Genetics: Dawkins, redux

[rug]

Nathaniel Comfort takes issue with the second instalment of the evolutionary biologist's autobiography



Richard Dawkins, pictured at home in 2010, popularized a gene-based view of evolutionary biology.



Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science
Richard Dawkins Bantam: 2015.
ISBN: 9780062288431

Nathaniel Comfort
Nature 525, 184–185 (10 September 2015) doi:10.1038/525184a
Published online 09 September 2015

In 1976, Richard Dawkins, then a 35-year-old Oxford lecturer in animal behaviour, published his first book, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press). Distilling a body of recent population-genetics research — notably that of W. D. Hamilton — it argued that genes, not organisms, were the targets of natural selection. An organism, Dawkins wrote, was simply a gene's way of replicating itself.

The book was a surprise best-seller. Along with E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology (Harvard University Press, 1975), it helped to spark a new nature–nurture debate that pitted sociobiologists against socialist biologists. Notable among the latter were the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the population geneticist Richard Lewontin, who accused the sociobiologists of rationalizing social evils such as racism and infidelity as genetically hard-wired, evolutionarily programmed. Yet Dawkins's fiercely reductionist, materialist world view exuded a transgressive sexiness, and his suave, swaggering prose appealed to many readers, lay and professional.

Dawkins's greatest gift has been as a lyricist. With terms such as selfish genes, memes and the extended phenotype, he has provided much of the vocabulary of modern evolutionary biology. He has published a sackful of books laying out the evidence for evolution, against design in nature, and for natural selection as the only mechanism of adaptive evolution. A skilled and popular lecturer, he also discovered a taste for the camera, hosting numerous television documentaries.

In the early 2000s, he saltated from popularizer into evangelist. His 2006 book The God Delusion (Bantam) was an ecclesiophobic diatribe, published around the same time as Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great (Twelve, 2007) and similar books by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. The gospels of Christopher, Daniel, Sam and Richard form the scripture of the 'new atheism', a fundamentalist sect that has mounted a scientistic crusade against all religion.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7568/full/525184a.html

[struggle4progress]

1. I can't see that Dawkins has really contributed much to our understanding of this story

Darwin spent a lifetime piecing evidence together into his natural selection story: it has generally survived over a century of scrutiny, during which armies of professional specialists have brought newer and newer tools to the investigation, providing a basis for what now might be regarded as one the most impressive syntheses in science -- bringing together geology, paleontology, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, and physics

X-rays (for example) were unknown in Darwin's day; but this later knowledge enabled the deliberate induction of genetic mutations and the mapping of hypothetical gene locations rather before X-ray crystallography revealed the structure of DNA and before the genetic code was broken by clever (if tedious) chemistry experiments. Some parts of the true biological story have since become extraordinarily byzantine, if one wants to understand it in detail: although nobody believes (say) in genuine lamarckian inheritance, it is in fact the case that in some biological models there can be features that could be confused with lamarckian inheritance

[rug]

2. This memoir is getting mixed reviews, for both the science and the religion in it.

[struggle4progress]

3. Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science by Richard Dawkins – review

... When he was subwarden of New College, Oxford, he had no problem saying grace – this was, after all, not error, just meaningless rhetoric ...

At his best, Dawkins has written with passion, urgency and clarity, and, if crushing the creationists and convincing the enemies of reason of their stupidity has secured him a reputation as something of a one-trick pony, it has been a polished trick and a best-in-show pony. But this is not Dawkins at his best. Brief Candle consists of scattered reflections on a life and on a set of public performances. It adds only a little to the science lessons and, compared with the first volume of the memoirs (which was itself a guarded performance), it’s stingy with insights into his personal life ...

... “You are professor of the public understanding of science,” Tyson said, “not professor of delivering truth to the public, and these are two different exercises. Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here’s the facts, you are either an idiot or you’re not.’ It’s ‘Here’s the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.’ And I worry that your methods, and how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective.” Dawkins reports that he “gratefully accepted the rebuke”, but there’s no evidence here that he recognised its wisdom.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/26/brief-candle-in-the-dark-richard-dawkins-science-review