Mick Hartley

I always thought that Mary Midgley’s criticism of Dawkins’ selfish gene concept was one of the more lamentable examples of a philosopher barging in when they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. This profile of her (via Butterflies and Wheels) reinforces that view:

In 1979, in response to the publication of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, Midgley wrote what was, by any standards, a remarkably intemperate critique in the journal Philosophy. “The notion of selfishness suggests an extreme determinism,” she says. “It also trades on people’s simplistic notions of human motivation. Selfishness cannot explain either altruism or self-destruction, both of which quite clearly exist.” Scientists – including Dawkins – were not slow to respond, accusing her of failing to grasp the concept. While Midgley concedes that she should have been a bit more measured in her response, she remains surprisingly consistent in her antagonism.

“I’m not anti-science,” she maintains. “What I object to is improper science sold as science. I understand Dawkins thinks he was talking about the survival potential of certain lines rather than the motives of the genes themselves, but I believe he is mistaken. Scientists in this country have little cultural overlap with the arts and humanities and … they are unaware of when they start bringing their own political and psychological views into the argument. There’s nothing wrong with scientists having such views as long as they are aware of what they are doing … Dawkins may argue that he is using selfishness as a metaphor but he must have been aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used. And Dawkins has to take some responsibility for that.”

No, she still doesn’t get it…or she’s pretending not to in order to avoid looking stupid in retrospect. “Dawkins thinks he was talking about the survival potential of certain lines rather than the motives of the genes themselves, but I believe he is mistaken.” What an extraordinary thing to say: she knows better than Dawkins what he was writing about. Did anyone apart from Midgley, having read the book, think that Dawkins was inferring selfish motives to genes? The selfish gene conceit has been one of the most powerful and useful metaphors for clarifying the logic whereby natural selection must work at the gene level: successful genes survive, unsuccessful genes don’t. Fine if Midgley doesn’t get it, but then it’s a bit rich for her to impose her misunderstanding back on to Dawkins.

Again, “Dawkins may argue that he is using selfishness as a metaphor but he must have been aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used. And Dawkins has to take some responsibility for that.” He has to take responsibility for reviewers who are too obtuse to understand what he’s talking about?

There’s a perfect example of her confusion in this Amazon review of her book “Evolution as a Religion“. Admittedly it’s not Midgley herself, but it’s a fair representation of her views:

There are modern political ideologists such as Richard Dawkins, masquerading as ‘socio-biologists’, who are trying to persuade us that we are naturally selfish. Midgeley dismisses this view with a disdainful flourish by pointing out that the word ‘selfish’ has negative connotations in every known language: the idea that we might have evolved to value a negative quality simply does not make sense. (‘He is a good man – he’s so selfish.’)

Writers like Dawkins are dangerous – they use mythology and try to persuade us it is science. They try to convince us that if we behave selfishly it is all right – we can’t help it – it is ‘in our genes.’ They try to convince us that life in Western society is a race in which we all start equal, and those who are the best, win. What we are not told that those who win generally start way in front of the rest. Well what does it matter? It’s all in the genes.

This is such a grotesque misunderstanding of Dawkins’ position that it’s difficult to know where to start except to say that no, this is precisely what he doesn’t argue.

For further Midgley confusion, see this Guardian letter:

Why do Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, in attacking the theory of intelligent design (ID), deal only with the arguments of traditional creationists (One side can be wrong, Life, September 1)?
Today’s ID theorists are more sophisticated. They concede that natural selection plays some part in development and that creation is not recent. They do not speak of God but, more generally, of design. Their position is indeed confused but it surely needs to be addressed directly. Of course the theory has been seized on by the neocons as a straight vindication of the Bible.

But really, it signifies something much less simple. It expresses a widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist – or Dawkinsist – orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science.

Even apart from the belief that neocon means the same as Christian fundamentalist, this is strange. Does she think that the world is not random “in some important sense”, outside of the effects of natural selection? If so, how would that differ from intelligent design? The whole glory of Darwinian evolution is that you can talk meaningfully about purpose, about progress: it brings teleology into biology without having to rely on outside supernatural factors.

As Evolutionblog notes (in a post titled “Midgley Steps In It Again”):

Midgley, like so many others who publish on this subject, deems it unnecessary to first learn some science before writing with confidence about it.