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neilrcoulter 's review for:
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
What is the fundamental, basic unit of life in our world? Is it each individual in a species? the species as a whole? groups of species that share real estate together? an entire continent, or even the planet itself? In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins argues that the basic unit is the gene, and that natural selection has been ruled by the ways in which genes seek to perpetuate themselves, generation after generation (that’s the “selfish” aspect—not that there is a gene which causes selfishness in anyone; I would have preferred his other title option, The Immortal Gene). Dawkins applies logic to case study after case study from science, building his case that none of us is really an individual in any basic, meaningful sense; rather, each of us is a collection of genes that keep themselves (and in the process, us) going. We don’t need to be these individual collections of genes at all—it’s just the most efficient means natural selection arrived at for keeping the genes going. It sounds like an enormous topic, and it is. But watching Dawkins wrestle with question after question is very entertaining and illuminating.
What makes Dawkins so readable here is the combination of his distinctive writing voice and his infectious enthusiasm and delight for learning about the natural world. Books like The Selfish Gene and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell in the 1970s opened the way for so many other “science books for us non-scientists” that have come out since. They show that science is never merely a bunch of facts to memorize in class, but instead is always a story that’s unfolding day by day.
The story that Dawkins constructs is extremely compelling—regarding everything in the world but humans. When it comes to applying the same principles and equations to humanity, the story is more complicated and less convincing. Dawkins sometimes suggests that there is no real distinction between humanity and any other species, yet he struggles to use the logic of natural selection to explain humans in the same way that it explains everything else. This difficulty is partly because we’re so close to the subject matter, and so it’s harder to see objectively. But it’s also largely because of the nagging fact of consciousness. We think, we analyze, we seem to know ourselves and our environment in ways that no other species does. We can sense the frustration of trying to include humans in the selfish gene discussion when Dawkins writes,
Though it ultimately doesn’t harm the general flow of The Selfish Gene , this issue of human consciousness, and the question of where exactly we fit into all this, is occasionally troubling. The wonder of Dawkins’s argument, really, is that he can bring us around to his point of view that what “matters” in natural selection is not an individual in a species but the genes within that individual. Still, though: we don’t ourselves intuitively feel that we are fundamentally our genes rather than our whole-person consciousness, do we? Within Dawkins’s very neat, tidy explanation of life on our world, this is the one tension that doesn’t quite go away. We are different: how and why and when did that happen?
Whether or not humanity fits nicely into this explanation, most of The Selfish Gene is clearly more focused on other species. Dawkins clarifies this in what was originally the final chapter of the book, “Memes.” But until that clarification, the reader may be forgiven for making the easy leap from “other species” to “humanity,” and then from there to the possibility that Dawkins is approving of cold, horrifying eugenics. This passage, for example:
In fact, it’s when Dawkins shifts from the central focus of The Selfish Gene to talking about culture and religion that he is at his weakest. If I were reading this book and knew nothing else about him, I would wish that he would keep writing about science but leave off writing about religion. What has actually transpired in his writing career thus makes me sad, and I almost don’t even want to say anything about his views on religion, as expressed in this, his first book. As good as he is at telling the story of science, his opinions about religion (and the related public persona that he has willingly cultivated) seem to have made it nearly impossible for people to calmly discuss what he says. Honestly, I picked up this book because I was interested in reading Dawkins for his reputation as a clear, engaging science writer, and because I believed that this first book didn’t contain the level of animosity toward religion that has become almost his trademark in the years since. That’s all true—religion doesn’t come up very often in the book, and it doesn’t seem very significant to Dawkins for his discussion. However, it does come up, and it is something that I care about, so with all this preamble out of the way, here are a few of my thoughts about it.
Dawkins supposes that the only need for God is to help us out with things we don’t understand. In areas where we’re blind to the “real facts,” it’s (for some reason) natural for us to attribute it to God and assume that he knows what’s going on, which relaxes us and makes us more comfortable with the ambiguity and blindness. Thus, if we can figure out some of the ways the universe works, then it should be natural for us to say, “Oh well, now that we can explain it ourselves, what’s the need for God?” It’s an argument that’s a little circular, first assuming that if there’s a God, that God would be thus-and-such kind of a God—in this case, that a God who created the world in a certain way (using evolution, as Dawkins and I would agree) wouldn’t also intend that we gradually figure out that creation process and come to delight in the way the natural world works, also coming to know God better and better, not in spite of but because of the beauty of how the world works and what we learn about it.
