Chapter 2: From ‘selfish genes’ to Mother ‘Gaia’

Among the most insidious challenges to human uniqueness today are two self-proclaimed sciences, both of which first appeared in the mid-1970s. One, sociobiology, is a form of biological reductionism that tends to ascribe human agency to our genetic makeup; the other is the planetary Gaia Hypothesis, according to which human beings are ‘intelligent fleas’ that feed on the pristine body of‘Mother Earth’.

That both these challenges wear the mantle of science makes them particularly insidious. Theoretically, the scientific mande should place them at odds with the expressly anti-rational and antiscientific bias held by most antihumanists, yet diey are not. The reader who finds this state of affairs inconsistent is quite justified.

But intellectual consistency has never been a hallmark of antihumanism, still less of mysticism, necromancy, and various forms of deep ecology. In fact, by no means are ostensibly scientific antihumanists very far apart from their anti-rational counterparts. Even legitimately scientific disciplines allow for wild extrapolations into the mystical, as witness the growing number of physicists who have recendy written books professing to prove mathematically the existence of a deity, a heaven, and immortality. Science and pseudo-science alike blithely drift hand-in-hand into a shared mythopeic antihumanism. While sociobiology essentially reduces human intellectuality to a mere byproduct of ‘selfish genes’, the sweeping planetary vision of the Gaia Hypothesis trivializes human beings as mere parasites on the Earth.

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The word sociobiology seems to have been invented by E. O. Wilson, a professor of science at Harvard University and curator in entomology at the University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. An engaging writer with a solid reputation for research on ‘social insects’, Wilson’s magnum opus, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, was originally published in 1975.[16]

That was a strategic year in the evolution of the American environmental movement. The waning New Left in the eady 1970s was still sufficiently influential to exercise a radical influence on environmentally concerned young people by focusing their attention on the social causes of ecological dislocations. To any thoughtful young environmentalist at the time, it seemed patendy clear that a profit-oriented and competitive market society was plundering the planet with the serious consequences of widespread pollution and ecological dislocation.

Precisely as the New Left began to wane, a countervailing view appeared. A harshly Malthusian approach toward environmental problems emerged, principally advanced by Paul Ehrlich in 1969 in his very widely read **The Population Bomb*.*[17] Ehrlich stridently linked the causes of the environmental crisis to population growth, particulady in the so-called Third World. An entomologist-cum-ecologist, like Wilson, Ehrlich significantiy helped to sidetrack environmental concern away from serious social criticism and toward essentially biological issues, dealing with population growth as though people were asocial beings who mindlessly proliferated like fruit flies. Indeed, far from challenging the existing social order, Ehrlich and his increasingly numerous admirers called upon American governmental authorities to establish a bureau of population control — all the more scandalous because the demand for such a patently invasive bureau was made of the Nixon administration.

In this growing conflict between the socially critical tendency in the environmental movement and the crudely biologistic orientation, Wilson’s Sociobiology played a major role in tilting environmentalists toward the asocial and politically inert attitudes fostered by Ehrlich. Wilson’s work, to be sure, did not focus on population issues, but he clearly enhanced a narrowly biologistic approach toward environmental problems by reducing human behavior to the restrictive operations of genetic selection and emphasizing their role in shaping the human condition. Since 1975 his views have increasingly sedimented themselves into the minds of many literate people, particularly scientists, and they are becoming the received wisdom in a wide diversity of fields, from anthropology to social theory.

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Sociobiology is basically the theory that animal behavior — and for the purposes of our discussion, human behavior — is overwhelmingly determined by the species’ genetic makeup. This theory is not particularly new: ever since genetics became recognized as a scientific discipline, some geneticists have always ardently privileged the role of genes in determining human social and mental traits.

But in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over the respective roles of inherited as against socially conditioned traits, contemporary sociobiologists have added several new twists. E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, an Oxford University ethologist, have imparted a veritably metaphysical quality to ‘the gene’, endowing it with extraordinary autonomy, often at the expense of the organisms it presumably ‘controls’.

For Wilson as for Dawkins — whose popular work. The Selfish Gene, also appeared in 1975,[18] genes are ends in themselves more than means that contribute to the functioning of a given species. Species seem to exist mainly to perpetuate genes, to foster their well-being and development. Species, in effect, are primarily the media for genetic evolution — a crudely reductionist view that has far-reaching implications for biology and ethics.

Consider, for example, Wilson’s observation on the opening page of Sociobiology that an ‘organism does not Eve for itself’, nor is its ‘primary function ... to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier’.[19] Whether knowingly or not, Wilson essentially reduces human beings, with all their personality traits, willfulness, passions, and intellectuality, to molecular units with an intentionality of their own. His sweeping contentions advance a narrowly biochemical and genetic teleology that places fully developed and complex organisms at the service of self-perpetuating and developing DNA molecules. Indeed, in one of Wilson’s pithier statements, an ‘organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA’.[20]

Nor did Wilson modify this simplistic view of organisms three years later in his Pulitzer prize-winning On Human Nature,[21] despite stormy debates about the soundness and reactionary implications of his ‘synthesis.’ In On Human Nature we learn that ‘no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.’[22]

What is clearly disturbing about these passages is that Wilson’s teleological bias is simply causality reduced to the narrow molecular level. He exhibits little appreciation of any evolutionary tendency that imparts value to subjectivity, intelligence, creativity, and ethics, apart from the service they perform to the well-being of genes. Indeed, where cultural and subjective attributes exist, they are mainly the work of genes, which are ‘intent’, as it were, on perpetuating their own kind through behavioral traits favorable to themselves. Entire levels of organic development are dissolved into DNA, much as a reductionist in physics might dissolve all phenomena into atomic or subatomic particles.

With the tunnel vision characteristic of so many sociobiologists, Robert Wright, in The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994),[23] suggests that compassion, love, parenting, and the like have genetic sources, so that ethical behavior merely serves a genetic self-interest that cannot be grounded in humanistic principles and sentiments. Using this kind of reasoning, one may claim that there are genes for capitalism, socialism, conservatism, liberalism, racism, sexism, and fascism.

