Curtis D. Carbonell

Abstract

Richard Dawkins holds Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. In his move from ethologist to evolutionary theorist, he has entered the public sphere as a vocal opponent of irrationalism. With his Channel Four (UK) television documentary The Root of All Evil? and his accompanying book The God Delusion he pulls no punches in lambasting people of faith as not only dippy thinkers but also as abusers of children’s trusting minds. This article sees Dawkins’s overt rhetoric designed to achieve a cultural goal: to reinvigorate aspects of the Enlightenment Project he finds worthwhile—in particular, a secularism founded on reason highly suspicious of religious meta-narratives. The article asks if his heavy-handed approach is the most viable in winning the religious/secular culture war and suggests that the more centrist position of the historian and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, might be more productive, if less provocative.

  [1] In 1874, John William Draper published a History of the Conflict between Religion and Science in which he attacks Roman Catholicism for its supposed historical anti-science stance. The notoriously bad form of the Church during the Galileo affair readily falls from the lips of advocates demonstrating why the Church shouldn’t meddle in things of science, and the idea that men like Galileo and Bruno are heroes of freethinking still permeates the popular imagination with liberated science on one end and restrictive religion on the other. Two decades later, the first president of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White, added his comment on this “conflict,” A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and solidifies the idea that science and theology are not simply in conflict but are at war (Draper 1874; White 1896).

  [2] One wonders if such agonistic theses still have some general validity. The latest upsurge in the popular press of anti-religious texts seems to have vindicated Draper and White. Sam Harris’s book on Christian fundamentalism The End of Faith utilizes a variant of the conflict thesis on the back cover. The book is about “a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion” (2004). Other recent publications concern the fear of the rise of the political religious right and suggest that, at least in the popular imagination, the conflict/warfare theses sell (Hedges 2006; for another example see Goldberg 2006). However, traditional scholarship in the history and science of religion has challenged the simplistic dualism of the Draper-White theses to suggest a variety of positions along a continuum between harmony and conflict, replacing these extremes with one that views the engagement as complex (Lindberg and Numbers 1986). With the academy offering the story of the subtle and often nuanced relationship between science and religion, as well as an entire approach (science studies) dedicated to understanding how science is a social pursuit (Kitcher 1995, 2001; for a look into the "science wars" see Sokal and Bricmont 1998), why is the evolutionary theorist and ethologist Richard Dawkins so readily espousing conflict-oriented rhetoric? Could it be that the popular imagination is markedly different from the academic imagination? Possibly. And if so, Dawkins may see that more is at stake than academics might admit.

[3] Within the walls of the academy “complexity” may be the most cogent form of description, but outside the walls, a culture war is being fought in a variety of sectors from school boards to academic symposiums to the blogosphere to contemporary news. Dawkins has placed himself in the vanguard. His Channel Four documentary The Root of all Evil? aired in January (2006) in the UK and his accompanying book The God Delusion (2006b) suggests that religious faith is dangerous and (worse) functions like a virus (see below). What may be at stake is the role of rational science in society. And his choice of a documentary is telling. A book is one thing, and today nearly anyone can get published (vanity presses are just a URL away), but how does a theorist in animal behaviour turned popular science writer find a vast platform, like British television, to voice opinions on such personal and abstract stuff as faith? Human nature, it seems, is still hot stuff. And Dawkins as a prototype of the new Third Culture intellectual, the scientist as humanist, plays the part with relish.

  [4] Since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA as a double helix, the life sciences have incrementally produced a more complex portrait of what it means to be human, a portrait that often impinges on representations in the humanistic realm of the arts, literature, history, philosophy, and religion. But this redrawing is not new. In 1859, Darwin suggests at the end of the Origin, “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation … Light will be thrown on the origin of man” (Appleman 2001, 172). Not long after (1871) he states clearly what everyone knew the Origin implies: “We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World” (Appleman 2001, 246). He then suggests our likely descent not only from old world primates, but from marsupials, amphibians, and fish. Darwin ends the book with the prescient quote, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” (Appleman 2001, 254).

