The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review

I watched Richard Dawkins' latest offering, "The Genius of Charles Darwin", which was a high speed whistle-stop tour of Darwinism - as understood by Richard Dawkins; at times, I did wonder if "The Genius of Richard Dawkins" might not be a better description. According to Dawkins, you would be forgiven for thinking that Darwin's theory of evolution explained all there is to know about how life came to be on earth. He neatly avoided Darwin's own significant omission - the beginning of life from inanimate matter. Darwin knew full well the limits of his theory, and avoided areas where there was insufficient evidence. Indeed, he wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely at the close of the Introduction-the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Dawkins, alas, was not so modest. Evolution, he proclaimed, was the greatest scientific idea of all time, as if one could somehow take scientific ideas and weigh them in some kind of balance for brilliance. Newton and Einstein were somehow sidelined, as well as the plethora of times we have "Days the universe changed" that James Burke is always so fond of reminding us. Inventions such a printing, which enabled ideas to spread, or advances in optics, which enabled Dawkins to see clearly were not important. It was that James Burke kind of connectivity that was somehow missing from his picture of Darwinism, that for instance ideas about evolution - in terms of change and progress - had become so part of the word itself, that Darwin deliberately chose to write Origin of Species without once using the term that has become synonymous with his ideas. Alfred Russell Wallace also had short shift, just as someone "who had similar ideas".

"Nature red in tooth and claw" quoted Dawkins from Tennyson's "In Memoriam", after which we were treated to night shots and sounds of hunts on the African plains, punctuated by a rather ghoulish green visage of Dawkins himself. In fact, Tennyson was drawing not upon Darwin, but upon Robert Chambers "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" (1844) which had quite different ideas about evolutionary mechanisms, although it did propose - before Darwin - the transmutation of species over time by what its author called evolution. But as I noted, ideas about "evolution" were everywhere at the time. Dawkins mentions Darwin's book selling out at once but in fact Vestiges outsold The Origin of Species up until the early 20th century.

This was one of the weaknesses of the presentation, explaining exactly what Darwin understood by "natural selection". An average viewer would assume it was a fight for survival against competition for limited food resources, and it is true that this element, drawing on the economic ideas of Malthus, plays a significant part, but it is not always such an individualistic struggle as Dawkins makes out. David Attenborough, in "The Living Planet", observes numbers of cases when groups of predators work together co-operatively to hunt their prey. Group selection was not mentioned, and most of the focus was on carnivores hunting ""The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation" - herbivores and plant life barely got a mention. Moreover, the random element, as with the Cambrian extinction, or the end of the dinosaurs, in which the changing environment plays a hugely significant part, barely got a mention. Symbiosis had not mention, and yet we (and all mammals) are colonized by multitudes of symbiotic bacteria

Along with the presentation of predation, was mention of "escalation", where predator and prey both evolve in an "arms race". This is a local predictability, and Stephen Jay Gould notes that this is "documented in increasing strength of both crab claws and shells of their gastropod prey through time). But laws of nature do not tell us why we have crabs and snails at all, why insects rule the multicellular world and why vertebrates rather than persistent algal mats exist as the most complex forms of life on the earth." The way in which historical accident plays a role was minimised, and instead evolution was presented as a universal explanation far beyond its capacity.

Dawkins, on the beach with schoolchildren mentioned invertebrates evolving from bacteria, fish evolving from lesser creatures, land animals evolving from them, and human beings evolving from them. This was the worst part of the presentation, giving the impression of a progressive sequence of change, and while Dawkins noted that mankind was like the last string on a piano, in terms of the age of the earth, he did little to alter this image.

Yet, as Gould points out, when this is presented in this way, as a series of pictures: "We never stop to recognize the almost absurd biases coded into this.. No scene ever shows another invertebrate after fishes evolved but invertebrates did not go away or stop evolving! After terrestrial reptiles emerge, no subsequent scene ever shows a fish (later oceanic tableaux depict only such returning reptiles as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs)". The differences are striking: Dawkins in this programme, presents life as a branching tree - Stephen Jay Gould, as a low bush, because as he notes: "The most salient feature of life has been the stability of its bacterial mode from the beginning of the fossil record until today and, with little doubt, into all future time so long as the earth endures. This is truly the "age of bacteria" - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be."