And if one is a sociobiologist, why not ascribe social forms to humanity’s genetic makeup? Societies and movements that have used sociobiologistic ascriptions in their ideology have indeed existed. But by what magic wand do sociobiologists decide that some societies and ideas are genetically determined while others are not? How to determine the extent to which a society or idea is biologically offensive? Is it based merely on the personal inclinations of the sociobiologist? For many sociobiologists, in fact, the mere existence of various social phenomena like capitalistic egoism and socialistic altruism seems to suffice as proof that our genes are responsible for them. Indeed, in Wilson’s view,

the human mind is constructed in a way that locks it inside this fundamental [genetic] constraint and forces it to make choices with a purely biological instrument. If the brain evolved by natural selection, even the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process.... The essence of the argument, then, is that the brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct its assembly . The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.[24]

Self-evidently, Wilson is placing the cart before the horse — the autonomy of the gene before the seemingly heteronomous organism it steers so automatically. Radically inverting Wilson’s formulation, we can far more plausibly claim that genes which abet the increasing sophistication of brain power and the mind tend to free a species, like humanity, from iron genetic constraints such as sociobiology would impose upon it. Given sufficient rationality in human beings, we can more plausibly claim that they have evolved a degree of free will, intentionality, speculative insight, and ethical standards so that their behavioral traits are effectively removed from their dependence on the ‘molecular architecture’ that is supposed to ‘automatically steer’ them.

This view, so easily justified by humanity’s ideals, aspirations, and social development, helps us to recognize the fact that we have developed as a species into a realm of second nature — a moral, intellectual and social realm that sociobiology crudely reduces to molecules arranged in a double helix. That sociobiologists are obliged to offer obeisances to nongeneric factors in accounting for human behavior is due less to the flexibility of their views than to the untenability of their simplistic biologistic premises. For if their premises were consistently carried to their logical conclusion, highly advanced mammals and human beings would indeed be reduced to mere vehicles for DNA with a metaphysical autonomy of its own.

Wilson’s mechanism and reductionism are often as crude as Descartes’s machine-like view of the body, however liberally he sprinkles his pages with caveats, personal opinions, and asides designed to soften the genetic tunnel vision of his argument. His chef d’oeuvre, Sociobiology, is riddled with behavioral constraints that rest on genetic predeterminations, indeed with anthropomorphic metaphors that seem to impart to genes an intellectuality and intentionality that properly belong in the realm of culture and to complex forms of social life.

The first chapter of Sociobiology, for example, is entitled ‘The Morality of the Geneb a phrasing that beguiles the reader to suppose that genes are not only sovereign in determining the behavior of all life forms but, given the sizable number of amoral people in the world, possess a self-awareness beyond that of the very animals they presumably ‘construct’. This grossly unwarranted phrasemaking, I would hold, is more misleading than clarifying.

It is highly unlikely that human beings could transcend their ‘molecular structure’ if, as Wilson explains in On Human Nature, ‘the [human] intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to promo te the survival of human genes.’[25] In fact, the human intellect was ‘constructed’ not only ‘to understand itself’ but to understand the world and even the cosmos upon which it reflects — indeed to create art, music, literature, and philosophy, which in no way serve to perpetuate the existence of its ‘molecular structure’.

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The title of Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, speaks for itself. To most literate people, selfishness is a distinctly psychological orientation, not simply a metaphor for biological self-maintenance and self-preservation. Nor is there any reason to believe that Dawkins is using the term as a metaphor. The opening pages of the book disabuse us of the suspicion that Dawkins regards genes as anything but crass egotists. ‘The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes,’ writes Dawkins; ‘... I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected of a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.’ Moreover: ‘ [t]his gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.’[26] Thus morality has a simplistic one-to-one relationship with genic morality, rooted in molecular ‘selfishness* that allows for no independence on the part of living beings.

Lest this dazzling concept be left to stand on its own precarious ground, Dawkins quickly modifies it. ‘However, as we shall see’he adds, ‘there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. “Special” and “limited” are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sensed.’[27]

This is an extraordinary passage — partly because of the unstated conditions it presupposes, and partly, too, because it seems to worsen rather than mitigate the Dawkins claim that genic selfishness usually gives rise to human selfishness. In Dawkins’ world, genes are not only selfish but manipulative to boot. They have subtle ways — these devilishly clever DNA molecules! — of getting us to behave in seemingly altruistic ways, on behalf of their own egotistical ends. If this conclusion seems like a distortion of Dawkins’ views, the reader who consults Dawkins’ book is regaled with chapter titles like ‘The gene machine’, ‘Genemanship’, and, of course, the ‘Immortal coils’ of DNA.

I will not try to second-guess Dawkins, Wilson, or for that matter any sociobiologists on whether they impute any real morality, emotional state, or intentionality to genes apart from their specific biochemical functions. If the selfishness of a gene is causally related to human selfishness, and a gene can exhibit the guile to use individual altruism to serve its own egotistical ends, I fail to see what doubts remain about the autonomy sociobiologists impute to human genic equipment.