[5] However, one such recent attempt at throwing new light on origins comes from the Harvard entomologist, E.O. Wilson. He looks to animal behaviour for clues on the psychology of the origin of man.[1] Sociobiology surfaced in 1975 in the seminal text, Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, its subtitle an overt statement that Wilson’s approach is the self-proclaimed third revolution behind Darwin’s and the Modern Synthesis. This attempt at solidifying his idea as a milestone in the history of evolutionary theory shows chutzpa, but the real hubris is found in the last chapter, “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology.” The contents concern man as a social animal jerry-built by Darwinian evolution during our Pleistocene past. Wilson ranges from the very broad, asking what Martian zoologists would think of these primates with “globular” heads. He addresses human society, culture, behaviour, language, religion, ethics, aesthetics, and ends with an ominous quote from Camus (Wilson 1980, 271-301). And the perceived social implications of this chapter earned him a doused head from water-wielding graduate students intent on disrupting his speech at the American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium in Washington D.C. (Segerstråle 2000, 23). Their complaint? That Wilson’s Sociobiology was a mask for extreme biologism.

[6] However, Sociobiology’s vaulting ambition suffered more than the occasional irreverent outburst of a few graduate students. Two of Wilson’s fellow biologists at Harvard, the geneticist Richard Lewontin and the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, both signed a scathing critique printed in The New York Review of Books accusing Wilson of the worst sort of genetic determinism.[2] But Sociobiology’s fundamental problems had more to do with the speculative nature of its claims than its social implications (Kitcher 1985). Its reiteration as Evolutionary Psychology (with a focus on the modularity of the mind shaped during our prehistory) did little to staunch critics from mentioning that the theories were high on claims and little on evidence. For example, David Buller’s recent book Adapting Minds argues the mind is not simply adapted to the prehistory of our evolutionary past but that it is still “adapting” (2005), suggesting that the mind is already sufficiently plastic to adjust to many new circumstances today. What we see is that the potential for describing human nature is still up for grabs, even if the importance of our evolutionary past is seminal in its elucidation. How the mind works, as most would agree, still has plenty to be explained.[3] However, for better or worse, the institution of Western science has eaten away at traditional understandings of our place in the universe—while still leaving plenty of questions unanswered and room enough for any mystic. Regardless of the ultimate merit of evolutionary theories of the human, those scientific thinkers like Wilson and Dawkins with the ability to popularize the ideas of their disciplines find themselves in the enviable position of the new intellectual. Again, such cultural developments should not be surprising.

[7] C.P. Snow presented a cogent but narrow argument in the ’fifties, suggesting two antipodal cultures exist in the modern academy: the sciences and the humanities. Snow wanted to know why we consider literary types like T.S. Eliot intellectuals but we ignore scientists like Ernest Rutherford. Snow asks: why do we excuse an educated person’s lack of knowledge about the second law of thermodynamics but we chide anyone who hasn’t read Shakespeare (1964, 12-20)? The relevance of Snow’s construct has been examined, portions of it not weathering so well, others proving to be relevant (Rabinow 1994, 53-64). An approach to re-categorize Snow’s antipodal positions to offer a third culture can be found with literary agent John Brockman, but any cursory glance at his list of adherents demonstrates how skewed the third position is toward the natural and life sciences.[4] What we see is that Brockman privileges rational science-minded thinkers, possibly because they fulfill the role of new intellectuals in ways at which Matthew Arnold or Antonio Gramsci would have cringed (neither as “men” of letters nor as organic intellectuals, but a new breed of scientists turned humanists).

[8] A search for answers to this sort of cultural phenomenon reaches back to the beginning of the humanist renaissance in fourteenth century northern Italy (and probably further), and it has its own history of contention between rationalist and mystical approaches of interrogating reality. However, in the academy, at least, the scales have tipped toward the dominance of rational science. Snow’s complaint seems less relevant now that Classics departments are barely alive and Literary and Cultural Studies are often havens for quasi-Luddites with little interest in what’s going on the other side of the academy. Fields in the physical and life sciences generate graduate programs with a surplus of opportunities. And the entire American university is being structured to function like a corporation. The sciences mean applied technologies, which mean dollars.