The fact that God created a world in which we have the creative and intellectual freedom to tell that world’s story in all kinds of ways doesn’t diminish my view of God at all. Dawkins tells a story of the world without God, but that doesn’t prove that there’s no God; it just proves that there are many ways to tell the story of the world. There are some such stories that are definitely wrong (that the world is flat, for example, or that the universe revolves around the earth), and others that seem to us definitely correct. But the existence of God is beyond the scope of the storytelling that Dawkins favors here. That logical approach doesn’t rule out God, but neither can it definitively prove God. There is mystery. It’s a different question, and just as fascinating. It may be possible for people to be “educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought” (372; quoting P. B. Medawar); it may also be possible for people to be educated far beyond their capacity to undertake spiritual thought.
In considering people’s reliance on God, Dawkins says that “The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary” (250). But if something is effective, why assume that it’s imaginary? Dawkins’s assumption is that only “small minded” people (129) follow religious rules, and then only blindly, even when they know better. And combining this with an idea of the Bible (and scriptures of other faith traditions) as merely a book of rules to be followed blindly, Dawkins easily dismisses religions as unnecessary nonsense. His misreading of the story of “Doubting Thomas,” from John 20, is a truly puzzling way of making the Bible fit his idea of it:
Faith is not, as Dawkins says, “a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence” (432). Yes, faith may make intangible connections (the proverbial “leap of faith”), but the faithful person also relies on some evidence that is deemed compelling and supportive. I’m not arguing that nothing bad has ever been done in the name of a religion. But let’s be more nuanced than Dawkins, particularly when “blind faith” is so often the motivator for people demonstrating the “going against the genes” altruism that he hopes humanity will choose. Dawkins writes, “As for me, I am skeptical of all myths. If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look” (301). I agree, and I sense that he is holding himself back from really seeking the truth in this particular case.
You see how hard it is not to talk about religion when discussing Dawkins? Anyway, as I said earlier, religion is not as significant a part of this book as my review comments might indicate. Near the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes, “Let me end with a brief manifesto, a summary of the entire selfish gene/extended phenotype view of life” (342), and nowhere in this summary does the topic of God or religion come up. As a follower of Jesus, I can read this book and thoroughly enjoy what’s to be enjoyed, while considering the author’s opinions on religion and then moving on. I wish more people could take Dawkins in this way, and that Dawkins could have held himself to this genre of writing, where has so much to offer everyone.
More than forty years after its initial publication, The Selfish Gene is fascinating and enlightening. For anyone who wants to read it, I highly recommend the fortieth anniversary edition, which includes two additional chapters, a new epilogue, and many pages of notes in which present-Dawkins interacts with his younger self, candidly and graciously pointing out areas where he has been proven wrong (and yes, patting himself on the back for all the areas where he’s been proven right), and pointing toward related research that’s taken place over those forty years. Do not skip these endnotes! They are an amazing conversation, and integral to the book.
What makes Dawkins so readable here is the combination of his distinctive writing voice and his infectious enthusiasm and delight for learning about the natural world. Books like The Selfish Gene and Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell in the 1970s opened the way for so many other “science books for us non-scientists” that have come out since. They show that science is never merely a bunch of facts to memorize in class, but instead is always a story that’s unfolding day by day.