Yet in the closing pages of a book structured almost consistently around a genocentric interpretation of animal behavior, Dawkins suddenly reverses his entire thrust. Making no discernible argument so far as I can see to support his case, he singles out humans to advance the claim that culture can indeed supplant the authority of genetics over a wide range of behavior. After some two hundred pages of support for the sovereignty of selfish genes, the reader suddenly learns that almost .all of Dawkins’ contentions can be annulled by the human species. ‘Are there any reasons for supposing our own species to be unique?’ he asks. To which he responds with a proud ‘yes.’[28]

What, it may be asked, gives us this privilege? ‘We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth,’ Dawkins responds,

and, if necessary ’ the selfish memes [units of cultural transmission] of our indoctrination . We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism — something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.[29]

Dawkins’ ‘memes’, in fact, are the cultural analogs of genes, transferred from the biological to the social by means of the same naive atomism that characterizes Wilson’s ‘molecular machinery’. Like genes, memes are mimetic replicators; they duplicate cultural traits by means of imitation, just as genes duplicate biological traits by means of sexual reproduction. Accordingly: ‘[j]ust as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in a broad sense, can be called imitation.’[30]

Not surprisingly, given sociobiology’s highly deterministic way of dunking, they too have a life of their own.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell .,. Imitation, in the broad sense, is how memes can replicated.[31]

But what of their ‘copying-fidelity’? After all, a song, which Dawkins regards as a meme, is altered ever so slightly each time it is sung until, perhaps, it no longer sounds like its original. Here, Dawkins acknowledges ‘I am on shaky ground’.[32] Indeed, taking Dawkins’ forceful comparisons of selfish genes and selfish people too seriously causes the ground beneath us to shake. Before long we are confused over what is metaphor and what is not in this thoroughly curious argument. In a grand finale, Dawkins tells us that ‘we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes [!] them behave rather as if they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose.... [But] the idea of purpose is only a metaphor, but we have already seen what a fruitful metaphor it is.’[33] The same, I suppose, could be said for memes, which, like genes that struggle with rivals, compete with each other in the ‘computers’ that are ‘human brains.’[34]

The Selfish Gene, which opens with an association between genetic selfishness and human selfishness, closes by producing a certain vertigo — it may be a geno-mimetic reaction — caused by Dawkins’ failure to explain where his metaphor ends and his reality begins. ‘Genes have no foresight,’ he warns us. ‘They do not plan ahead. Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is ail there is to it.’[35] Genes and memes float in the air with the same stability of a kite in a hurricane. Such stirring acknowledgments of humanity’s uniqueness are rare.

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What we certainly learn, even with Dawkins’ memes, is that culture is reducible to biosocial atoms — cultural particles, so to speak — that are no less reductionist than genes. This close analogy between culture, indeed of society in its broadest sense, and genes is as stifling as a genetic interpretation of human behavior.

That The Selfish Gene plays into the antihumanist leveling of human beings to all biota, despite Dawkins’ protestations of human uniqueness, is suggested by Robert L. Trivers’ foreword to the book. Trivers, who seems to enjoy Dawkins’ highest esteem, is at pains to inform us:

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection. Within each species some individuals leave more surviving offspring than others, so that the inheritable traits (genes) of the reproductively successful become more numerous in the next generation. This is natural selection: the nonrandom differential reproduction of genes . Natural selection has built us, and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our own identities.[36]

So much for human uniqueness — and memes. Antihumanists nevertheless belie their very act of leveling human beings to the simplest organisms by burdening our species with the extraordinarily unique responsibility of, as Trivers put it, ‘understanding’ sweeping biological facts £ if we are to comprehend our own identities’. Although humans are ‘objectively’ interchangeable with chimps, in Trivers’ view, only our species, it would seem, is competent to understand that all-encompassing reality or comprehend its own identity. Chimps may lack even a knowledge of death, as recent evidence has shown, let alone a comprehension of natural selection. But antihumanist protocol insists that there is no objective basis for elevating humanity over the most elevated of apes in the primate world.

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Wilson seems far less equivocal than Dawkins about humanity’s inability to transcend its genetic ensemble through culture, even through morality. He asks:

Can the cultural evolution of higher ethical values gain a direction and momentum of its own and completely replace genetic evolution? I think not. The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance ivith their effects on the human gene pool. Tlie brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior— like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it — is the circuitous technique by which human genetic matenal has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.[37]

If Wilson’s views are ultimately unequivocal, he nonetheless peppers the most dogmatic passages in his book with highly equivocal sentences. To the question of whether ‘higher ethical values’ — not mere customs, opinions, or moral injunctions — can transcend the grip of genocentiicity, Wilson responds with an opinion, then proceeds to graduate his opinion into a fact by asserting that ‘genes hold culture on a leash’. It may be a ‘long leash’, to be sure, but even ‘higher ethical values’ (which Wilson has mutated into mere ‘values’) are ‘inevitably’ constrained by ‘the human gene pool’. Conclusion? ‘Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function’ than to keep ‘human genetic material’ intact.[38] These careless remarks, taken from his strategic chapter, ‘Altruism’, in On Human Nature, reveal how Wilson advances a mere opinion to support liis genocentric approach — then changes the subject.

In the debates that followed the publication of Sociobiology, Wilson’s capacity to mingle dogmatic statements with equivocal adjectives and subclauses, often shifting the scope of his arguments and backtracking to less committed positions, made it virtually impossible to subject Iris views to critical interpretation. Ajnidst a flurry of claims that his critics ‘misinterpreted’, ‘maligned’, or ‘misstated’ his ideas, Wilson managed to wear so many different ideological hats that it was often impossible to determine the head they covered. We shall see that this game of musical chairs is played out repeatedly in sociobiology and even more outrageously in other antihumanist works.

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The subject of altruism vexes sociobiologists for obvious reasons: its existence militates against the image of selfish genes (a term Wilson also uses as well as Dawkins) that ostensibly produce selfish individuals. In that case, why do human beings ever behave altruistically at all? How can selfish genes explain the common fact that people exhibit concern for others, indeed for individuals whom they do not know as well as their immediate circle of friends?

In no small part, the answer to these questions depends upon how we define altruism. Webster’s Third International Dictionary calls it ‘uncalculated consideration of, regard for, or devotion to others’ interests, sometimes in accordance with an ethical principled This reasonably balanced definition patently applies to the majority of altruistic acts, from personal charity to a commitment to social ideals, whose memes are perhaps too intertwined with genes and other memes to be extricable.