Dawkins's story on the survival of an HIV woman in Africa, and others like her, is an outcome of evolutionary forces. Her offspring carry the gene, and survive, so over time, those Africans who succumb to HIV will die out, and given long enough (around 1,000 years), mostly the genetic population with the survival gene will predominate. He compares this with survival genes for the Black Death. This was extremely weak - a kind of evolutionary fairy story, which does not take into account either the random factor or the time it takes to breed. For instance those who survived the Black Death may have had a gene which helped their survival, or equally, it could have been luck (a word he is not too keen on), because it had swept through Europe like a bush fire, and those behind the fire zone were simply too few in number and number of contacts for it to continue. What he does not consider is that the HIV population may happily breed before they die, or that the HIV virus may mutate. Historical contingency is not high on his agenda, and yet if he was looking for viral infections, he might note that the influenza outbreak of 1919 did not confer much immunity on those who survived. As Gould notes: "The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. The earth's creatures have evolved through a series of contingent and fortuitous events."

When Dawkins was talking to the school children - and where did he find such a devout lot, because there are
none like that at any schools my sons have attended in Jersey - he noted with amazement that four out of 10 Britons still believe, in some form or another, that God created the world. That (and where is that survey, I've not found it?) is the Dawkins method of "pulling a fast one", and by presenting first people who believe in a literal rendering of Genesis - which Augustine and Jerome did not, for example - he then presents this statistic as a way of saying that this is what the people surveyed thought, which may or may not be true.

As a way of looking at "God created the world", which does not involve any conflict with cosmology or evolution, consider this presentation by C.S. Lewis

"Looking for God -- or Heaven -- by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth, nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. If there were someone who thought plays exist on their own, without an author..., our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.....To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find him in space. (Hang it all, we're in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send up a saint in a spaceship and he'll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye."

How Dawkins fits committed evolutionists and theists like Kenneth Miller (author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution") who have fought against creationists and proponents of intelligent design in debates and in the law courts of America into his picture is unclear; I suspect he hopes they would go away because they don't fit his very literal ideas about what belief should be. But then Miller (like Lewis and Augustine) operates with a very different idea of "creation" than the literalists who are Dawkins' bête noire. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian" asked the philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse, and concluded that while some aspects of Christianity - looking at it in all its diversity - caused problems, these need not always be insuperable.

My main gripe is that Dawkins presents evolution as (a) all embracing, which Darwin said it was not (b) extremely simplistically, which may lead people to reject it because it is presented in a flawed manner.

In my opinion, Stephen Jay Gould have a much more nuanced presentation of evolution, and its limits, when he wrote these words:

Natural selection is an immensely powerful yet beautifully simple theory that has held up remarkably well, under intense and unrelenting scrutiny and testing, for 135 years. In essence, natural selection locates the mechanism of evolutionary change in a "struggle" among organisms for reproductive success, leading to improved fit of populations to changing environments. ( Struggle is often a metaphorical description and need not be viewed as overt combat, guns blazing. Tactics for reproductive success include a variety of non-martial activities such as earlier and more frequent mating or better cooperation with partners in raising offspring.) Natural selection is therefore a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress.

Yet powerful though the principle may be, natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change (and may, in many cases, be overshadowed by other forces). This point needs emphasis because the standard misapplication of evolutionary theory assumes that biological explanation may be equated with devising accounts, often speculative and conjectural in practice, about the adaptive value of any given feature in its original environment (human aggression as good for hunting, music and religion as good for tribal cohesion, for example). Darwin himself strongly emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: "I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification."


References:

"The Seeing Eye" , C.S. Lewis (1963)

Can a Darwinian be a Christian, Michael Ruse
http://www.amazon.com/Can-Darwinian-Christian-Relationship-Religion/dp/0521631440

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Kenneth Miller
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0060930497

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/3079/Default.aspx
A review of Finding Darwin's God by Michael Ruse

A gut issue: Bacterial symbiosis shapes a healthy immune response
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/edsumm/e080529-01.html


The Evolution of Life, Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/gould.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151