The story that Dawkins constructs is extremely compelling—regarding everything in the world but humans. When it comes to applying the same principles and equations to humanity, the story is more complicated and less convincing. Dawkins sometimes suggests that there is no real distinction between humanity and any other species, yet he struggles to use the logic of natural selection to explain humans in the same way that it explains everything else. This difficulty is partly because we’re so close to the subject matter, and so it’s harder to see objectively. But it’s also largely because of the nagging fact of consciousness. We think, we analyze, we seem to know ourselves and our environment in ways that no other species does. We can sense the frustration of trying to include humans in the selfish gene discussion when Dawkins writes,
Each one of us knows, from the evidence of our own introspection, that, at least in one modern survival machine [humans], this purposiveness has evolved the property we call “consciousness.” I am not philosopher enough to discuss what this means, but fortunately it does not matter for our present purposes because it is easy to talk about machines that behave as if motivated by a purpose, and to leave open the question whether they actually are conscious. (64)But then later: “Are there any good reasons for supposing our own species to be unique? I believe the answer is yes” (245).
Though it ultimately doesn’t harm the general flow of The Selfish Gene , this issue of human consciousness, and the question of where exactly we fit into all this, is occasionally troubling. The wonder of Dawkins’s argument, really, is that he can bring us around to his point of view that what “matters” in natural selection is not an individual in a species but the genes within that individual. Still, though: we don’t ourselves intuitively feel that we are fundamentally our genes rather than our whole-person consciousness, do we? Within Dawkins’s very neat, tidy explanation of life on our world, this is the one tension that doesn’t quite go away. We are different: how and why and when did that happen?
Whether or not humanity fits nicely into this explanation, most of The Selfish Gene is clearly more focused on other species. Dawkins clarifies this in what was originally the final chapter of the book, “Memes.” But until that clarification, the reader may be forgiven for making the easy leap from “other species” to “humanity,” and then from there to the possibility that Dawkins is approving of cold, horrifying eugenics. This passage, for example:
As soon as a runt becomes so small and weak that his expectation of life is reduced to the point where benefit to him due to parental investment is less than half the benefit that the same investment could potentially confer on the other babies, the runt should die gracefully and willingly. He can benefit his genes most by doing so. . . . There should be a point of no return in the career of a runt. Before he reaches this point he should go on struggling. As soon as he reaches it he should give up and preferably let himself be eaten by his litter-mates or his parents. (168–9)Or again: “If a population arrives at an [evolutionarily stable strategy] that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad” (242). The middle chapters of the book are full of this kind of logical precision applied to “choices” genes make in the course of their quest for survival: “game theory” kinds of rules about how genetically closely related someone has to be for it to be worth your while to go out of your way to help them, and so forth (and woe to you if you zone out for a page or two in the midst of these chapters, because you will quickly lose track of what’s being argued and why; it’s not a hard book for the general reader, but Dawkins doesn’t let you sit in the back row and sleep through class). Being too ready to apply everything to humans is not going to meet with success, and it’s not what Dawkins intends. As he admits, “man’s way of life is largely determined by culture rather than by genes” (214). There is a lot to unpack in that simple statement, and this is not the book that will even begin to unpack it.
In fact, it’s when Dawkins shifts from the central focus of The Selfish Gene to talking about culture and religion that he is at his weakest. If I were reading this book and knew nothing else about him, I would wish that he would keep writing about science but leave off writing about religion. What has actually transpired in his writing career thus makes me sad, and I almost don’t even want to say anything about his views on religion, as expressed in this, his first book. As good as he is at telling the story of science, his opinions about religion (and the related public persona that he has willingly cultivated) seem to have made it nearly impossible for people to calmly discuss what he says. Honestly, I picked up this book because I was interested in reading Dawkins for his reputation as a clear, engaging science writer, and because I believed that this first book didn’t contain the level of animosity toward religion that has become almost his trademark in the years since. That’s all true—religion doesn’t come up very often in the book, and it doesn’t seem very significant to Dawkins for his discussion. However, it does come up, and it is something that I care about, so with all this preamble out of the way, here are a few of my thoughts about it.
Dawkins supposes that the only need for God is to help us out with things we don’t understand. In areas where we’re blind to the “real facts,” it’s (for some reason) natural for us to attribute it to God and assume that he knows what’s going on, which relaxes us and makes us more comfortable with the ambiguity and blindness. Thus, if we can figure out some of the ways the universe works, then it should be natural for us to say, “Oh well, now that we can explain it ourselves, what’s the need for God?” It’s an argument that’s a little circular, first assuming that if there’s a God, that God would be thus-and-such kind of a God—in this case, that a God who created the world in a certain way (using evolution, as Dawkins and I would agree) wouldn’t also intend that we gradually figure out that creation process and come to delight in the way the natural world works, also coming to know God better and better, not in spite of but because of the beauty of how the world works and what we learn about it.