By contrast, sociobiology’s definition of altruism is far removed from the balanced and commonplace. Wilson’s On Human Nature defines altruism as ‘self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others. Altruism may be entirely rational, or automatic and unconscious, or conscious but guided by innate emotional responses.’ [39] His elucidation of altruism is one of the most genocentrically convoluted arguments I have encountered in the antihumanistic literature.

Thus the chapter tided ‘Altruism’ opens with an allusion to the ambiguities of religious martyrdom and its high estate in Christian precept. It seems the Church found it difficult to reconcile an elite of martyrs with its belief in the deity’s egalitarian view of humanity as a whole. Wilson thereupon obliges us to ‘drop to all fours’, as Voltaire once caustically remarked that the noble savage’ in Rousseau’s writings inclined him to do, by showing that altruism usually becomes selfishness. We sanctify true altruism in order to reward it’, he observes, and thus to make it less than true, and by that means to promote its recurrence in others. Human altruism, in short, is riddled to its foundations with the expected mammalian ambivalence’ [40] — a sufficiently ambiguous expression if there ever was one!

Whether rewarding true altruism makes it less than true I cannot say. What does Wilson regard as true altruism? The really authentic stuff, I take it, is ‘self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others’,[41] as his glossary claims, as exemplified by Christian martyrs. Thus, true altruism is depicted as a form of grisly self-sacrifice — as, for example, saints boiled in oil by pagan barbarians or thrown to Hons.

But is this really true altruism? Martyrs to Christianity or, for that matter, Islam and other crusading refigions, were probably less concerned with ‘the benefit of others’ than they were with their personal salvation and the rewards (in the case of Islam, very material ones) of a future life.

Lest we are too puzzled by the phrase ‘expected mammalian ambivalence’, Wilson quickly plunges into portrayals of the most supreme kinds of true altruism: soldiers who bodily throw themselves upon five enemy hand grenades to shield their comrades, who rescue others from battie sites ‘at the cost of certain death to themselves’, and other such fatal decisions.[42] Very few such cases are illustrative of ‘expected mammafian ambivalence’, least of all in attempts to ‘rescue others’ in battle situations with the certainty of being killed.

But let us agree that passion, a pure impulse whether of anger or affection, can inspire true altruism, as can a genuine, sober concern for the well-being of other human beings. In fact, the most sustained examples of altruism occur in daily social Hfe. Altruism is also found in people who engage in struggles for freedom, be they the volunteers who join armies to oppose tyranny and social privilege at grave risk to their lives, or the revolutionary dinamateros in the Spanish Civil War of 1936—39 who exploded Francoist tanks with dynamite strapped to their own waists. We need not turn to warfare to find extraordinary examples of altruism — take for example the civil rights workers who drove into the American South in racially mixed busses and faced armed white mobs, vicious pohee, and pohee dogs in civil rights marches..

Wilson takes no note of such commonplace examples of everyday altruism. Indeed, a reflective and abiding concern for social justice and freedom is perhaps a truer expression of sustained altruistic behavior than are impulsive actions, heroic as they may be, which are Hkely to be driven by the passions of the moment. Is it possible that such everyday and abiding behavior reveals ‘a transcendental quafity that distinguishes human beings from animals’, to use Wilson’s words? Perhaps it does, ‘to put the best possible construction on the matter,’ Wilson generously advises us, but he then warns that ‘scientists are not accustomed to declaring any phenomenon off limits’[43] — a gratuitous remark, I may add, since few responsible people would want scientists, like Wilson himself, to take recourse to the transcendental as they perform their work.

Whereupon Wilson proceeds to survey presumably altruistic forms of animal behavior (‘minor’ altruism, to be sure) in robins, thrushes, and titmice, who alert one another that a hawk is approaching, by changes in posture (crouching) or acoustical signals (whistling). Is this altruism, or is it self-protection? Or fear? Alas, we lack the abifity to penetrate into the minds of robins, thrushes, and titmice, but Wilson somehow seems to know that instead of issuing a warning to alert other birds, ‘the caller would be wiser not to betray its presence but rather remain silent.’[44]

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Allow me to suggest that attributing altruism to birds is too anthropomorphic to allow for credufity. It is no less anthropomorphic for Wilson to tell us that in three recorded cases at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, chimpanzees have taken over the care of the orphaned infants of their deceased sibfings. Is this altruism, or is it a sibfing recognition that might be expected in an ape that has been called man’s closest cousin?

Far more striking, in fact, is what our ‘closest cousins’ do not do that human beings do with extraordinary frequency. They never share food, except for meat after a kill, which is idiosyncratic at best: it normally requires a great deal of ‘begging’ and cajoling on the part of the hunter’s companion to gain the meat. Equally important, chimpanzees normally distance themselves from an ill or injured member of their group and leave them to survive their infirmities on their own. They exhibit no knowledge of death: when they capture prey, such as a pig or an infant baboon, chimpanzees have been known to literally eat it alive, despite the victim’s struggles and cries before a vital organ of its body is chewed away.

I am not trying to characterize chimpanzees as ‘cruel’, a value-laden term that has no meaning in the non-human world. Chimpanzees are busy being c him panzees. I am, however, criticizing anthropomorphic primatologists for overemphasizing the extent to which chimpanzees are like people, searching out qualities in them that render them affines of humans, and attributing to them moral responsibilities and cognitive abilities that they probably do not possess. A very considerable amount of material has been published about chimpanzee ‘wars’ and ‘sacrifices’ that reads far too much human behavior into a species that is removed from humans by more than five million years of evolutionary development.[45]

Wilson’s authority on the mindless world of genetically programmed bugs is unquestionable, although his beguiling stories about ‘kamikaze attacks’ by bees on intruders and African termite ‘soldiers’ whose ‘caste’ members ‘are quite literally walking bombs’ seem too metaphorical.[46] Even Wilson, I should note, does not accept an equivalence between the behavior of insects and that of human beings; indeed, he prudently warns that ‘sharing the capacity for extreme sacrifice does not mean that the human mind and the “mind” of an insect (if such exists) work alike.’[47]

