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

328 CONTROVERSIES CONTAINED Cut Bono? 329
and the principal beneficiaries of their decisions, and many are afraid that
Darwinism, in its gene-centered version, will undercut their assurance on that
score. They are apt to see Dawkins' vivid picture of organisms as mere vehicles
created to carry a gaggle of genes into future vehicles as intellectual assault and
battery. So one reason, I venture, why organism-level and group-level
perspectives are so frequently hailed as a worthy opponent to the gene-level
perspective is the background thought—never articulated— that we are
organisms (and we live in groups that matter to us)—and we don't want our
interests playing second fiddle to any others! My hunch is, in other words, that
we wouldn't care whether pine trees or hummingbirds were "mere survival
machines" for their genes if it weren't for our realization that we bear the same
relation to our genes that they bear to theirs. In the next chapter, I want to put
that worry to rest by showing that this is really not so! Our relationship to our
genes is importantly different from the relationship of any other species to its
genes—because what We are is not just what we as a species are. This will pull
the plug, draining all the anxiety out of the still fascinating and unresolved
conceptual questions about how to think about the units of selection, but before
I turn to that task, I must make sure the threatening aspect of the issue is made
clear, and several common misconceptions are cleared up.
Perhaps the most misguided criticism of gene centrism is the frequently
heard claim that genes simply cannot have interests (Midgley 1979, 1983,
Stove 1992). This criticism, if taken seriously, would lead us to discard a
treasury of insights, but it is flatly mistaken. Even if genes could not act on
their interests in just the way we can act on ours, they can surely have them,
in a sense that is uncontroversial and clear. If a body politic, or General
Motors, can have interests, so can genes. You can do something for your own
sake, or for the sake of the children, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of
democracy, or for the sake of... peanut butter. I find it hard to imagine why
anybody would want to put the well-being and further flourishing of peanut
butter above all else, but peanut butter can be put on the pedestal just as
readily as art or the children can. One could even decide—though it would be
a strange choice—that the thing one wanted most to protect and enhance,
even at the cost of one's own life, was one's own genes. No sane person
would make such a decision. As George Williams (1988, p. 403) says, "There
is no conceivable justification for any personal concern with the interests
(long-term average proliferation ) of the genes we received in the lottery of
meiosis and fertilization."
But that doesn't mean that there aren't forces bent on furthering the sakes or
interests of genes. In fact, until quite recently, genes were the principal
beneficiaries of all the selective forces on the planet. That is to say, there
were no forces whose principal beneficiary was anything else. There were
accidents and catastrophes (lightning bolts and tidal waves), but no steady
forces acting systematically to favor anything but genes.
To whose interests is the actual "decision-making" of natural selection
most directly responsive? It is not controversial that conflicts between genes
and bodies (between genes and the phenotypic expressions of the genotypes
of which they are a proper part) can arise. Moreover, no one doubts that in
general the body's claim to be considered the principal beneficiary lapses as
soon as it has completed its procreational mission. Once the salmon have
fought their way upstream and successfully spawned, they are dead meat.
They literally fall apart, because there is no evolutionary pressure in favor of
any of the design revisions that might prevent them from falling apart, giving
them nice long grandparent-retirement periods like those many of us get to
enjoy. In general, the body is thus only an instrumental, and hence
secondary, beneficiary of the "decisions" made by natural selection.
This is true throughout the biosphere, revealed in a pattern with a few
important variations. In many phyla, parents die before their offspring are
born, and their entire lives are a preparation for a single climactic act of
replication. Others—trees, for instance—live through many generations of
offspring, and can hence come into competition with their own young for
sunlight and other resources. Mammals and birds typically invest large portions
of their energy and activity to caring for young, and hence have many
more opportunities to "choose" between themselves and their young as
beneficiaries of whatever course of action they take. Creatures for which
such options never come up can be designed "under the assumption" (Mother
Nature's tacit assumption) that this is simply not an issue that needs any
design attention at all.
Presumably, the control system of a moth, for instance, is ruthlessly designed
to sacrifice the body for the sake of the genes, whenever a generic and
recognizable opportunity to do so arises. A little fantasy: We somehow
surgically replace this standard system (a "Damn the torpedoes, full speed
ahead!" system ) with a body-favoring system ( a "To hell with my genes, I'm
looking out for Number One!" system). What could the replacement ever do
that wasn't just one way or another of committing suicide or pointlessly
wandering? A moth is simply not equipped to take any advantage of opportunities
tangential to its lifework of reproducing itself. Life-enhancing ends
are hard to take seriously, if it is the short life of a moth we are considering.
Birds, in contrast, may abandon a nest full of eggs when they themselves are
threatened in one way or another, and this looks more like what we often do,
but the reason they can do this is that they can start another nest—if not this
season, then next. They are looking out for Number One now, but only
because this gives their genes a better chance of getting replicated later.
We are different. There is a huge scope for alternative policies in human
life, but the question then becomes: how and when does this scope get
established? There can be no doubt that many people have clearheadedly,
well-informedly chosen to forgo the risks and pains of childbearing for the
safety and comfort of a "barren" life of other rewards. The culture may stack