Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Welcome to Andrew Brown, author of The Darwin Wars, and guest interviewer
Susan McCarthy.
  

    
Andrew Brown's book *The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish
Gods* has just been published in the UK by Simon & Schuster.  It's got
all kinds of vicious quotes on the back from evolutionary theorists
attacking one another, closing with philosopher Daniel Dennett calling
Andrew's work "a sleazy bit of trash journalism."

How'd you get that great blurb, Andrew?  And why do people feel so
strongly about evolutionary theory -- why do we have Darwin Wars?
  

    <scribbled by satyr Wed 12 May 99 17:44>
  

    
[typo]

Whoa, talk about blind-siding!  (Interesting topic, but not exactly what
had been on the surface of my mind lately, what with Kosovo and kids
shooting kids.)

Andrew, can you classify the areas of disagreement amoung evolutionary
theorists in comprehensible terms for us mere mortals?  (Having taken
genetics once upon a time, I have some small hope of being able to follow
it, if you make it simple enough... ;-)
  

    
Context is all, satyr. Andrew's next up as an Inkwell guest. Any
disjunction with personal preoccupations or world events... well, please
adjust your set.
  

    
btw, Andrew is in the UK, so factor that in to the rhythm of this
conversation. In the meantime, you might want to check out his extremely
wonderful site at <http://www.darwinwars.com>
  

    
To answer the first of Sumac's questions:a couple of years ago I did a
piece for the Guardian about the rivalry between SJ Gould and Richard
Dawkins. It seemed a really interesting subject that no one had written
up.

A friend of mine, who was working as a teaching assistant for Gould,
or had done so, and was also engaged with Dennett on a mailing list
about evolution in the historical sciences, sent him a copy of my piece
and got that quote back.

I went round whimpering for a couple of days. after all, it was a
perfectly decent piece of journalism on an interesting and important
subject. Then I decided there was a book in it; when, in the course of
events, I found myself flagging, I would be spurred to greater efforts 
by the memory of Dennett's remark. When the book was finished, they
wanted blurb quotes to show examples of all these people slagging each
other off, and I couldn't resist.

Dennett wrote an extremely pompous letter to my publishers complaining
 about it. 
  

    
Actually, I believe the dispute is more about the qualities of
imagination in the two sides than anything else -- if you're looking
for non-gossipy explanations. there are of course long and tangled
explanations involveing personal enmities and friendships. And there
are some small areas of scientific difference of emphasis. But after
brooding on it for years, I have come to the conclusion that it is at
bottom about whether you like your history messy or improving. And this
is a matter of temperament and style, and so very hard to eradicate.

I may post a little from the book to illustrate this point.
  

    
Please do.
  

    
I will, honest. but am worked off my feet this weeken, at least till
saturday., what with all the MI6 nonsense. so may be late
.
  

    
> whether you like your history messy or improving

Hmmm, "punctuated equilibrium" popped up on my memory channel...
  

    
Here's an agreed fact: the stoy the book starts with
========


George Price killed himself in a squat near Euston station in the
winter of 1974.: William Hamilton, who identified Price's body, has
described the scene: 
"A mattress on the floor, one chair, a table, and several ammunition
boxes made the only furniture. Of all the books and furnishings that I
remembered from our first meeting in his fairly luxurious flat near
Oxford Circus there remained some cheap clothes, a two-volume copy of
Proust, and his typewriter. A cheap suitcase, and some cardboard boxes
contained most of his papers, others were scattered about on ammunition
chests."
The deathbed of an altruist can be a terrible place. Both Price and
Hamilton were theoretical biologists, a discipline about as
mathematical and abstruse as may be imagined; yet it was Price's
discoveries in the field which had led to his despair and death. He had
reformulated a set of mathematical equation that shows how altruism
can prosper in a world where it seems that only selfishness is
rewarded. The equations had been discovered ten years before by
Hamilton, but Price's reworking was general and more elegant. He had
provided a general way in which to measure the direction and speed of
any selection process; this makes possible, in principle, .a Darwinian
analysis of almost anything.
When Price had first found them he was so shocked that  he set himself
to do the work again, sure that there must be a flaw. He ended up
reformulating them more generally and more powerfully; when this work
was completed, he went mad. For though his equations show that truly
self-sacrificing behaviour can exist among animals, and even humans,
they also seem to show that there is nothing noble in it. Only
behaviour which helps to spread the genes that cause it can survive in
the very long term. Since man, too, is an animal, the human capacity
for altruism must be strictly limited; and our capacity for cruelty,
treachery and selfishness impossible to eradicate. Through algebra,
George Price had found proof of original sin. 
  