But Wilson’s point is that inasmuch as kamikaze bees and soldier termites, like all creatures capable of making the ‘extreme sacrifice’ for the common good, systematically. self-destruct and hence do not pass on their own genes to others, these ‘self-sacrificing’ or ‘altruistic’ bugs make it possible for their ‘more fertile brothers and sisters to flourish’. In fact, there are two kinds of genes among the many that control insect behavior: ‘selfish genes’ and ‘altruistic genes’.[48] And if we are to accept the tide of Christopher Will’s recent book on genetics, there are ‘wise genes’ as well.[49]

But how can self-destructive altruistic genes ever survive the harsh imperatives of natural selection when they exist in ‘competition’ with the self-perpetuating selfish genes? Wilson invokes ‘kin selection’ to meet this challenge: that is, genetically governed behavior by which individuals sac rifi ce themselves to enhance the survival of their kin, who possess altruistic as well as selfish genes. And with kin selection at hand, Wilson now feels that it is ‘natural, then, to ask whether through kin selection the capacity for altruism has also evolved in human beings’.[50]

Wilson’s response, of course, is an unqualified yes. Among humans, he allows, ‘the form and intensity of altruistic acts are to a large extent culturally determined’. Actually, they would seem to be ‘culturally determined’ to an immense extent, or as Wilson puts it: ‘Human social evolution is obviously more cultural than genetic. ’ To one who has read so far in On Human Nature, culture’s power over genetic imperatives would not at all be ‘obvious’, and, in fact, lest we take Wilson’s fleeting emphasis on culture too seriously, we leam that ‘the underlying emotion, powerfully manifested in virtually all human societies, is what is considered to evolve through genes’.[51]

What is vexing about this passage, all its backtracking aside, is that human altruism, conceived as a concern for other people and the human condition generally, is by no means reducible to the underlying emotions that are considered to evolve through genes. Indeed, innumerable thinkers and many revolutionary social movements in the past were guided not by kin selection but by great ideals, be they ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ or ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’. For profoundly cultural reasons they evoked strong passions in many idealists and produced passionate social upheavals, guided by great ideas that had no evident association with genes or memes. Yes — human genetic equipment was involved in the emergence of passions, as were hormones like epinephrine. But the evolution of these passions, their sophistication, and the extent to which they powered ideas rooted in intellection were too evidently cultural to reduce to genetic influences.

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What is fundamentally wrong with Wilson’s genocentrity is that concepts such as ‘selfishness’ and ‘altruism’ presuppose the existence of a culture that gives them meaning and a morality that explains why primordial ‘underlying emotions’ can be active in social causes. If one reduces society from a human phenomenon to mere aggregations of living things — not only organisms but genes and memes — culture is inconceivable. We would have a collection of living beings, but not a society organized into mutable institutions.

Sociobiology, with its atomized genes and memes, patently deals with collections, aggregations, and heaps of organisms rather than with authentic societies characterized by a radically different level of association and organization of superficially discrete beings — specifically, human beings. Human beings exist in relationships with each other that are not defined by genes alone, if at all. In this respect, sociobiology is not social at all. It deals with biology, specifically with genetics, and gives them a social patina, generally by using antiiropomorphic metaphors. It describes genes not only as “selfish’ but as ‘altruistic’ and even as ‘wise’. Given this luxurious moral life of genes, it seems impossible that we are mote than mere ‘genetic machines’, and yet we plainly are, just as we are not simply atoms, electrons, or protons.

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Inasmuch as genes determine human development, aggression, sexual behavior, altruism, and religion, to cite the principal concerns of On Human Nature, how are modern humans to cope with a genetic ensemble that evolved when human beings, according to Wilson, were ‘Ice-Age hunter-gatherers’? How can we readjust our glacial genes to deal with the era of the information superhighway? The answer, Wilson tells us, is an exercise of will’.[52] Where will this ‘will’ come from? Perhaps it will come from a gene that makes for obduracy, intentionality, purpose, and who knows what other willful character traits that lurk in the human genome, not to speak of one that will evolve. If evolutionary genetics places a high premium on adaptation, as do all theories of natural selection on which Wilson relies, the genetic sources of will may be uncertain indeed.

But by what right can Wilson claim that the human genetic ensemble was shaped by Ice-Age hunter-gatherers when a substantial proportion of Homo sapiens sapiens never left the warm climate of Afiica in which they evolved? Indeed, they may never have encountered the glaciation that covered much of the northern hemisphere through the Pleistocene. Amusingly, Wilson’s theory might be mistakenly seen as a risible converse of that of Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York, the chairman of the school’s African-American studies program, who has gained considerable notoriety for emphasizing that blacks, evolving in sunny climates, have ‘shiny genes’ by comparison with the ‘dull genes’ of white ‘ice people’, apparently rendering Africans innately superior to Europeans.

Such genetic ping-pong would be silly were it not redolent of reactionary ideologies that ax less sophisticated than modern sociobiology. Needless to say, an animal’s genetic make-up plays a major role in guiding its behavior. The simpler the life-form, the more thoroughly genes determine its actions and the more limited is its genetic repertoire.

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Sociobiologists are at their worst when they try to deal with social phenomena. In Wilson’s glossary, the definitions — and their implications — of words like society, hierarchy’, dominance, aggregation, band, caste, communal, and competition, reveal his orientation toward social structures and ethical phenomena. Where these concepts have clearly social premises, Wilson tends to restrict them to narrow biological definitions, in a reduction of social phenomena to genetics that obscures the discontinuities as well as the continuities between biology and society.

Consider, for example, Wilson’s definition of society, which he describes as ‘a group of individuals belonging to the same species and organized in a cooperative manner.’[53] Only a devout acolyte would ffil to require Wilson to explain what he means by organized and cooperative, two culturally, philosophically, and ethically laden words that have far-reaching implications in social theory. Different societies have been organized and cooperative in very different ways — as despotisms, democracies, republics, monarchies, patriarchies, and the like. Nowhere does Wilson tell us what kind of cooperation and organization he means. What would seem to count, in his definition, is whether a society’s form of cooperation and organization make it genetically fit to survive the challenges of natural selection.

