The presentation of apes to humans via skulls suggested that brain size was the deciding factor in our evolution. In fact we know that this is again a simplification, and not a good one. If Dawkin's had taken some time to look at Alfred Russell Wallace's work, rather than merely considering it the same as Darwin's, he would find this problem. Another biologist, Professor Ramachandran, states it succinctly:
The hominid brain reached almost its present size - and perhaps even its present intellectual capacity about 250,000 years ago . Yet many of the attributes we regard as uniquely human appeared only much later. Why? What was the brain doing during the long "incubation "period? Why did it have all this latent potential for tool use, fire, art music and perhaps even language- that blossomed only considerably later? How did these latent abilities emerge, given that natural selection can only select expressed abilities, not latent ones? I shall call this "Wallace's problem", after the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace who first proposed it.
To consider this problem when looking at human evolution would have been more interesting that suggesting that brain size alone was the contributory factor, which is what Dawkins tended to do with his presentation of skulls. Skulls are all very well, but they are rather unformative in showing what was going on within them. That is where the cutting edge of work on human evolution is becoming focused, and that was entirely missing from the programme.
There was the usual muddle about self-genes, which according to Dawkins may contribute to acts of altruism towards members of one's own family, but only do so with humans towards the wider world because they "misfire". When he says that genes strive to make more copies of themselves, he means: "selection has operated to favour genes that, by chance, varied in such a way that more copies survived in subsequent generations." But when he says we can overcome our selfish genes, and considers selfish behaviour to be the outcome of the selfish gene, he is perpetuating the same muddle over the use of the word "selfish" that an animal specialist accused him of earlier in the programme. He stated that most biologists now accepted his notion of the selfish gene, which from a brief survey of the academic literature, looks more like wishful thinking than anything else.
In fact, to promote his idea of the selfish gene is not to celebrate the genius of Charles Darwin, because for Darwin, natural selection had to act on individuals. The reason for this Stephen Jay Gould makes very apparent:
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. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favours some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold.
If, in favouring a stronger body, selection acted directly upon a gene for strength, then Dawkins might be vindicated. If bodies were unambiguous maps of their genes, then battling bits of DNA would display their colours externally and selection might act upon them directly. But bodies are no such thing. There is no gene "for" such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. Bodies cannot be atomized into parts, each constructed by an individual gene. Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channelled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts. It accepts or rejects entire organisms because suites of parts, interacting in complex ways, confer advantages. The image of individual genes, plotting the course of their own survival, bears little relationship to developmental genetics as we understand it.
The philosopher David Stove showed just how deficient the "selfish gene" argument actually is with his witty and erudite demotion job on the concept:
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.... 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.
Moreover, to suggest that genes alone are responsible for wider altruism is to completely ignore matters like "mirror neurons", which Armand Leroi, himself an evolutionary biologist, has explored, looking at the neurology of altruism, imitation and empathy.
Mirror neurons were so named because, by firing both when an animal acts and when it simply watches the same action, they were thought to "mirror" movement, as though the observer itself were acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. As Professor V.S. Ramachandran observes:
Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution
Dawkins cannot find a place easily for altruism alongside his selfish gene hypothesis, so he postulates that altruism is because of "misfiring selfish genes". Genes would have been capable of promoting kin selection, but on a global scale kin selection cannot differentiate between close kin and strangers, hence altruism, acts of generosity to complete strangers. Why this occurs in some case, such as the kindly Professor Dawkins, who is clearly a caring man, but does not occur in other people, such as Robert Mugabe, is not satisfactorily explained; instead it seems more like an "explaining away" difficulties with the theory, or what Karl Popper called "immunising the theory" against any possibly falsification.
But to return to the Bishop, who said "I am a human being" and asked why monkeys were still around if evolution was true, Dawkins then went on to explain that in evolutionary terms, we shared a common ancestor, and we both had evolved. He also went on to comment that with the number of shared genes, it might be possible for human and genetically close ape relative to breed. In fact, this has occurred, but not in Oxford, so that is why Dawkins probably did not know about it.
