today.

The invention of Darwinism

There are two reasons why this important discussion has been neglected. One is the very narrow, stereotypic idea of Darwin’s thought that has lately prevailed. During the last half-century, people have seen him primarily as the discoverer of natural selection: the engineer who managed to bolt that final piece of mechanism into the story of evolution, thus explaining, at last, how it can plausibly have taken place. Both supporters and opponents have concentrated on this, which is indeed central to his work. But he also took much more trouble than is usually noticed to work out the meaning of this change: to consider just how it should affect the rest of our thinking, especially the way we think about ourselves.

On this topic, very crude ideas were at once attributed to him in his own day by people, such as Herbert Spencer, who ought to have known better. Still more surprisingly, this process has continued busily in our own time, establishing the notion of a confused reductive ideology called Darwinism that is actually quite alien to his thought. Often this doctrine is simply taken to be a vindication of savage, unbridled competition. As Steven Rose says, “Darwinism was seen variously as justifying imperialism, racism, capitalism and patriarchy … Today, journalists refer to board-room struggles and takeover battles for companies as ‘Darwinian’” (1997: 175). And James Le Fanu, who blames not just evolutionary theory but Darwin personally for nearly all today’s distresses, writes:

The uncritical endorsement of misleading explanations can have grievous consequences. We have glimpsed in an earlier chapter some of these in the propagation of eugenic policies and the absurdities of socio-biology. But there is more, for, paradoxically, despite 150 years of remorseless scientific progress, we are left with a surprisingly pessimistic view of humanity as the perpetrators of the terrible destructive wars of the past century and the destroyers of the planet that sustains us.

(Le Fanu 2009: 250)

It is, of course, always tempting to look for a single cause for one’s troubles, but this seems to be going a bit far. In this book I want to show how misleading such talk is, not just in order to put the record straight but – more centrally – to bring the discussion of our nature back from wasteful fantasies to the central psychological topics that are of real concern to us, just as they were to Darwin. This shift is badly needed today because the travesty called Darwinism is now seriously influential. (About that, Le Fanu is right). The impression that we ought to accept crudely egoistic ideas – even if we don’t like them – because they have been proved to be scientific is now quite widespread.

Individualism and social atomism

Besides this twisted notion of Darwinism, another potent factor that has led to neglect of this topic is the general difficulty that an individualistic age has in understanding the function of morality at all. Today, people tend to see “explaining morality” chiefly as a matter of discovering how beings who are each totally isolated can ever be called on to consider one another, a task that naturally proves impossible. The doctrine behind this approach is a shadowy but powerful belief in individual solitude, which may be called “Social Atomism”. It is a combination of the deep individualism of our time – something that will occupy us throughout this book – and a prejudice about method: a general idea that it is always more scientific to consider separate components than the larger wholes to which they belong. Indeed, it is often believed that those larger wholes are actually less real. (“There is no such thing as society.”)

Put together, these ideas imply that the right way to understand life, including human life, is not to look for the dominant patterns in it but to break it up into units – ultimate constituents – and find laws governing their interactions. In principle, these constituent atoms would not need to be physical ones. In fact, in the past various efforts have been made to analyse consciousness into mental units. Thus Hume treated it as a series of separate impressions, and later Wilhelm Wundt, trying to analyse introspection, made a number of suggestions about possible ways of breaking it into atoms. But these enterprises proved decidedly hard, so it is no surprise that today the atomizing task is being handled in physical terms, which always suit it better.

Thus, in biology, it began to appear in the mid twentieth century that the entity truly in charge of life was the gene, which was somehow more real than the organism it belonged to. As Brian Goodwin remarked:

A striking paradox which has emerged from Darwin’s way of approaching biological questions is that organisms, which he took to be the prime examples of living nature, have faded away to the point where they no longer exist as fundamental and irreducible units of life ….

Modern biology has come to occupy an extreme position in the spectrum of the sciences, dominated by historical explanations in terms of the evolutionary adventures of genes. Physics, on the other hand, has developed explanations of different levels of reality, microcosmic and macrocosmic, in terms of theories appropriate to these levels …. It is the absence of any theory of organisms as distinctive entities in their own right, with a characteristic type of order and organization, that has resulted in their disappearance from the basic conceptual structure of modern biology. They have succumbed to the onslaught of an overwhelming molecular reductionism.