[9] Dawkins’s position as the voice of institutional rationality stems from the prestige of evolutionary biology in the life sciences. He has been labeled one of Britain’s leading intellectuals (Campbell 2005), which suggests that Brockman is onto something. Dawkins’s position of authority should not be much of a surprise, though. Few revolutions have resonated culturally as much as Charles Darwin’s suggestion that biological evolution is driven (primarily) by descent with modification via the primary mechanism of natural selection. However, Darwin wasn’t the first to suggest that evolution occurs, just the first (along with the independent research of Wallace) to imagine a working mechanism. Darwin’s impact was immediate, and followers like Huxley and Spencer did their best to promote evolutionism. But the new worldview didn’t flourish until the Modern Synthesis, in which Darwinism melded with Mendelian genetics to form a unified umbrella for biology. By the time of Sociobiology’s claim to be a new synthesis, Dawkins was ready to follow in 1976 with the publication of The Selfish Gene, a book H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, claims is the best popular science has ever produced (2007). But Dawkins’s success as a popularizer stems less from his scientific contributions and more from his towering status as an explainer of difficult concepts. From the “selfishness” of genes to the idea of a blind watchmaker, Dawkins has used metaphor with deadly precision that is, itself, an art form.

[10] Other popularizers of the life sciences such as Wilson and Gould have had similar success yet have never penetrated as far into the popular imagination as has Dawkins. Wilson is the most eminent of the three as a scientist. His work on insect “societies” is considered an elegant and admirable addition to entomology. But, outside the academy, his name is less known, even as adherents echo pop-Sociobiology in everyday language with water-cooler claims about male aggressiveness or female proclivity for pair-bonding. Moreover, Wilson’s concept of cultural evolution, the culturgen, has penetrated far less than Dawkins’s meme, and Wilson’s suggestion of consilience between the sciences and humanities has yet to be implemented possibly because it underestimates the complexities involved (1998).

[11] Like Wilson, Gould is known outside the academy but primarily as a bridge to the laity explaining all things natural. His columns in Natural History Magazine range the gamut from baseball to dinosaurs, and no one can deny his impact on America’s idea of what evolution is.[5] His tame foray into popular entertainment on the Simpsons solidifies his place as a personality outside the academy, but compared to the honour South Park pays Dawkins, Gould’s role on the Simpsons can be considered quaint. Dawkins, though, incites Matt and Trey to the sort of inverse representation at which they are expert: the more blasphemous, the more prestigious. Dawkins, it seems, has arrived as a pop-culture figure because he suffers the indignity of shacking up with Mrs. (former, Mr.) Garrison (Parker and Stone 2006). His deftly handled appearance on The Colbert Report (October 17, 2006) is no surprise, and a quick look at the spoofs of him on Youtube suggests Dawkins’s message resonates far outside the academy.[6]

[12] We are led to wonder if the attention has less to do with his evolutionary functionalism, his gene-centered view, his memetics, and more do with the arch-rationality of statements like “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist (1996, 6). It may be that Dawkins resonates because in the popular imagination Darwinism (as the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge suggested in 1874) often means atheism. And that insufficient conclusion is exactly where Dawkins fits in.

[13] Such a blasphemous idea as Darwinism equaling atheism may lie behind the fundamental reason why “Darwinism” flopped in the human sciences. We know the usual suspects: the abuse of applying evolutionary theory to economics, Social Darwinism, strikes us as a clear example of its dangers. Nazi eugenics is another. And neither have anything to do with biological Darwinism. Yet, some humanists still shiver when you mention Darwin’s name and any social issue, much less a religious issue. On the other side of the academy, though, evolutionary theory has developed a variety of sub-disciplines, and its proponents fill scholarly journals and books with contested but progressive knowledge. Today, one frontier is Evo-Devo, short for evolutionary developmental biology, a sub-discipline that hopes to form a true third revolution after Darwin’s own and the Modern Synthesis by explaining biologic development: how form emerges from formlessness, how an oak grows from an acorn, a baby from a zygote.[7] And the reductive description about how organisms are formed may strike the pious as treading on holy ground, even if no such conclusions are being drawn. It is in interesting spaces like this where biology and theology collide that Dawkins finds his platform. Where biology sheds light, theology disappears and the god of the gaps shrinks a bit more.

