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

330 CONTROVERSIES CONTAINED
CuiBono? 331
CHAPTER 11: Panspermia, intergalactic gene-splicers, and multiple origins of
life on Earth are all harmless if unwelcome heretical possibilities. Teilhard's
"Omega-point," Lamarck's genetic transmission of acquired traits, and directed
mutation (without a crane to support it) would be fatal to Darwinism,
but are safely discredited. The controversies over the units of selection and
the "genc's-eye point of view" are important issues in contemporary evolutionary
theory, but they don't have the dire implications often seen in them,
whichever way they come out.
This completes our survey of Darwinism in biology itself. Now that we are
armed with a fair and quite detailed picture of contemporary Darwinism, we
ore ready to see, in part III, what implications it has for Homo sapiens.
CHAPTER 12: The primary difference between our species and all others is
our reliance on cultural transmission of information, and hence on cultural
evolution. The unit of cultural evolution, Dawkins' meme, has a powerful and
underappreciated role to play in our analysis of the human sphere.
FIGURE 11.1
the deck against it (with such loaded words as "barren" ), and it is true that it
is a reversal of the fundamental strategy of all life, but, still, it often happens.
We recognize that bearing and raising offspring is just one of life's possible
projects, and by no means the most important, given our values. But where
could those values have come from? How did our control systems become
equipped with them, if not by miraculous surgery? How is it that we have
been able to establish a rival perspective that can often overpower our genes'
interests while other species have not? 8 This will be a topic for the next
chapter.
8. Dog-lovers may protest that there is good evidence of dogs' sacrificing their lives for
their human masters, putting their own prospects for reproduction and even "personal"
longevity firmly in second place. Certainly this can happen, because dogs have actually
been bred for this very capacity to acquire such occasionally fatal trans-species loyalties.
These are necessarily exceptional cases, however. The cartoonist Al Capp saw the problem
many years ago when he created his delightful shmoos, white armless blobs with two
rather pseudopodal feet and happy, cat-whiskered faces. Shmoos loved people above all,
and instantly sacrificed themselves whenever appropriate, turning themselves into sumptuous
roast beef dinners (or peanut-butter sandwiches, or whatever their human companions
happened to need or desire). Shmoos, you may recall, reproduced asexually by
cloning in large numbers at the drop of a hat—a bit of poetic license that got Capp out
of the nagging problem of how shmoos, given their proclivities, could ever have survived.
Kim Sterelny has suggested to me that shmoos exhibit the sort of features we should look
for as proof of intergalactic interlopers in our past! If we found organisms whose adaptations
were manifestly not for their own direct benefit, but for the benefit of their
putative makers, this would properly set us wondering, but it would not be conclusive.