Mick Hartley

At least Mary Midgley is consistent. Here she is - in common with about half the contributors at CiF, it sometimes seems – having a go at Dawkins:

Recent converts to creationism, when asked to explain their conversion, often say that this move is their only alternative to "scientific atheism" or "Darwinism" which they find intolerable. What then is the "Darwinism" they fear? It is actually Dawkinsism. Richard Dawkins expounds it, not only in the brutally egoistic rhetoric of The Selfish Gene but, more explicitly, in River out of Eden, a book which he has subtitled "A Darwinian View of Life" – "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither cares nor knows; DNA just is. And we dance to its music" (p 155).

So it's Dawkins who's responsible for all these recent converts to creationism – whoever they may be. Rather than, say, the creationists – whose view was, effectively, the only view until very recently – having to dress their doctrine up in the garb of Intelligent Design and go on the offensive as a direct result of the increasing success of Dawkins at al.

But it's that phrase "the brutally egoistic rhetoric of The Selfish Gene" which is the throw-back to her original review of The Selfish Gene some thirty odd years ago. I posted about it here. Although she never quite stated it explicitly, she gave the strong impression of believing Dawkins to have been suggesting that genes themselves had selfish motives. As she said later, after having been accused of completely missing the point, "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." And, "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." This despite Dawkins' relentless insistence that we can, and should, rise above our genes.

And now here she is again:

This is clearly not Darwin's vision. He would not have dogmatised so hastily about matters that he was convinced are totally mysterious to us. Nor, certainly, would he have made the mistake of mixing claims to scientific objectivity with melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene – a mixture which gives Dawkins his own grand conclusion that the cosmos is both a random, meaningless jumble and also a callous, brutal fate-figure that manipulates us. Small wonder that his readers say "If that is evolution I don't want it".

Evolutionary theory calls for no such confused worldview….

"Melodramatic rhetoric based on personifying the gene". As I said, she's consistent.