  [14] But do such forays into popular culture and such disciplinary successes explain an evolutionary biologist like Richard Dawkins’s playing the role of the new intellectual and critiquing religion on British television? Possibly, as Lewontin argues in the introduction to It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions that the increasing dominance of the life sciences demonstrates that what we want to know about is ourselves, and biology is primed as the premier science for this endeavour. Lewontin suggests that simply knowing the structure of our DNA will not tell us how to construct an organism. There are too many complex networks of weak forces beyond the information stored in DNA, but he reminds us that biology is the place to answer the new questions because it tells us about what it means to be human (2000). And Dawkins is now one of the most recognized spokespersons from the life sciences declaiming about two of humanity’s most fundamental categories: faith and reason.

[15] Dawkins’s breakthrough came with the publication of The Selfish Gene. He popularized the idea of narrowing our focus from where we expect evolution to occur (the species or even the organism) to the level of the gene. Following George Williams and W.D. Hamilton, he suggests with poetic flair that evolution functions at the genetic level where replicators further their own evolutionary success by forming alliances he calls survival machines (bodies). Some thinkers critiqued Dawkins for his metaphor suggesting tiny acidic sections of a chromosome could be selfish (Midgley 1979; for his response, see Dawkins 1979). Others suggested such metaphors allow the worst sort of misunderstanding that lead to biological determinism (Lewontin, Rose and Kamin 1984, 8). However, Dawkins clearly states at the end of an important chapter: “we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (1989, 291). How much more emancipatory can a statement be? Still, the controversy continued, fueled by fears that Sociobiology would encompass all of the human sciences and culture (including the arts and religion) and replace it with the doctrine of warring alleles.

[16] But, along with his cavalier use of metaphor, his speculative theorizing with discursive tools like memetics have been contested as little more than “a fancy redescription of the phenomenon” of cultural change (Ruse 2006, 21). One critic writes that the lack of empirical findings or research programs suggests memetics is “a science in search of a subject matter” (Robert Aunger in Grafen and Ridley 2006, 178). Dawkins’s idea that cultural evolution occurs in a similar way to biologic evolution sounds less like the tenor of a biologist and more like that of a humanist. It demonstrates his ability to speculate with the best of critical theorists and places him among the company of others he might not appreciate. (Is Dawkins theorizing about memes really all the different from, say, Foucault’s use of an episteme as a knowledge category in describing the development from Renaissance to Classical to Modern discourses?) Dawkins’s neologism, though, is simple and seductive. While the unit of selection for an organism is a gene, according to Dawkins, the “unit of selection” in culture is a meme. His neologism beat other contenders and now represents any piece of cultural information that can be transmitted from one mind to another. Regardless of the scientific merit, Dawkins provides a conceptual framework to imagine how ideas propagate themselves in a Darwinian (or even Lamarckian) fashion. How does this insight help us understand how Dawkins found a platform on British television and ended up on South Park? In some cases, memes can be viewed analogous to viruses. Dawkins extends his analogy by comparing host DNA to viral DNA and suggesting that pesky viruses (like in real life) can be harmful. Another way to imagine this process is by looking at how biological viruses have been, analogically, used to describe computer “viruses.” Dawkins wants to ask if there are other similar environments so that he can suggest the human mind itself is one. His proposal is that the human mind is infected with a “mental faith virus” (Dawkins 2003, 141) and that religion is an institution filled with highly sophisticated and efficient viral memes. And god as a virus is provocative.

