ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
One of Darwin’s core ideas is that human beings are the evolved product of millions of years of living in groups of social primates of one stripe or another. This inescapable evolutionary history means that we are born endowed with what he calls ‘ever-enduring social instincts.’ Our social instincts are biological instincts. They don’t fall from some higher plane, but come from our long experience of living in social groups. They are innate, the product of hundreds of thousands of years of sharing, squabbling, falling out and making up, hugging and sulking, slapping and tickling. In Darwin’s phrase, ‘there is a grandeur in this view of life’, but it is a grandeur utterly rejected by anti-Darwinists, most prominently Dawkins, for whom we are born selfish.
Accused of elevating selfishness into a cosmic principle or law of nature, Dawkinites claim that it is just a metaphor: ‘Oh no Dawkins isn’t saying humans are selfish, you’ve simply misunderstood. You’ve failed to grasp the subtle complexity of his brilliant metaphor. It’s just a metaphor, don’t you see? A metaphor for the apparently selfish behaviour of this particular molecule the gene. Why can’t you get it through your thick head, that it is only a metaphor?’
One hundred English pounds to the reader who can spot the metaphor in this famous peroration from The Selfish Gene:
Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to create a society in which people cooperate unselfishly for the common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us therefore try to teach altruism because we are born selfish.
Now this is a view that derives not from Origin of Species but Original Sin.
You can find versions of Original Sin in Calvinism, Anglicanism, and St Paul. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, here’s how Martin Luther formulated Original Sin:
‘[...] the infection with evil inclinations from our mother’s womb! This inborn sickness and hereditary sin condemneth to eternal wrath and damnation every creature born into the world!’
This was shortly before he lost his job at Hallmark Cards.
An idea common to thinkers such as Martin Luther, Billy Graham, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker is that we are born bad, infected with nasty selfish genes and hideous animal instincts, but with effort can transcend our rotten nature. To do any good or kind action means first overcoming our base, corrupt natures. This is the complete opposite of Darwin’s philosophy, as we saw just now in the Origin of Species section. For Darwin, when we do bad we very often have to transcend our sociable, empathic natures, and when we do good we go with the grain of our evolved social instincts. Self-sacrificial actions are, he says:
‘the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts rather than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time; though, if prevented by any cause, distress or even misery might be felt.’
That word misery is almost always the word Darwin uses when he imagines any thwarted instinct. It’s the word he uses to describe what a goose feels if prevented from migrating by clipped wings or a cage, and to explain why the goose will throw itself at the bars of the cage until its chest is bloody. I think his connection of misery and instinct in the human context just quoted is every bit as strong. Try to deny your generous impulse, you will feel miserable because you have gone against deep biological instincts.
It’s clear, therefore, that the views of a Pinker or a Dawkins do not derive from Darwin or Wallace. So where do they get their ideas then? They are detailed expression of a philosophical doctrine which runs through Adam Smith, Hegel, Hobbes, Luther, Calvin, and Saint Augustine. The Pinker/Dawkins view is perhaps most succinctly encapsulated by the ninth of the 39 Anglican articles of faith:
Original Sin [...] is the fault and corruption of Nature [...] whereby man is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit.
The Swedish town of Överkalix lies way up north right on the rim of the Arctic Circle. In the nineteenth century, the town was so isolated that if a harvest failed the Överkalixians starved. The parish registers show a fluctuation between failed harvest and bumper crop, famine and feast.
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1801 famine |
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1802 feast |
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1821 famine |
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1822 feast |
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1856 famine |
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1863 feast |
When the study looked at the descendants of those who’d lived through this, they discovered something incredible. The grandchildren of those who got the least food lived longest. In fact, they lived 32 years longer. The average life expectancy of those whose grandparents’ slow growth period (which is 9-12 years old for boys, 8-10 for girls) coincided with a famine year, was 32 years longer than for those whose grandparents’ slow growth period coincided with a feast year. This turns survival of the fittest upside down. What do we call this? Survival of the scrawniest?
Passed down in the chromosome, the grandparents’ life experiences are expressed in the grandchildren’s size, shape, mental and physical health.
By the way, we must never let our parents know that their life story could in any way be the decisive influence on our children’s health and happiness. They cannot be allowed to take the credit for the fact that their grandchildren are less warped than we their children. After all, one of the great joys of parenthood, if not its whole purpose and meaning, comes from its being a very public damage reversal project, performed right in your own parents’ face. My friend Ada told me about the following exchange with her dad, which began when her dad started on about the difference between Ada and her daughter.
‘Oh, she’s very well behaved, my granddaughter,’ he said. ‘Not like you were at that age. Always mumbling and wetting yourself. Oh no. Very confident she is. You weren’t a bit like that. She’s a pearl.’
‘Isn’t it amazing,’ Ada asked her dad, ‘what just a little bit of love and a modicum of praise can do?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he replied.
‘I’m not blaming you, Dad. You were bringing up kids before it was widely known that continually chipping away at a child’s self-esteem would in some way damage them – be so damaging, in fact, that she wouldn’t have kids herself until she was 45.’
‘I told you not to hang about,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t hanging about. My delaying parenthood was a genetic adaptation to reduce the malign influence of a father who, on school Sports Day, heckled me by singing: “Last in the sack race, you came last in the sack race.”’
‘I was ashamed to see the other teachers overtake you. You’re the headmistress. You should be showing them who’s boss.’