All of Wilson’s effusions about his liberal beliefs to the contrary, socio-biological thinking is crude. Yet given the increasing fascination of scholars and the public with genetics these days, sociobiology is making its way into many social disciplines that were once distinguished for a relative degree of sobriety. To cite only one of many examples: a recent issue of Current Anthropology, a highly reputable scholarly quarterly, contains a discussion article entitled ‘On Human Egalitarianism’, in which the authors, puzzled by the virtual ubiquity of egalitarian values and institutions among hunter—gatherers, assume that the ‘ancestors of H. sapiens’ were innately ‘hierarchically oriented’, and that ‘cultural elaborations of food sharing, pair bonding, and egalitarianism [are grounded] in inherited tendencies’, in natural selection rather than consciousness.[54] So widespread is sociobiology today that we are now told that apparently there are genes for hierarchy and domination on the one hand and genes for egalitarianism and food sharing on the other. Perhaps one set of genes is dominant and the other is recessive, or perhaps dominance depends upon the adaptive advantages the genes confer in natural selection. Whether consciously or not, the proponents of such sociobiological interpretations — and they are growing steadily in number — diminish the role of ethics and social relations in determining human behavior and social development.

Hierarchy is in fact a social term — hierarchies are found nowhere in first nature. A hierarchy is based on domination by institutionalized strata, such as gerontocracies, patriarchies, warrior sodalities, shamanistic guilds, priesdy corporations, and the like over subjugated strata who are visibly underprivileged on an ongoing basis. To dissolve hierarchies into the person of an alpha chimpanzee, gorilla, or baboon, as so many primatologists do, is to make a mockery of a term which has its origins in pyramidal ecclesiastical structures. A hierarch goes with an institution such as a monarchy, bureaucracy, or even a stable patriarchal family relationships that are not institutionalized in the animal world.

Protests by sociobiologists to the contrary notwithstanding, they eventually do reduce human beings to ‘gene machines , and by extrapolation, they deal with society, mind, and great social ideals from a preponderantly genocentric viewpoint. We do not have to turn to Max Weber to lament the ‘disenchantment of the wodd’; it is very much under way because of the genetic noose sodobiology is tightening over humanity and its greatest endeavors.

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Before leaving the realm of the genetic, let us examine the so-called ‘microcosmos’ itself, as seen through the. eyes of two antihumanists who dismiss human beings and their achievements as mere byproducts of bacteria and cells.

This thesis has been strongly promoted by Lynn Margulis, professor of biology at Boston University, who, in a book entided Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution written in collaboration with Dotion Sagan, really puts humanity in its trivial place.[55] Indeed, the real wonders of biotic evolution, Margulis and Sagan argue, are the microorganisms that have been on the earth for five-sixths of organic evolution, in contrast to hum an s, who have been around for only one thirtieth of 1 per cent of that time. Bacteria hold first place in the drama of life — whereas we humans are ‘a sort of mammalian weed, with all our accomphshments and personality we are still the result of eons of microbial evolution’[56] — which presumably puts us in our place.

Precisely why Margulis and Sagan selected microbes over the more basic and older chemicals that make up life is puzzling. Carbon, so indispensable to the formation, sustenance, and evolution of organic things has been in the universe for many billions of years, much closer to twelve billion than to a measly four or five. Certainly hydrogen, no less important than carbon, has been around even longer. Ammo acids have been around for so long that a figure as small as four billion hardly does justice to their longevity. Are they less important to life than microbes are to recendy arrived humans?

This numbers game rests on the omnipresent fallacy of mistaking a necessary condition for advanced life-forms for their sufficient condition. There is nothing stunningly new in the fact that cells of one kind or another are needed to produce multicellular life-forms. Nor is there anything stunningly new in the fact that microbes of a vast variety and in staggering numbers are necessary to render complex multicellular life-forms functional. Yes, the earth would be covered with nothing but debris if wastes were not broken down, recreated, and reworked by microbes, just as it would be very messy indeed widiout trillions of ants to reprocess detritus into forms usable to ants and other life-forms.

One may reasonably wonder, to be sure, how much of a mess would exist in the first place if complex animals were not present to produce it. Even more troubling, why would microbes be of any interest at all if they did not produce, facilitate, and help — as well as injure through disease — complex life-forms that engage in a good deal more than the biochemical and reproductive activity of microbes — such as thinking, for example? or exhibiting acute self-consciousness? or knowing the world, or exploring it, or exercising will?

When microbes can do these exceptional things, they may indeed be considered the marvels of life. Yet Margulis and Sagan seem to give primacy to microbes largely because they are indispensable to the development and existence of such biota as mammals, primates, and of course, human beings. Indeed, as one chapter of their book breathlessly follows another, describing how during dramatic environmental changes organic molecules combine to produce cell membranes, DNA, RNA, anaerobic cells, and aerobic ones, we are always reminded that human beings are dependent upon microcosms and their ability to survive human depredations.

Thus we ax told with much aplomb that ‘the visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm’s activities.... Grasping as best we can the formidable powers of the biosphere in which we live out our lives, it is difficult to retain the delusion that without our help nature is helpless.... We may pollute the air and waters for our grandchildren and hasten our own demise, but this will exert no effect on the continuation of the microcosm’ which, in fact, ‘is still evolving around us and within us. You could even say ... that the microcosm is evolving as us.’[57]

It is a novelty to learn that many people these days harbor the ‘delusion that without our help nature is helpless’. Margulis and Sagan engage in the usual overstatement of humanistic views all the more easily to demolish them. It is no less a novelty to learn we, like all multicellular life-forms from jellyfish to wolves, are simply an ‘overgrown portion of the microcosm’. That we cannot function without microcosms is a trite biological fact; their activities in maintaining the earth, the biosphere, and even our digestion of food are well-known facts of paramount importance. But why not include all the chemical elements that make up our genes and protoplasm?