    
Another longish bit: here's punk eek:
============
The general charge against Gould is that he has overstated the
importance of his own theories. The philosopher and historian of
science David Hull points out that there are two ways in which a
scientist can try and spread a new idea: he can claim that it is an
uncontroversial and natural development what everyone already believes,
or he can market it as a revolution, whose strength is derived from
the fact that only a chosen vanguard understand it. Both strategies
have been adapted by both sides in these disputes, but Gould himself
has tended to claim that his novel ideas are revolutionary, whereas
Dawkins has preferred to argue that his are simply what everyone
believed all along without noticing. Hull concluded his discussion with
the delicate, dry observation that it was impossible to discern any
correlation between the originality claimed for an idea and that which
it might actually possess.
Other assessments of Gould's originality have been less polite.
According to some of his enemies, he is meant to have supplanted
orthodox Darwinism, as practised by working scientists, with an
entirely fictitious construct of his own . To some extent this is an
inevitable consequence of writing about people still alive. As a
journalist you can hope to make people laugh at your descriptions of
them, but you never hope that all your subjects will consider you just.
Historians have their problems, but at least they do not have to
consider the amour propre of their subjects. 
The theory that has most upset people was his earliest, produced in
conjunction with Niles Eldredge when both were palaeontologists working
in New York. in 1972. Punctuated Equilibrium claimed that there was in
fact a problem with the appearance of species in the fossil record:
and this is that they persist, recognisably, for millions of years
after their emergence in a largely stable form. What is odd about this
is that if the Darwinian process were one of continuous friction-free
adaptation, you would expect all species to be constantly evolving into
their successors. This does not seem to happen. Instead, the  fossil
record shows clear breaks between species, which seem to emerge
suddenly and from nowhere in geological terms. 
Of course, geological suddenness is perfectly compatible with gradual
change across generations. The one thing this theory is not and has
never been claimed to be, is an attack on natural selection. On the
contrary, one of the unstated premises of the theory is the efficiency
of Darwinian selection as an agent of change: it is precisely because
neoDarwinism has found a process to develop whales from amoebas that we
need an explanation for the persistence of amoebas, or of horseshoe
crabs, which seem to have maintained their present form for around 200m
years while almost every other species around at the time of their
arrival has gone extinct, along with most of the ones that flourished
in the mean time. But the theory is and was meant as a challenge to the
then reigning interpretation of Darwinism in which the persistence was
an uninteresting problem.. 
Various mechanisms have since been proposed to account for it. But the
fact that there is something that needs explaining is now generally
admitted. A measure of the theory's success is that its opponents now
accept it full and deny there was anything new or interesting about it.
The Dawkinsians are confident that the persistence of species can be
explained without in any way diminishing the primacy of gene-based
explanations.  
  

    
Wowee... The altruism passage is a grabber!  Can you explain why
> human capacity  for altruism must be strictly limited; and our capacity 
> for cruelty, treachery and selfishness impossible to eradicate.
>
?

Does altruism need cruelty, treachery and selfishness to help pass it
along to the next generation?
  

    
Exactly so. It's a kind of generalised Macchiavellianism. Macchiavelli,
who was, FWIW, given his only government job by the devoutly xian
Florentine government of Savonarola, himself finally burnt for an excess
of xian zeal, saw that the only way to make virtue possible among the
citizens was for the prince to be a treacherous bastard. 

