An Excerpt from “The Darwin Wars”

by Andrew Brown

The sudden, wrenching transition between genetic determinism for animals and memetic determinism for humans which is found in The Selfish Gene seems to stem, partly at least, from the need to avoid admitting that many of the things that humans believe (including religions and meme theory) can be preserved because they satisfy emotional and even practical needs. It corresponds to a sharp and surely unrealistic division between emotion and idea, or rationalism and superstition.

There is a division of view here, between E. O. Wilson, on the one hand, and Dawkins, Dennett and Humphrey on the other. Wilson underwent a classic evangelical conversion as an adolescent. He has since rejected it, and in the early Eighties, Ullica Segerstråle, a sociologist of science who studied Wilson’s feud with Lewontin, came to the conclusion that a large part of their differences stemmed from Wilson’s zeal to replace religion with science. But he does see religion as important and adaptive. Religious codes seem to him to contain vital cultural information, which must be good for genes. It’s not clear from his latest works whether he still believes that science can entirely replace religion, though he still writes as if this were the ultimate aim.

Dawkins and Humphrey, on the other hand, write as if science had already replaced religion: it’s just that we are too stupid to understand this. ‘Conversions from superstition to science have been and are everyday events. They have probably been part of our personal experience. Those who have been walking in darkness have seen a great light,’ said Humphrey in his Amnesty lecture. (Note, incidentally, the use of a religious metaphor to drive home an atheist point, a trope they find irresistable.) ‘By contrast conversions from science back to superstition are virtually unknown. It just does not happen that someone who has learnt and understood science and its methods and who is then offered a non-scientific alternative chooses to abandon science.’

But of course these conversions happen all the time. Every measure of popular belief over the last fifty years shows that unscience is growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. Astrology, ufology, and every imaginable form of New Age crap grows steadily more popular. So, too, does the number of organised Creationists in the US. The Internet, which is accessible only to people of a reasonable degree of education, pullulates with superstition. There is a strong and recognisable strain of scientifically educated fundamentalists in all religions. It looks as if a technical education predisposes people to take scriptures as literally as if they were instruction manuals. Scientifically educated fundamentalists may well suffer from intellectual dishonesty amounting to a sort of cognitive dissonance. But is their condition any worse than the one that Humphrey has talked himself into?

His problems cannot be attributed to stupidity. He is a very clever man. And yet a moment’s examination of the world shows that what he claims about the relative rationality of science and religion isn’t true and couldn’t be true: ‘Science doesn’t cajole; it doesn’t dictate; it lays out the factual and theoretical arguments as to why something is so—and invites us to assent to them, and to see it for ourselves. Hence, by the time someone has understood a scientific explanation they have in an important sense already chosen it as theirs. How different is the case of religious or superstitious explanation. Religion makes no pretence of engaging its devotees in any process of rational discovery or choice. If we dare ask why we should believe something the answer will be because it has been written in the Book, because this is our tradition, because it was good enough for Moses, because you’ll go to heaven that way. Or, as often as not, don’t ask.’

This is ludicrous. All religions pretend to rationality, and most of them attain it. They are constantly giving believers reasons to believe, and these reasons are constantly being rationally confirmed. What on earth does Humphrey suppose goes on in Catholic universities, Orthodox Jewish seminaries, or even in the Islamic academies at Q’om, if not rational argument? It may be based on premises he finds repugnant or false, but it is conducted with a high degree of sophistication and respect for the facts. It is precisely the long attempt to construct rationally defensible, coherent, and yet still flexible systems of thought which makes these religions so hard to change. The intellectual system of any given religion turns as slowly as a supertanker because, like a supertanker’s, its parts are closely and necessarily linked, which gives it tremendous size and momentum.