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?
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Now come on, can you imagine Thatcher saying the words "Super Fun Paradise Ticket"? It's only slightly easier (and slightly less disturbing) than trying to imagine her saying "Oh yes, that's really doing it for me". Whereas she would sound entirely natural saying something like "Baby Mortification Flensing Tax".
This comment is probably too long...
Dawkins’s failure as a cultural historian certainly limits the scope of the programme. One of the biggest flaws I see with it is that it doesn’t know what it is. Is it about Darwin? Darwin’s influence on his own society? Darwin’s influence on modern society? The science of evolution? How evolution mixes with religion? Or, as it appears to be, an untidy mix of all these?
Dawkins isn’t an historian, other than an amateur one; he’s a scientist. To him (and to me) the people who think that evolution and religion can co-exist ARE ‘just plain wrong’. There certainly are complex social reasons for how they arrived at this – wrong – viewpoint, but if this were a documentary on the science of evolution (and I wish it would stick to that) then that wouldn’t matter a jot.
I would love a documentary on Darwin to methodically explain how the theory was derived, how it answers questions, and how it passes tests. If you want to include biography, this can be woven around the science. Implications can be saved for later episodes, perhaps. Maybe this popular-science formula is over-used, but it certainly works for me, both in print (John Gribbin or Bill Bryson), and on screen (Jacob Bronowsky or Aubrey Manning). If this were a little more didactic, it might have held together better. As it is, a viewer who doesn’t already understand evolution probably won’t learn much.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that Dawkins drifts into a more Spencerian model of evolution. I don’t know a great deal about Spencer, but I thought his ‘evolution’ was a more general one about the increase of complexity over time, not just in biology, but in all systems. It feels like more of a conceptual theory than a scientific one. Most modern evolutionists probably reject the idea of progressive complexity, at least within biology. Although life appears to be more complex than in the past, this is more like a sampling error than any real effect (a packet of Maltesers to the first student who can tell me how this error occurs). Spencer’s work on biological change (which I think pre-dated ‘Origin’) was rather Lamarckian, if I remember rightly. Although there are many aspects of Dawkins’s evolution which come from sources other than Darwin (the source of variability, the mechanisms of heredity, etc.), I’m pretty certain Dawkins would still call himself a Darwinian.
I can confirm that there was no mention of Galton, whatsoever. This annoyed me tremendously. I suppose Dawkins is technically right when he says that eugenicists are merely extending the principals of animal-breeding, which are an inspiration for rather than an implication of Darwin’s work. But in his over-defensiveness he misses the point that without ‘Origin’ and ‘Descent’ there would have been no obvious link between pigeon-fancying and human progress. This defensiveness infects a lot of his work these days. He already knows what objections and misinterpretations the religious lobby will throw up, so he allows no room for them. Where he used to guide his doubters through a series of Socratic questions, and listen to their answers, he is now blunt and provocative. The sequence with the children in episode one was an embarrassing example of this.
Some nit-picking, now. You suggest that Frans de Waal (the guy who studies nit-picking) believes Dawkins’s work promotes ‘veneer theory’ (de Waal’s own term). I’m not sure he’d say that. He does say that the ‘Selfish’ in ‘Selfish Gene’ has been misunderstood by some, but his main claim is that empathy is not restricted to humans: it is present throughout primates. As Dawkins says, the book that everyone thinks is about selfishness is actually about altruism, and its roots in biology. Misinterpretations of Dawkins might involve a veneer of morality on top of red nature, but Dawkins’s actual work is notoriously materialist. He would probably ridicule any suggestion that some phenomena are biological but others sit on top in some way.
I don’t know if the next episode will redeem the series, but so far I’m quite disappointed.
Hi there. I suppose I'm a little unfair to criticise Dawkins for his lack of historical technique, since he isn't an histoian, but then again he shouldn't try to be one (this would, I imagine, be like me doing a programme about popular fiction but trying to shoehorn in some maths). As you say, the main problem is that the programme doesn't know what it wants to be, either history or scientific analysis.
As for Dawkins moving into a Spencerian model... this was more evident in the first episode than the second (although he did use Spencer's term 'survival of the fittest' in the second without any contextualisation at all), when he talked about evolution leading to animals being faster, more intelligent, generally better. This sounded to me like Spencer's idea that evolution had some kind of teleology to it, that (as you indeed point out) organisms would become more complex, whereas Darwin was much more suspicious of evolution having a 'direction' as such, and was much more dependent on chance mutations. That said, the second episode did emphasise the lack of an evolutionary goal much more (in the discusson with the Kenyan priest).
Thanks for remembering the name of the guy who criticised Dawkins... however, Dawkins did say rather explicitly in the programme that de Waal accuses him of veneer theory. Whether he actually does or not is another matter; I'm increasingly getting the impression that the Dawk likes to make claims about his critics that aren't quite precise enough, so he can knock them down.
Finally, the incompatibility of evolution and religion. I can't help but feel that the debate has moved on a little from this - sure, the Genesis narrative is an utter crock, but most Christians understand that (and yes, that's a rather dubious move from a previously strongly held position, but still) and have located god further back a bit, so now he just created 'existence', not 'man.' It's not something I have any intellectual time for myself, but I do feel that Dawkins' either/or approach sometimes makes his atheistic model too simplistic.
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