So without treacherous bastards, there would be no trustworthy people.
they'd all have been killed and eaten. (actually, of course, by the time
you get to organisms as complex as people, this isn't true). But the kind
of theories that Price and the sociobiologists after him work on are meant
to bo so general that they apply to every living thing. Perhaps everything
of any sort that gets copied, including (spit!) memes. 

And on that kind of level, it's quite clear that altruistic behaviour will
only survive if an altruistic behaver survives, and the survival of the
behaver demands intermittent unpleasantness. 

As I say, humans are necessarily much more complex than this. We have
emotions, so that we feel very deeply the conflicts of game theory, just
as we hurt when the laws of physics and engineering combine to break our
legs. IN neither case does the mathemitcal explanation come naturally.
  

    
What was Price's background that he was so profoundly affected by the
implications of his own theoretical work.

Personally, while I'm sure I couldn't follow the mathematics, I find the
conclusion rather unsurprising.
  

    
he was a strange character. as a young man he was a chemist, andworked on
the manhattan project, where he got a doctorate. then he worked as a
scince journalists, then for IBM, in the late fifites and early sixties.
Finaly he came to London, and worked as a theoretical biologist at UCL.
.
  

    
Without enough altruism to make possible scientific enquiry, our species
would probably never have reached the point of comprehending such concepts.

But, apparently, without treachery enough to prevent us from making use of
this new knowledge to eradicate treachery, we also would not have done so.

It seems to be a conundrum.
  

    
Andrew, has having been a religion writer given you a different
perspective on the Darwin Wars?
  

    
It made me a lot more sensitive to the penumbra of pop philosophy
which surrounds all pop scientific theories. It gave me an interest in
the ways in which systems of ideas arise and defend themselves,
irrespective of content. It showed me very clearly that on some
subjects Richard Dawkins was talking nonsense.

On the other hand, I took up science writing becasue I wanted to do
stories which might occasionally be true, as a change from the
religious ones. But when I want to think religion repulsive or merely
false, I don't go to scientists. I study the devout.
  

    
Without going down enticing byways indicated in your book (such as the
differences between religious issues in the US and the UK), would you
talk about how it showed you where Dawkins was talking nonsense?
  

    
> the ways in which systems of ideas arise and defend themselves,
> irrespective of content

That would be an interesting read!  Perhaps as a counterpart to Kuhn's
essay on scientific revolutions.
  

    
#21
Well, I gave a lecture the other day on the theme "Could there be a
Darwinian fundamentalist" which was precisely on this kind of theme. I was
interested partly in the historical analogies between the early xian
intellectuals (the fathers of the church) and the modern Darwinians -- I
don't htink there are interesting analogies betweeen modern
fundamentalists and their scientific enemies. But when xianity was still a
vigorous young system of ideas, doing a kind of Cambrian explosion across
the intellectual biosphere, things were different. I can jsut see Dan
Dennett as a cranky old archimandrite working on these beautiful epistles
against the heretics. 

the other, much wilder, interest in theat lecture was whether there is a
personality type that is drawn tosystems of orthodoxy. Again, you can see
how such people would act almost as the immune system for an ideology and
perhaps it can't grow without them. But that sounds like another book,
preferably written by a central European academic with seven years of his
life to spare.
  

    
#20
Well, in his talk about how xianity spreads, and how (even what) xians
believe. Especially the belief that xcians are necessarily uncritical
thinkers. It strikes me that there is as great a range of curiousity among
xians as among the rest of us. 
  

    
You've already suggested that you dislike the term "meme", but it would seem
to apply directly -- the idea of units of meaning which take on a life of
their own in the nooshpere.  Is there another way of expressing that idea
that you prefer to "meme"?
  

    
What's wrong with "idea"
The thing I dislike about "memes" is that they give a false precision to
an analogy. Yes, of course, ideas are _like_ organisms. Culture is _like_
an ecology. (apologies for telnet typing).

But they are not very like each other. 

And a lot of the peripheral rhetoric of memes, all the stuff about viruses
infestingus and so forth, is just stupid. The interesting ideas are those
that we incoroporate into some kind of persistent self. 

In a way, I would like to believe in memes. I have tried. But sense keeps
breaking through.