Margulis and Sagan seem to confuse ‘information’ with wisdom, intelligence, and innovation. We are told:

For sheer scope, human information systems have only Just begun to approach the ancient bacterial systems which have been trading bits of information like a computer network with a memory accumulated over billions of years of continuous operation. As we move from a purely medical view of microbes to an understanding of them as our ancestors, as planetary elders [!], our emotions also change, from fear and loathing to respect and awe. Bacteria invented [!] fermentation, the wheel in the form of the proton rotary motor, sulfur breathing, photosynthesis, and nitrogen fixation, long before our evolution. They are not only highly social beings, but behave as a sort of worldwide decentralized democracy, Celb basically remain separate, but can connect and trade genes with organisms of even exceedingly different backgrounds. Realizing that human individuals also remain basically separate but can connect and trade knowledge with very different others may be taking a step toward the ancient wisdom [!] of the microcosm.’[58]

This passage, to speak frankly, is entirely anthropomorphic. We have no reason to believe that the parallels drat Margulis and Sagan draw between microcosmic attributes and human behavior have anything in common, that microbes exhibit any ability that compares with the foresight that went into invention of the wheel, institutionalized social relations, ‘a worldwide decentralized democracy’, reflective ‘wisdom’, and self-conscious individuality.

Having indulged in this pean to microbial inventiveness, wisdom, and democracy, Margulis and Sagan invite us to regard ‘man’ as ‘the consummate egotist’.

Human beings are not particularly special, apart, or alone....It may be a blow to our collective ego, but we are not masters of life perched on the final rung of an evolutionary ladder.... Objective scholars, if they were whales or dolphins, would place humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans in the same taxonomic group. There is no physiological basis for the classification of human beings into their own family (Hominidae — the manapes or apemen), apart from that of the great apes (Pongidae — the gibbons, siamangs, gorillas, chimps, and orangutans). Indeed, an extraterrestrial anatomist would not hesitate to put us together with the apes in the same subfamily or even genus.[59]

To argue down this taxonomic rhetoric demeaning the human species as a mere primate would be an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Neither whales nor dolphins can ever be objective scholars for a multitude of anatomical, environmental, and even mental reasons diat actually explain why human beings are indeed unique and why apes must be placed in a separate taxonomic family. Indeed, evolutionary biologists can easily make fools of themselves when they use microbiology, anatomy, and taxonomy to subvert the uniqueness of human beings, whose biological evolution has opened up cultural development.

Still, Margulis and Sagan do not deny us the benefit of a few homilies. We should be consoled to know that if human beings became extinct, if even all primates disappeared, ‘the microcosm would still abound in those assets (e.g. nervous systems, manipulative appendages) diat were leveraged into intelligence and technology in the first place.’[60] These ‘assets’ would not be nervous systems or ‘appendages’, however, since Margulis and Sagan seem to regard any microbial trait, such as flagella, as means of communication comparable to a nervous system and a means of locomotion comparable to bipedal walking. Alas, flagella do not constitute arms or legs; they are simply whiplike appendages that give greater motility to microbes and cells. One might, with equal superficiality, regard the wind as a means of communication for the earth and waves as seaside vocalizations.

So abundant are ‘human’ characteristics among microbes that should it come to pass that humanity is destroyed by a nuclear bomb and its radioactive fallout, Margulis and Sagan console us with their ‘doubt that the overall health and underlying stability of the microcosm would be affected.... Nor would the destruction of the ozone layer, permitting entry of torrents of ultraviolet radiation, ruin the microbial underlayer. Indeed, it would probably augment it, since radiation stimulates the bacterial transfer of genes.’[61]

I will not dwell on the various scenarios Margulis and Sagan offer for a ‘future supercosm’ in which, among other possibilities, technology gains such autonomy that it masters humans rather than the reverse and carries ‘the wet, warm environment of the pre-Phanerozoic [or Present Era] microcosm into a future as fascinatingly nonhuman as the past.’[62] Exactly what will constitute ‘fascination’ or who will be ‘fascinated’ when human beings are not around remains something of a puzzle — unless computers are given the emotional as well as the mental equipment to replicate these distinctiy human attributes.

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If sociobiology has effectively reduced human beings to ‘gene machines’ and micro cosmology seems to reduce them to bacteria, the Gaia Hypothesis reduces them to ‘intelligent fleas that infest’ Mother Earth or, more theistically, ‘Gaia’. The image of humanity as fleas appears in James Lovelock’s stridendy antihumanistic 1988 book, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Planet.[63]

Much, of the science Lovelock brings to the Gaia Hypothesis (as he called it on the inspired suggestion of a novelist friend, William Golding) seems to be basically sound. Dating from the 1970s, it advances the hypothesis that life over the course of organic evolution has interacted very creatively with its inorganic or abiotic environment. The earth as we know it today and as it has been for many millions of years was not in any sense ‘given’ to human beings; life-forms played a decisive role in creating it. Thus ‘the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and the crust of the Earth are regulated at a state comfortable for life because of the behavior of living organisms’ . Specifically, a homeostatic mechanism of feedback loops between the earth’s biota and its abiotic environment keeps the acidity, temperature, oxidation state, and ‘certain aspects of rocks and waters’ constant at any given time. This close coupling of biota and its environments suggests that the planet’s biosphere and its abiotic realm actually constitute a distinct system, ‘Gaia’. [64]

This thesis is plausible and inviting. But like a number of earlier Gaians, Lovelock, in my view, is a reductionist — albeit on a more cosmic scale than sociobiologists and microcosmologists. And he is a misanthrope. ‘There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth’s surface between living and nonliving matter,’ he tells us. ‘There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the “material” environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells’.[65] Bypassing the graded but highly qualitative differences between non-living and living ‘matter’ for a simplistic ‘hierarchy’ of energy levels, Lovelock’s notion of Gaia exhibits no real concern for or interest in specific life-forms. Given the confusion that permeates New Age thinking, the fact that the Gaia Hypothesis is even more simplistic than Descartes’ view of life has not deterred its acolytes, including Lynn Margulis, from hailing it as a new view of reality.