[17] For Dawkins, faith-based religion is a virus of the mind, the worst sort of meme possible: one that benefits itself at the expense of its host. This explains why Dawkins suggests that teaching religion to a child can be considered abuse. He asks in his book A Devil’s Chaplain what chance has a little girl of six after being sent away for weekly instruction by a Roman Catholic nun (2003, 128)? The child believes in Father Christmas; she wants to be a tooth fairy when she grows up. Dawkins argues that manipulating children’s natural gullibility to inculcate religious belief constitutes a form of child abuse. We see, then, how Dawkins’s work in evolutionary biology and cultural criticism have coalesced and given him a platform to declaim about religion. But such musings have little of the rigor of scientific thinking and more the genius of humanistic theorizing. His epidemiology of religion is no more validated than Derrida’s demonstration of the logocentricism in Western philosophy. One might argue that both are helpful and brilliant, but they are highly troublesome to old-fashioned positivists who think “theories” should be “scientific” instead of “critical.”

[18] The problem, though, is that Dawkins attempts to fight a meme war in a postmodern world where two competing meta-narratives are believed to define “modernity” according to their own strictures. One posits a god-centered modernity in which supernatural events occur and where religion plays a fundamental role in how we define our places in the universe. The other posits a secular world informed by rational science without the influence of supernatural events. Furthermore, both sides have at their disposal the mechanisms of late techno-capitalistic postmodernity: those media and economic avenues that so define our lives “in a strange new landscape”—from TV and movies, to internet blogs, to magazine and book publishing, to sports, to music, to any of the myriad social matrices in which we represent ourselves and our beliefs (Jameson 1991, xxi).

[19] This chaotic aspect of postmodern contemporary culture may explain the ornery rhetorical approach Dawkins utilizes. Let’s just say he doesn’t play nice. After a voice-over reading in The Root of All Evil? from the Old Testament of a command to kill anyone who worships another deity, Dawkins comments, “The god of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty and vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide.” He begins chapter two of The God Delusion with an edited version peppered with a bit more rhetoric. The book then dismantles the concept of the God Hypothesis, our memory of his caustic representation of Yahweh lingering in the background. Referring to this angry god, Dawkins does write “It is unfair to attack such an easy target” (2006b, 31) and then continues to do so through out the entire book.

[20] Some critics think he oversimplifies his representation of religion to attack it. In the same article Orr praises The Selfish Gene for its subtlety and its deft approach to a difficult subject, Orr takes Dawkins to task for his simplistic approach to the complex engagement of science and religion. Orr writes “the most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in a serious way,” labeling Dawkins an amateur atheist for his dismissal of theology (2007). However, what Orr reads as a criticism, Dawkins might accept as a compliment. One might imagine Dawkins responding that he doesn’t engage alchemical or astrological thought either. Why theological? A central claim of Dawkins is that we provide a space for the religious to operate because we do take them seriously in a way in which we no longer take seriously fairies or the Olympians. However, Orr reflects a salient obstacle many people have to Dawkins’s approach. The centrality of religious thought to most people’s lives on this planet suggests that more needs to be done than simply labeling religious thought irrational, then moving on (for a contrasting view with Orr, see Levitt 2007).

[21] One Anglican theologian, Oxford’s Alister McGrath, offers a response to Dawkins that privileges an understanding of theology in a way prefiguring Orr’s complaint. McGrath details his overwhelmingly positive response to The Selfish Gene when he first read it and explains, “Dawkins offers a powerful, and in my view credible, challenge to one way of thinking about creation” (2005, 13). McGrath takes up this challenge and chides Dawkins for his continuation of the conflict/warfare thesis that seems more a caricature than an accurate reflection. (McGrath is speaking about the Dawkins prior to the polemicist of The Root of All Evil and The God Delusion.) What McGrath seems to be annoyed with is not merely the dismissal of theology but the hostile rhetoric that now infuses Dawkins’s most current work with the tone of secular manifestos. In the end, McGrath acknowledges, “We all have much to learn by debating with each other.” But he calls for such conversations to be done, “graciously and accurately” (2005, 158).

