“Richard Dawkins” – Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley (ed)

This is a hommage to Dawkins, split into 25 essays in 7 parts, most focussing on the impact The Selfish Gene has had on the authors and their respective fields. For someone like me, who shamefully still hasn’t read the Selfish Gene, it further persuades to finally get around to it.

Steven Pinker’s contribution, as expected, is clear and interesting and concerned with language, as he deals with some of the confusion Dawkins’ use of the word “selfish” has caused – if human brains, effectively lumps of neural tissue, have conscious experiences like wanting and feeling, “there is no principled reason to avoid attributing states of knowing and wanting to other hunks of matter“. Genes “know” things through the sequence of their DNA, “try” by creating extended phenotypes whose effect is a differential ability to survive and reproduce, leading to feedback loops into the next generation of the gene. Pinker argues that a major achievement of The Selfish Gene was to allow the application of mentalistic terms to biology, which in turn has exerted a positive influence on the study of consciousness, where concepts like wanting and thinking can be dealt with as manifestations of abstract phenomena.

Selfish, of course, does not need to imply ruthlessness or the lack of collaboration, as genes often achieve their imperative by building organisms programmed to commit selfless acts and get along with their relatives and neighbours. We must remember, as Pinker notes, that “the motives of the gene are entirely different from the motive of the person“.

As the last chapter of The Selfish Gene deals with memes, the phrase coined by Dawkins describing cultural replicators, so do some of the essays in this collection. Robert Aunger notes that no significant body of empirical research has developed out of the excitement sparked by the meme theory. The problem seems to be that memes can be used to explain everything, and therefore explain nothing.

One of my favourite essays was that by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, which discusses the effect of The Selfish Gene on the research of family relations. They identify in-laws as a “cross-culturally ubiquitous source of marital conflict”, discuss why full siblings may cooperate more than half siblings and why people more often comment on an infant’s resemblance to its father than its mother.

As this review presents only a small sample of a sample of fields influenced by Richard Dawkins’ writings, and as nearly every essay in this collection comments on his readability and style, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, should probably be required reading for anyone professing an interest in the biological sciences.

“The View from Mount Improbable”, Richard Dawkins

“The View from Mount Improbable” is perfect for swotting up on Dawkins when you don’t have much time. It is an extract from the 320-page “Climbing Mount Improbable” and is published as part of a Pocket Penguin series, which is well worth checking out.

Dawkins starts with a summary of his famous metaphor for the results of evolution as an incredible mountain peak with a seemingly unclimbable ragged front. But his metaphorical mountaineers are so “intent [...] on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look around the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands”.

This short book is then dedicated to the alleged bane of Darwin’s theory: the evolution of the eye. As it takes Dawkins only 56 tiny pages (including drawings) to dispel conclusively all qualms anyone might have with this eye issue, I will not attempt to summarise it further.

Read this book to brush up on arguments against creationists and their continuing reluctance to understand that evolution is, in fact, quite the opposite of chance resulting in perfectly adjusted organisms. Instead, it is a series of random mutations, selected for the small improvements they confer on an organism, over thousands of generations, to eventually give an organ, a mechanism or a species that appears to be made just so for its environment.

“The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life”, David P. Mindell

I wanted to read this book to gain some intellectual ammunition for arguments with people who disagree with studying evolution for the sake of it.

The first chapter is slightly off-topic as Mindell deals with three unpopular scientific discoveries and how they took their time with changing the accepted world view. Unexpectedly for me, this turned out to be the most interesting chapter of the book and might prompt me to read more books on medical history. It is nice to have a reminder of the un-importance of people’s previous beliefs – science has been true even when we didn’t know it or didn’t want to accept it, and evolution has always been going on, in the background, quietly but undeniably true.

After that, however, Mindell starts sounding overly defensive and hangs his arguments on the most tenuous links – “see, we’re right, evolution *is* important”. In his chapter on the evolutionary study of pathogens, I felt my PhD project nicely justified and, even though it read like a grant proposal, it was nice to hear “if we predict how and when a pathogen will respond we may avoid the worst effects”.

Many other chapters, like the one on domestication and the beginnings of agriculture, were all too familiar from college courses and other books .

I read “The Evolving World” partly at the same time as Dawkins’ “God Delusion” and it became painfully obvious how poorly Mindell compares with Dawkins as an engaging and passionate science writer. He falls into some of the annoying traps Dawkins mentions that scientists often find so hard to navigate, like defending the idea of non-overlapping magisteria for science and religion and treading very carefully not to offend anyone in a typical politically correct but boring style.

Finishing with the role of evolution in the courtroom brought a bit more life to the book in the end, but overall, Mindell’s words had a very unintended effect on me. Instead of wanting to convince people that evolution has many practical applications, I now just want to shrug my shoulders at people who demand immediate technological benefit and ask them what is wrong with devoting a career to studying evolutionary processes simply for the sake of knowledge.