Admittedly, the biosphere is indispensable to the existence of Gaia, but Gaia nonetheless ‘is not a synonym for the biosphere..... Still less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is simply the collection of all individual living organisms.’ Calling biota a collection is indicative of a quantitative antihumanist orientation that sees ‘heaps’ and ‘aggregates’ rather than self-transformative organisms that defy the narrow physicalist mentality of positivistic scientists. Yet for Lovelock Gaia emerged with life in its earliest forms ‘and extends into the future as long as life persists’.[66]

Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia contains an interesting account of the Earth’s evolution, from its Archeon to its Middle and Modern age, in which we finally arrive at ‘man’ and ‘his’ doings. The fact that, for Lovelock, specific life forms are merely the fleeting cells of a superorganismic body permits his antihumanism to run riot. ‘Our humanistic concerns about the poor of the inner cities or the Third World,’ he declares, ‘and our near-obscene obsession with death, suffering, and pain as if these were evil in themselves — these thoughts divert the mind from our gross and excessive domination of the natural world.’ With the social insight of a Margulian microcosmologist, Lovelock declares: ‘Poverty and suffering are not sent; they are the consequences of what we do.’[67]

The identity of Lovelock’s ubiquitous we here is surprisingly cryptic. Perhaps it includes the disempowered masses of the ‘inner cities or the Third World’, who ‘grossly and excessively dominate the natural world’ as much as Lovelock appears to give a damn for humanity. Or perhaps it includes the competitive and immensely empowered bankers, industrialists, stockbrokers in all their sinister mutations, political mafias, and similarly privileged strata who have brought societies around the world to virtual ruin.

Amid his dismissal of the distractions created by social issues, Lovelock the biologist rather contemptuously tells us: ‘Pain and death are normal and natural; we could not long survive without them.’[68] What Gaia doth deliver, this we must suffer in the name of a biologism that overrides social abuses, perhaps even social horrors.

Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis might pass for mere amoralism, which would be troubling enough in the age of Auschwitz, were it were not so banal. ‘When we drive our cars and listen to the radio bringing news of acid rain,’ Lovelock advises, ‘we need to remind ourselves that we, personally, are the polluters.... We are therefore accountable, personally, for the destruction of the trees by photochemical smog and acid rain. We are responsible for the silent spring that Rachel Carson predicted.’[69] Indeed, ‘we’ are absorbed in a ‘city life [that] reinforces and strengthens the heresy of humanism, that narcissistic devotion to human interests alone’.[70] Not only is humanism a heresy, but cities — that is, the one universalizing medium by which humanity began to overcome its barbarous parochialism and ethnic hatreds — are a blight.

Not surprisingly, Lovelock exhibits little concern for such humanistic problems as pollution, nuclear power plants, and other environmental dislocations, his pious references to Rachel Carson’s warning of a ‘silent spring’ without birds notwithstanding. ‘Gaia, as I see her, is no doting mother tolerant of misdemeanors, nor is she some fragile and delicate damsel in danger from brutal mankind,’ we are firmly advised. ‘She is stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and comfortable for those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress. Her unconscious goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of this, we shall be eliminated with as littie pity as would be shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile in full flight to its target.’[71]

These strident remarks are meant to defend the author from the charge that he is a ‘champion [of] complacence’ who claims that ‘feedback will always protect the environment from any serious harm that humans might do’.[72] One could, in fact, make a very persuasive case that pollution is a form of natural selection, in which Gaia, ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress’ her ‘rules’ or ‘unconscious goal is merely another natural phenomenon among the many that have doomed countless species to extinction. Yet Lovelock’s cosmic antihumanism takes on strong theistic features, however much he bases his hypothesis on science. In his ‘testament built around the idea of Gaia,’ confesses Lovelock, ‘I have tried to show that God and Gaia, theology and science, even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought.’[73] Having obscured the boundary between science and religion rather definitively, Lovelock wanders through citations from Jacques Monod (a stern materialist and determinist), and Erich Jantsch and Ilya Prigogine (advocates of system self-development), concluding that for the present, my belief in God rests at the stage of a positive agnosticism’,[74] after which he drifts into quasi-philosophical fantasies of an island five hundred million years from now, in which bionic philosophers and speechless vegetative males have neither the means nor the need to argue about the origins of life to understand the evolution of Gaia.

Lovelock’s personal predilections and aspirations aside, what is surprising is that his works on Gaia have been earnestly embraced by a huge number of New Age ‘spiritualists’, whose understanding of his views leaves much to be desired. Once it leaves the plausible domain of earth science, The Ages of Gaia is so much at war with itself, so contradictory, and so anthropomorphic, that anyone looking at it from the standpoint of consistency and coherence may well be astonished that so many Gaians populate the privileged middle-class world of the late twentieth century.

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Between the selfish gene, the sovereign microcosmos, and Gaia, there appears to be little room for human uniqueness as a product of evolution, no belief in the potential nobility of the human spirit, indeed, no authentically naturalistic grounding for great social ideals and ecological insights. Reason barely factors in Wilson’s and Lovelock’s elucidations of sociobiology and Gaia, respectively, only biochemistry and a vaguely conceived ‘science’ that becomes a euphemism for mind. Nearly all the works on sociobiology, microcosmology, and Gaia that essay the Olympian project of ‘re-enchanting’ the world depict humanity variously as gene machines, an assemblage of microbes, or intelligent fleas. If this is not an edifying characterization of the human species, as bad an image or worse emerges from other parts of the contemporary repertoire of antihumanism.