The fact that God created a world in which we have the creative and intellectual freedom to tell that world’s story in all kinds of ways doesn’t diminish my view of God at all. Dawkins tells a story of the world without God, but that doesn’t prove that there’s no God; it just proves that there are many ways to tell the story of the world. There are some such stories that are definitely wrong (that the world is flat, for example, or that the universe revolves around the earth), and others that seem to us definitely correct. But the existence of God is beyond the scope of the storytelling that Dawkins favors here. That logical approach doesn’t rule out God, but neither can it definitively prove God. There is mystery. It’s a different question, and just as fascinating. It may be possible for people to be “educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought” (372; quoting P. B. Medawar); it may also be possible for people to be educated far beyond their capacity to undertake spiritual thought.
In considering people’s reliance on God, Dawkins says that “The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary” (250). But if something is effective, why assume that it’s imaginary? Dawkins’s assumption is that only “small minded” people (129) follow religious rules, and then only blindly, even when they know better. And combining this with an idea of the Bible (and scriptures of other faith traditions) as merely a book of rules to be followed blindly, Dawkins easily dismisses religions as unnecessary nonsense. His misreading of the story of “Doubting Thomas,” from John 20, is a truly puzzling way of making the Bible fit his idea of it:
Another member of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. (257)Dawkins has missed the important point that in that story: Thomas demands evidence because he’s the only one in the room who hasn’t already seen the evidence. Everyone else had already had their chance to examine the evidence and reach the conclusion they did (v. 24). Jesus’s line, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” is not about anyone in that room, all of whom were, of course, seeing right at that moment. It means the people who will come generations after the people in that room and will not see Jesus in the same way, so they will be believing based on the evidence that these people have seen and testified as correct. Scientists needn’t repeat every experiment that’s been done, just to verify that it’s still accurate. Rather, they trust that previous scientists were rigorous in their examination of the evidence, and so long as nothing has fundamentally changed to call the results into question, those results remain acceptable and evidence-based beyond the lives of the scientists who first carried it out.
Faith is not, as Dawkins says, “a state of mind that leads people to believe something—it doesn’t matter what—in the total absence of supporting evidence” (432). Yes, faith may make intangible connections (the proverbial “leap of faith”), but the faithful person also relies on some evidence that is deemed compelling and supportive. I’m not arguing that nothing bad has ever been done in the name of a religion. But let’s be more nuanced than Dawkins, particularly when “blind faith” is so often the motivator for people demonstrating the “going against the genes” altruism that he hopes humanity will choose. Dawkins writes, “As for me, I am skeptical of all myths. If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look” (301). I agree, and I sense that he is holding himself back from really seeking the truth in this particular case.
You see how hard it is not to talk about religion when discussing Dawkins? Anyway, as I said earlier, religion is not as significant a part of this book as my review comments might indicate. Near the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes, “Let me end with a brief manifesto, a summary of the entire selfish gene/extended phenotype view of life” (342), and nowhere in this summary does the topic of God or religion come up. As a follower of Jesus, I can read this book and thoroughly enjoy what’s to be enjoyed, while considering the author’s opinions on religion and then moving on. I wish more people could take Dawkins in this way, and that Dawkins could have held himself to this genre of writing, where has so much to offer everyone.
More than forty years after its initial publication, The Selfish Gene is fascinating and enlightening. For anyone who wants to read it, I highly recommend the fortieth anniversary edition, which includes two additional chapters, a new epilogue, and many pages of notes in which present-Dawkins interacts with his younger self, candidly and graciously pointing out areas where he has been proven wrong (and yes, patting himself on the back for all the areas where he’s been proven right), and pointing toward related research that’s taken place over those forty years. Do not skip these endnotes! They are an amazing conversation, and integral to the book.