Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

326 CONTROVERSIES CONTAINED Cui Bono? 327
9 of David Haig's sleuthing, but there are hundreds or thousands of others
that could be cited. (Cronin 1991 and Matt Ridley 1993 survey the history of
this research up to the present.) Whenever you have an evolutionary puzzle,
the gene's-eye perspective is apt to yield a solution in terms of some gene or
other being favored for one reason or other. Insofar as adaptations are
manifestly for the good of the organism (the eagle-as-organism surely
benefits from its eagle-eye and eagle-wing), this is largely for the Wilsonian
reason: what's good for the genes is good for the whole organism. But when
push comes to shove, what's good for the genes determines what the future
will hold. They are, after all, the replicators whose varying prospects in the
self-replication competitions set the whole process of evolution in motion,
and keep it in motion.
This perspective, sometimes called gene centrism, or the gene's-eye point
of view, has provoked a great deal of criticism, much of it misguided. For
instance, it is often said that gene centrism is "reductionistic." So it is, in the
good sense. That is, it shuns skyhooks, and insists that all lifting in Design
Space must be done by cranes. But as we saw in chapter 3, sometimes people
use "reductionism" to refer to the view that one should "reduce" all science,
or all explanations, to some lowest level—the molecular level or the atomic
or subatomic level (but probably nobody has ever espoused this variety of
reductionism, for it is manifestly silly). In any event, gene centrism is
triumphantly non-reductionistic, in that sense of the term. What could be less
reductionistic (in that sense of the term) than explaining the presence of, say,
a particular amino-acid molecule in a particular location in a particular body
by citing, not some other molecular-level facts, but, rather, the fact that the
body in question was a female in a species that provides prolonged care for
its young? The gene's-eye point of view explains things in terms of the
intricate interactions between long-range, large-scale ecological facts, longterm
historical facts, and local, molecular-level facts.
Natural selection is not a force that "acts" at one level—for instance, the
molecular level as opposed to the population level or organism level. Natural
selection occurs because a sum of events, of all sorts and sizes, has a
particular statistically describable outcome. The blue whale teeters on the
brink of extinction; if it goes extinct, a particularly magnificent and almost
impossible to replace set of volumes in the Library of Mendel will cease to
have extant copies, but the factor that best explains why those characteristic
chromosomes, or collections of DNA nucleotide sequences, vanish from the
earth might be a virus that somehow directly attacked the DNA-replicating
machinery in the whales, a stray comet landing near the pod of the survivors
at just the wrong time, or a surfeit of television publicity, causing curious
humans to interfere catastrophically with their breeding habits! There is
always a gene's-eye description of every evolutionary effect, but the more
important question is whether such a description might often
be mere "bookkeeping" (and as unilluminating as a molecular-level box score
of a baseball game). William Wimsatt (1980) introduced the term
"bookkeeping" to refer to the fact, agreed to on all sides, that the genes are
the storehouse of information on genetic change, leaving it debatable whether
the gene-centered view was just bookkeeping, a charge that has often been
made (e.g., by Gould 1992a). George Williams (1985, p. 4) accepts the label
but vigorously defends the importance of bookkeeping: "The idea that
bookkeeping has been taking place in the past is what gives the theory of
natural selection its most important kind of predictive power." (See Buss
1987, especially pp. 174ff., for important reflections on this
claim.)
The claim that the gene-centrist perspective is best, or most important, is
not a claim about the importance of molecular biology, but about something
more abstract: about which level does the most explanatory work under most
conditions. Philosophers of biology have paid more close attention, and made
more substantive contributions, to the analysis of this issue than to any other
in evolutionary theory. I have just mentioned Wimsatt, and there are others—
to pick just some of the best, David Hull ( 1980), Elliot Sober (1981a), and
Kim Sterelny and Philip Kitcher (1988). One reason philosophers have been
attracted to the question is surely its ab-stractness and conceptual intricacy.
Thinking about it soon gets you into deep questions about what it is to explain
something, what causation is, what a level is, and so forth. This is one of the
brightest areas in recent philosophy of science; the scientists have paid
respectful attention to their philosophical colleagues, and have had that
attention repaid with knowledgeable and well-communicated analyses and
arguments by the philosophers, to which the scientists in turn have responded
with discussions of their own of more than workaday philosophical
significance. It is a rich harvest, and I find it hard to tear myself away from it
without giving a proper introduction to the subtleties in the issues, all the
more so because I have strongly held opinions about where the bulk of the
wisdom lies with these controversies, but I have a different agenda here,
which is, curiously enough, to drain the drama from them. They are excellent
scientific and philosophical problems, but no matter how they come out, their
answers won't have the impact that some have feared. (This will be a topic of
further discussion in chapter 16.)
The tantalizing recursions and reflections of evolutionary explanation are
reason enough for philosophers to pay close attention to the units-of-selection
controversy, but another reason it has attracted so much attention is surely
the reflection with which we began this section: people feel threatened by the
gene's-eye perspective for the same reason they felt threatened by Charles
Wilson's allegiance to General Motors. People want to be in charge of their
own destinies; they take themselves to be both the deciders