[22] I imagine Dawkins purposely engages in such ungracious moves. He’s not in the business of an even-handed affair with these latest projects. And while Dawkins is no friend of irrationalism of any kind, his documentary/book campaign against the rising fundamentalism he sees sweeping the world reveals Dawkins to be an astute cultural critic who understands that to win a meme war you cannot rely on the supposed rigorous objectivity of the scientific method. What led Dawkins to draw such slick rhetorical guns? My guess: tit for tat. Dawkins knows that creationists misrepresent him and other evolutionary biologists (like his sparring partner, Stephen Jay Gould) (Dawkins 2003, 91-103). In fact, a current slogan of neo-Creationism called Intelligent Design claims that “Darwinism is in crisis” and seeks to drive a wedge within the structure of evolutionary theory to cause doubt, not to accrue new scientific knowledge but to create a space in contemporary culture for the reaffirmation of religious belief (Pennock 2001, 5-53). Regardless of the truth, scream something loud enough and say it often, and people begin to believe. Dawkins appears to have entered the battlefield, not simply as a rational scientist or an evolutionary theorist, but as a cultural critic willing to play dirty. Dawkins may be wising up to the idea that victory in this culture war may be achieved through our media channels instead of our science laboratories.

[23] Not only does The God Delusion take as its primary topic the meme of religion but so also does Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006). Dennett is a philosopher who sees Darwin’s natural selection as a universal acid that cuts through biologic and cultural concepts (1995, 63). Dennett and Dawkins, though, have a huge task. They face problems on two fronts: the secular vanguard battles an ever-increasing rise in fundamentalism across the globe with little hope that rational discourse will succeed. How do you argue with a suicide bomber or a young earth creationist? The rearguard battle might be just as difficult, though, because secular moderates want to maintain a small, but comfortable hold on the last vestiges of Neo-Platonic mystical thinking and save a space for benign forms of religion. Dawkins and Dennett have little time with either position. And because they are opposed to religious fundamentalists and secular moderates sympathetic with benign theism, they inadvertently invoke the ire of both. Surely there can be a middle ground between Dawkins and Dennett’s positions and their opponents’ where intellectual views are distinguished from socio-political views.

[24] One articulated investigation into this middle ground comes from the philosopher and evolutionary historian Michael Ruse. He helpfully cuts through the rhetoric to remind us of the obvious: you can be an evolutionist and a Christian. Ruse sees Dawkins and Dennett’s approaches as too rigid: either evolution (and atheism) or dippy thinking, god-center mysticism. He reminds us that taking Darwin seriously does not mean jettisoning metaphysics. A naturalistic epistemology does not lead to nihilism. He draws the conclusion “that you can and should step between the Charybdis of Johnson [Philip] and the Scylla of Dawkins” (Ruse 1986, 294). His opposition of creationists and arch-rationalists creates a helpful structure upon which to hang these various threads. In one examination of Dawkins, Ruse dedicates an entire chapter and titles it “Richard Dawkins: Burying the Watchmaker,” and we see from the allusion that Ruse reads Dawkins as a secular theologian who has replaced the Christian world drama of fall and redemption with the struggle of organisms adapting to their environments via the gospel of natural selection: “One might well be forgiven for concluding that, whatever the status of Christianity, secular religion is alive and well today at Oxford University (Ruse 1999, 132).

[25] But, Dawkins represents an extreme. Ruse represents the middle ground by stepping away from the complexities of philosophic and theological debate and makes a simple observation from history: Darwinian Christians have existed and still do exist. In the introduction to his look at this subject, Can a Darwinian be a Christian: the Relationship between Science and Religion (2001), Ruse simplifies the concept by showing us two things: reverends like Baden Powell and Charles Kingsley spoke in favour of Darwinism. There have been others from within science as well, from Asa Gray to R.A. Fisher to Theodosius Dobzhansky. But, these historical facts simply ground Ruse’s other observation that there is a non-confrontational intellectual space between Dawkins and Philip Johnson: that of thinkers like the evolutionary historian and theorist, Stephen Jay Gould. Gould creates two separate domains, while still retaining the privileging of science as the primary tool to interrogate the natural world. In Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould suggests the idea of NOMA, non-overlapping magisteria, or two realms, one for science and its investigation into nature, and one for religion and its investigation into metaphysical questions of ultimate value. The simplistic duality of Natur vs. Geist may appeal to some, but the categories remind us that such a construct is highly artificial, and Gould’s attempt smacks more of détente than resolution. While secular humanists may certainly abide the idea of separate domains, I imagine theologians might wonder if they have been cheated.

