Dawkins' Doughnuts

So, part two of The Genius of Charles Darwin. Last week I bemoaned the lack of historical depth to Richard Dawkins' account of evolutionary theory. Did things get better this week? Well... not really.

Let's focus on the good parts, for the moment, because there were many. The Dawk is at his best when explaining concepts, not trying to contextualise them, and so there was a nice part on why applying Darwinian principles to business is simply stretching a metaphor too far. It's clear, too, that Dawkins feels uneasy that The Selfish Gene is often associated ideologically and historically with Thatcherism (much of the programme was Dawkins saying "honestly, I'm a liberal"), and the case he made for the fallacy of the comparison was a good one. Some interesting material on the Darwinian uses of altruism, although the section in which he confronted another researcher who had criticised his work as promoting veneer theory (i.e., that morality is really just the misleading icing on a cake of survival-driven viciousness) was a bit disappointing; encouraged by the fact that Dawkins had let a voice of informed dissent onto the stage, it really turned into Dawkins saying "But of course, he's wrong." As for other voices of dissent; this week's hilarious scene was the interview with the Kenyan priest, who after Dawkins had patiently explained the theory of evolution (including the crucial nugget that humans didn't pass through a stage of being apes, they simply have a common evolutionary ancestor), replied with "So what's evolution's aim? Will we all have, like, really big heads?" You can take the teleology out of the priest, but you... actually, no you can't.

And so to the not so good; that is, Rick's grasp of scientific history. I threatened to kick my television to death if Francis Galton didn't crop up in a discussion of eugenics, and although admittedly I spent a minute in the kitchen during this part, I didn't hear Galton mentioned once (I haven't, however, destroyed the television. I'm saving that for the next time some pop 'historian' lets "And the Victorians, yeah, they like totally covered up table legs 'cos they looked well rude" drop out of his or her mouth). This seems a little too much like intellectual dishonesty to me, not least because Dawkins was keen to point out that eugenics is not Darwinism, yet it's the figure of Galton who muddies the waters on this point. Firstly, because Galton - who actually coined the term eugenics - was thinking about these kind of things throughout the 1860s and 1870s in articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865) in Macmillan's Magazine, and books such as Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), which pretty much does for Dawkins' implications that these were twentieth century ideas (and therefore nothing to do with the uberVictorian Darwin). Secondly, and closer to home, it's rather disingenuous to say that eguenics had nothing to do with Darwin whatsoever, when the very term was invented by his cousin. Yes, you heard it here four hundred and twelfth.

There was also another moment of "Did he actually say that?" (although I suppose Galton was "Did he actually not say that?") towards the end, when musing on humanity's capacity for altruism. Dawkins wondered how we could explain such behaviour as charity, kindness, the establishment of asylums for the mentally ill, the Poor Law... Um - go back a bit. It's well known that Dawkins despises Foucault (mainly, it seems, for proposing ideas that can't be conclusively verified, and often doing so in a stylistically challenging manner. Or perhaps for being bald and French, who knows?), but you don't have to have read Discipline and Punish or The Birth of the Clinic to understand that asylums were less instances of human kindness and more instruments of social control and normativity. Similarly, the Poor Law as monument to empathy? Has he read Oliver Twist, or any of Dickens' (arguably the key empathetic figure of the nineteenth century) critiques of the system? Perhaps Dawkins thought the Poor Law sounded nice, but then that doesn't explain why council tax isn't called the Super Fun Paradise Ticket. Ah well.

Next week - finally, Dawkins gets round to religious resistance to Darwinism. Why hasn't he looked at this before?