Even the people now seems to be open to the idea of evolution. But
can darwintheory of natural selection explain morality, love, evil, life
on Mars, and why testicles hang outside the body? Tow gifted scientist
debate these deep mysteries.
When zoologist Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene was published 20
years ago, it practically snuffed out many readers' belief in God and in
their own importance, for it described in stunning and terrifying detail
a world where all life was merely the conveyor belt for the gene. Its
mission: to replicate itself. DNA was the fundamental and irreducible
unit of life that spun itself endlessly into the incredible diversity of
flora and fauna. Everything we hold most dear--acts of love, altruism,
the painterly beauty of the peacock's tail, the birth of a
newborn--could, according to Dawkins, be explained by the gene's attempt
to survive, and to hitch a ride on the fittest organism possible, the one
most likely to mate and reproduce. Darwinian natural selection was
Dawkins's ruling theme. The gene looked like the most purely selfish
entity one could imagine, but it was more like the Terminator--just
programmed to survive.
Since that time, Dawkins, who was recently appointed the first
Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Oxford University, has elaborated on his elegant if chilling theory in
the books The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and most recently,
Climbing Mount Improbable. As Dawkins once stated, "Darwin made it
possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Like Carl Sagan and
Stephen Hawking, Dawkins is one of those rare scientists who have
captured the popular imagination. And his particular world view has
profoundly influenced our interpretation of nature, business, love,
medicine, and life itself. Even ideas, says Dawkins, are like genes. The
fundamental unit of meaning, which he calls the "meme," may be able to
infect us like the renegade DNA of viruses. Does this mean that Nazism
was just a powerful meme, an epidemic of one nasty, highly infectious
idea?
Of late there has been an outcry against Darwin and Dawkins. Last
summer, when Commentary magazine published an essay, "The Deniable
Darwin," by David Berlinski, it elicited a flurry, of letters--from
scientists, businessmen, lawyers, chemists, biologists--so thick that the
published ones alone ran 37 pages. As one reader wrote, "You have fired a
shot in what is becoming a great moral revolution, and it will be heard
around the world."
To get to the heart of that revolution, we decided to host a debate
between Dawkins and the man who coined the term "virtual reality," Jaron
Lanier. Lanier is a computer scientist and musician, a visiting scholar
at the Columbia University department of computer science, a visiting
artist at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and a
provocative thinker on evolution, morality, and ideas. Lanier and Dawkins
met last year at the New York City home of John Brockman, a writer who
holds salons on science and culture.
Lanier sees himself as a Darwinist who has no basic quarrel with
evolutionary theory, but who doesn't believe it's the only or most apt
metaphor for our lives. According to Lanier, natural selection is only
part of the human story, and we are more than just the accidental result
of a stream of digital information encoded in our genes. In fact, what's
best about us and civilization may be our ability to thwart
evolution.
JARON LANIER: I'm worried that evolution is being used in the wrong
way by all sorts of people who otherwise have almost nothing in common.
It's become a banner for New Agers, and for many in the hard sciences.
This annoys me no end, because evolution is the only natural force that
should be understood to be evil. The evolutionary process that created us
was cruel.
RICHARD DAWKINS: Treating evolution as though it were a good thing
is a point of view advanced by English biologist Julian Huxley in the
1920s and 1930s. Huxley tried to make evolution into a kind of religion.
In contrast, his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, thought that evolution
was a thoroughly bad thing, and I agree with him. I would hold it up as
an awful warning.
JL: Here's the dilemma simply put: Most of us subscribe to the
belief that it's not possible to draw a clean line between people and the
rest of nature. Then on the other hand, we also believe that nature is
amoral, that it doesn't revolve around human et JL: Here's the dilemma
simply put: Most of us subscribe to the belief that it's not possible to
draw a clean line between people and the rest of nature. Then on the
other hand, we also believe that nature is amoral, that it doesn't
revolve around human ethical systems.
RD: Right.
JL: So it's hard to figure out the basis of our morality. Either we
find ways in which we're different from nature, or we have to be willing
to judge part of nature as evil. I believe that as a civilization we've
helped thwart evolution, and that's good. Every time we help the needy,
or person to live and pass on their genes, we've succeeded in defying the
process that created us.
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Darwin,
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evil life,
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