(Goodwin 1994: 1–2)

The parallel with physics is indeed important, since physicists have already had to face this problem of combining explanations that work at different levels. When they lost the seventeenth-century belief in ultimate explanation by solid, separate, billiard-ball-like atoms they gradually saw how to use the surviving parts of Newtonian physics within a wider, more flexible range of different thought patterns, each of which is helpful for its own range of problems. Being no longer bound by the crude kind of materialism that saw the physical world as made of tangible objects such as stones, they could use a much more sensitive approach to topics such as energy and, indeed, consciousness. As many people have pointed out, this change in the notion of matter calls for some rethinking of the term materialism itself.

Biologists, however, have not interested themselves in these problems. Instead, as Goodwin says, they have continued to look for traditional “building blocks” – an unsuitable term that is still far too commonly used – in a way that leads them to use reductions of various kinds, extending explanatory schemes far beyond their natural scope. That range of atomistic reductions will concern us again and again in this discussion.

Reductive strategies

Reduction is always an attempt to simplify the conceptual scene. Often it springs from an impression that simplicity and clarity are always what is needed to make an explanation more scientific. But, where thought patterns have to fit a complex subject matter, this naturally does not work. The drawbacks of this slimming-down approach appear in some remarks of Lewis Wolpert’s about the status of social science. Wolpert writes:

There is a question whether the social sciences are really science … The peculiarity of the social sciences is the complexity of the subject-matter.

(Wolpert 1992: 124–5)

In a sense, all science aspires to be like physics and all physics aspires to be like mathematics. In spite of recent successes, biology has a long way to go when measured against physics or chemistry. Biologists can still be full of hope … but what hope is there for sociology acquiring a physics-like lustre?

(Ibid.: 121)

The sentence about “aspiring” comes from Schopenhauer’s remark that “all the arts aspire to the condition of music”. It exalts purity and abstraction. But, whatever may be said of music, this ambition clearly makes no sense for science. Physics is not trying to be like mathematics nor like anything else. It does its own work, which is looking for general truths about the actual material world. It does not operate – or want to operate – as mathematics does, only at the level of thought; it wants real physical facts. Similarly, the other sciences, and indeed the humanities, each do their own special job of investigating particular chosen aspects of the world, so they need to use different conceptual patterns that suit those aspects.

Biology, then, is not an amateur science, struggling in an endless effort to become physics. Like history or logic, it has its own special work, which is to investigate life. And life is a quite peculiar phenomenon about which physics has absolutely nothing to say. This is why, during the past century, biologists of a reductive turn of mind have tried to play down this embarrassing topic altogether. Not only do they avoid talking about the concept of life itself (the standard dictionary of biology has no entry under the heading “life”), but they also try their damnedest to reduce life’s distinctive patterns to ones found in things that are lifeless. In fact, they still seem haunted by the wish to ground their thought safely in Newtonian physics: to show that explanation always really terminates in inert, lifeless atoms that alone can be scientifically approved and in theories describing their connections. Thus, in The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins explains what is distinctive about life as follows:

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life”. It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology. … It is this that I was hinting at in the previous chapter, when I referred to the queen ant as the central data bank.

(1986: 112)

Similarly Atkins observes, “Inanimate things are innately simple. That is one more step along the path to the view that animate things, being innately inanimate, are innately simple too” (1987: 53). This style of talk is designed to conceal the spontaneous creativity that is actually central to the concept of life behind a screen of documentation, as if the calculations that describe it were the thing itself.

Of course, logical clarity of theory and the precision of mathematics are important here, as they are for every sort of enquiry. But science always oscillates between that clarity and another pole that is even more important – truth to the outside world. Anyone can become clearer by becoming more abstract, by ignoring certain ranges of facts. But when the whole world is there waiting to be understood it is oddly perverse to ignore facts just for the sake of looking pure and “acquiring a physics-like lustre”. And the notion of a “hard” science as being always a more abstract one is rather odd considering the ferociously hard work involved in working out conceptual schemes for understanding complex subject matters.

These confused aspirations are surely remnants of seventeenth-century dualism, thought-patterns that were specially devised to show matter and spirit as separate kinds of substance. The concept of life was always a serious embarrassment for that enterprise because it unmistakably brings the two things together. For that reason, people who think the glory of science depends on its sti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Pseudo-Darwinism and social atomism
• 2. The background: egoism from Hobbes to R. D. Laing
• 3. The natural springs of morality
• 4. Coming to terms with reason
• 5. Darwin’s new broom
• 6. The self’s strange adventures
• Conclusion: the wider perspective
• Bibliography
• Index