The Soviet Union, in its effort to stamp out religion, was determined to prove that men were descended from apes. In 1926, a Soviet scientist named Ilya Ivanov decided the most compelling way to do this would be to breed a "humanzee" - a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Ivanov set off for a French research station in West Africa. There he inseminated three female chimpanzees with human sperm. Not his own, for he shared the colonial-era belief that the local people were more closely related to apes than he was. He stayed long enough to learn that his experiment had failed.
With regard to "social Darwinism", in a fascinating section, Dawkins concentrated on "big men", the Rockefellers etc, as promoting "the business survival of the fittest", which led to cases like Enron where a blanket policy of firing employees who were not ruthless enough led to people with no business ethics at all running the company to financial disaster. But he overlooked in his interview with a businessman, the idea that companies diversify and then see where the consumer buys, and expand on that, and cut back on other areas of their business. This kind of "corporate Darwinism" fits an evolutionary paradigm rather well, but it was just ignored, and not explored at all with Dawkin's focus on the Herbert Spencer school of Social Darwinism.
Lastly, apart from the incessant tinkly music (from a glockenspiel?), what also seemed most odd was Dawkin's anthropomorphisms. Repeatedly, again and again, he thrust at the viewer - alongside footage of predators catching and eating prey - the idea that nature was "brutal" "savage" "cruel". Perhaps he should read some Mary Midgley - in "The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour". She notes:
We have thought of a wolf always as he appears to the shepherd at the moment of seizing a lamb from the fold. But this is like judging the shepherd by the impression he makes on the lamb, at the moment when he finally decides to turn it into mutton. Lately, ethologists have taken the trouble to watch wolves systematically, between meal-times, and have found them to be, by human standards, paragons of regularity and virtue. They pair for life, they are faithful and affectionate spouses and parents, they show great loyalty to their pack, great courage and persistence in the face of difficulties, they carefully respect each other's territories, keep their dens clean, and extremely seldom kill anything that they do not need for dinner. If they fight with another wolf, the fight ends with his submission; there is normally a complete inhibition on killing the suppliant and on attacking females and cubs. They have also, like all social animals, a fairly elaborate etiquette, including subtly varied ceremonies of greeting and reassurance, by which friendship is strengthened, co-operation achieved and the wheels of social life generally oiled. All this is not the romantic impressions of casual travellers; it rests on long and careful investigations by trained zoologists, backed up by miles of film, graphs, maps, population surveys, droppings analysis and all the rest of the contemporary toolbag.
She comments on the trap which Dawkins, alongside others, is falling into:
Actual wolves, then, are not much like the folk-figure of the wolf, and the same goes for apes and other creatures. But it is the folk-figure that has been popular with philosophers. They have usually taken over the popular notion of lawless cruelty which underlies such terms as "brutal," "bestial," "beastly," "animal desires," etc., and have used it, uncriticized, as a contrast to illuminate the nature of man. Man has been mapped by reference to a landmark which is largely mythical.
In the old days, Disney used to put on supporting items to the main feature, which were a kind of nature documentary which false attributed all kinds of human like motivation to animals. Although Dawkins is very selective in his examples of predators, it is not apparent whether he is not indulging in little more than a Film Noire version of Disney. He doesn't show how cruel and savage pandas are, or how brutal the average cow is, or indeed any one of a dozen herbivores who are present only as illustrations of carnivores at work.
If only in his contempt for theology, Dawkins had not been so dismissive of the notion of anthropomorphism when it has occurred - and been rejected - with respect to ideas of God, perhaps he would be more aware of it occurring in his own work.
And if I had to answer the question ""I am an ape. Are you an ape?" I would be inclined to say that I was a perpendicular hairless tree shrew. If you are defining lineage by past speciation, why stop - arbitrarily - with the ape? Why not go back to when we were common cousins with the vole?
Links:
The Genes That Make Us Human by Dr Armand Leroi
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/563/
The Nature of
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/leroi05/leroi05_index.html
The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour by Mary Midgley
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/midgley02.htm
Human Evolution: From Tree Shrew to Ape
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/anthro/bioanth/ch10/chap10.htm
Human Evolution
http://www.dorak.info/evolution/human.html
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