[26] In the end, I see Ruse’s approach avoiding the unnecessary dualism of Gould, without worrying over domains and realms of influence. But can we go further? In a post-Kuhnian world in which a wide array of social networks help determine the very discourse we use, maybe it is time to jettison such rigid categories as “science” and “religion” and, regardless of the impending problems of interdisciplinarity, stride forward toward the construction of new categories more descriptive of a world where arch-rationalists are labeled secular theologians and evolutionary theorists play the part of cultural critics. True interdisciplinarity points us toward positioning human cognition as central, and the ubiquity of language, metaphor, and discourse as fundamental to any understanding of such abstract and self-reflexive stuff as reason and faith.

[27] But this is a luxury allowed in liberal democracies where secular and religious societies both function with tolerance. In a world of Christian reconstructionism and Islamic extremism, “religion” is being hijacked for political means and affecting real lives. Dawkins may be in the forefront of battles yet to be fought and, in this way, a misunderstood maverick championing his version of reason as an alternative to a variety of cultural totalitarianisms. A big question still looms: can a heavy-handed approach to the sociology, history, or philosophy of religion help rationalists win his culture war? Or will such tactics push the devout further into defensive positions while forcing sympathetic humanists to retreat from the arena? Dawkins has chosen to take the gloves off. I wonder, though, if he can go the distance.

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Notes

[1] Wilson begins the last chapter with a slip, “Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history . . . ” (italics mine) politically unaware that “humanity” would have been a more comprehensive and accurate term, and then continues with “as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on Earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species” (1980, 271). A cursory reading of the passage reveals his ignorance (or dismissal) of gender-bias in western literature, although the potential problems humanists might have with their disciplines shrinking under biology is acknowledged at the very end with his quote from Camus.

[2] See (Gould, Lewontin et al. 1975) “These theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany. The latest attempt to reinvigorate these tired theories comes with the alleged creation of a new discipline, sociobiology.”

[3] Also see (Kitcher 1985) for an extensive critique of Sociobiology. For approaches sympathetic to Evolutionary Psychology, see Dennett 1991; Pinker 1997. And for a response to Pinker, see Fodor 2000.

[4] See (Brockman 1995) for his initial list. Also, see http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/

[5] In a review of Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the eminent biologist John Maynard Smith takes a potshot at Gould that seems out of place (in the review) and overtly hostile: “Dennett suggests that criticisms of the neo-Darwinist synthesis come, in the main, from those who are reluctant to believe that they are the product of an algorithmic process and who lust after skyhooks. First among these, he suggests, is Stephen Jay Gould. Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory” (1995). For Gould’s response, see (1997a; 1997b).

[6] For a comment from Dawkins, see (2006a). “Finally, I have repeatedly been asked what I think of South Park and of Ted Haggard’s downfall. I won’t say much about either. Schadenfreude is not an appealing emotion so, on Haggard, I’ll say only that if it wasn’t for people of his religious persuasion, people of his sexual persuasion would be free to do what they like without shame and without fear of exposure. I share neither his religious nor his sexual persuasion (that’s an understatement), and I’m buggered if I like being portrayed as a cartoon character buggering a bald transvestite. I wouldn’t have minded so much if only it had been in the service of some serious point, but if there was a serious point in there I couldn’t discern it. And then there’s the matter of the accent they gave me. Now, if only I could be offered a cameo role in The Simpsons, I could show that actor how to do a real British accent.”

[7] For a helpful introduction to evo-devo, see Carroll 2005.