The Selfish Gene Delusion

Nicholas Beale

Science and Religion in a Post-Dawkins Phase

Richard Dawkins has a tremendous gift for finding a catchy metaphor. He is associated above all with two titles: The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006). In the former he characterises humans as “lumbering robots” controlled by our genes: “they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.” This cluster of ideas, and his eloquent expression of them, attracted many rich admirers: one became CEO of Enron and another paid Oxford to make Dawkins a Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. In this post, Dawkins was freed to communicate without the need for research or peer review. In 2006 he launched his broadside against religion and became the UK’s most famous living scientist. Whatever the success of the specific arguments he attempted, the smoke and noise increased the public perception of a serious conflict between “science” and “religion.”

But now that the smoke of his guns is clearing and HMS Dawkins has retired from his professorship, it is also becoming clear that we are moving into a post-Dawkins phase in terms of the public discussion of science and religion. The reasons for this are partly religious and philosophical, partly purely scientific. Here are three:

1. The claim that religious belief is harmful from an evolutionary point of view is simply false. Whether or not the tenets of (say) Christianity are true, there is overwhelming evidence that Christians have, on average, more children than atheists (surviving fertile grandchildren is really the acid test, but I don’t know of any data on this). They also live longer, are healthier, and so on. The fact that there are individual counter-examples to this is beside the point: evolution works on populations and not on individuals. Such practical effects of practicing the Christian faith are at best only weak evidence for the truth of Christianity. But it is dishonest for evolutionary biologists to say “Christian belief is harmful” unless they make it crystal clear that what they mean is: Christian belief is beneficial from an evolutionary point of view, but I consider it harmful for other reasons.

2. The idea that evolution acts exclusively at the level of the gene is also false. Not only is there increasing evidence for a vast array of biological inheritance that is not based on changes to the genome (so-called epigenetic inheritance), the idea that genes are the “programs” of life turns out to be fundamentally misleading. Biology operates at many levels: genes, cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems, to name just five. All these levels are interdependent and none of them functions at all on their own: cells require genes but genes require cells—and indeed ecosystems. Furthermore they interact in complex nondeterministic ways: at no stage can an outcome be predicted with certainty. The great systems biologist Denis Noble is wonderful on this, both in his masterly book The Music of Life and in subsequent writings; see also, for example, Evolution in Four Dimensions by Jalbonka and Lamb). In humans and other social animals the social group is clearly a fundamental unit of evolution, especially where most parents are members of the same social group, and from a biological point of view much of the function of religion is to regulate behavior within social groups. In a strange way, a denial of the fundamental biological importance of the social group lies at the heart of the fallacies of both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

3. In The God Delusion Dawkins went well outside his area of competence, wading with gusto into areas of philosophy, cosmology, and theology without taking expert advice. This, combined with its aggressive tone, caused all but the most partisan reviewers to find it a deeply disappointing book. Nature illustrated its review with a cartoon depicting Dawkins as a sandwich-board man. Some of the politer comments about his forays into philosophy suggested that they were “sophomoric.” The idea that the truth of all statements can be decided scientifically is also palpably absurd: not only is this idea self-refuting (for its truth clearly cannot be decided scientifically), Kurt Gödel proved that even mathematics cannot be shown to be complete and consistent.

It is a remarkable fact about the intellectual atmosphere at the time that someone could write a book that is largely about theology whilst professing total ignorance of the subject. After all, there was (almost certainly) no historical Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, but no-one would be taken seriously if they wrote a book about Hamlet without having read Shakespeare’s play and at least some of the key literature. String Theory is even more “obviously absurd” than the most abstruse Trinitarian theology, but no-one would take a book like Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong seriously if it were not written by a competent mathematical physicist who has studied the topic in depth.

I hope, and expect, that the Obama era, and the retirement of Dawkins, will mark a move to a more constructive phase of the dialogue between science and religion. Certainly the atmosphere amongst leading scientists on both sides of the Atlantic is much more favourable than the impression given by Dawkins and his followers. The leadership of the AAAS has been for a while in active dialogue with the leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals, greatly encouraged by E. O. Wilson, and I have heard AAAS President Jim McCarthy speak movingly of the value of this for both sides. John Polkinghorne and I hope that our little book Questions of Truth will help advance this dialogue as well, and it is interesting that we readily received permission to launch the book at this year’s AAAS Meeting in the U.S. and at the Royal Society in the UK.

Another case in point is a letter to the Daily Telegraph on 9 February 2009 signed by several scientists and Christian leaders (including Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Francis Collins and Nobel Laureate Sir Martin Evans) on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. “Evolution,” they write, “has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin had little interest. Despite his own loss of Christian faith, he wrote shortly before his death: ‘It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.’”

Religion is not the same as science, but nor is philosophy or, for that matter, art. Science principally involves complex interactions between theoretical ideas and objects which can be manipulated by experiment. Religion involves an equally complex but very different set of interactions between ideas and persons, and real personal relationships are inevitably faith-based. But both explore questions of truth, and religion—at least in Judeo-Christian forms, is also significantly based on evidentially motivated beliefs, carefully assessed.

However, knowledge without action is impotent. The world faces many serious problems and to achieve real progress in addressing them we need to engage both the deep values of large numbers of people and use suitably reliable “factual” information. This fundamentally requires engagement between the scientific and religious approaches to understanding of reality, and is perhaps one aspect of Einstein’s famous dictum that “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”  

Nicholas Beale is a strategic consultant and social philosopher. He is a long-time collaborator with scientist-priest John Polkinghorne on the web site Polkinghorne.net. The web site for their new book, Questions of Truth, is questionsoftruth.org.

A sample from the book, “Are Thoughts Material?” is also available on Provocations.

Features, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Science and Technology, Mon 23 Feb 2009