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Science, religion and society: Richard Dawkins' God Delusion

From the WSWS:http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/dawk-m15.shtml


Science, religion and society: Richard Dawkins' God Delusion
By Joe Kay

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 416 pages.

It was refreshing to see the publication of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. It is not every day that one of the premier evolutionary biologists in the world publishes a text dedicated to the defense of atheism. Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out.

The God Delusion has received an enthusiastic response from the public, including in the United States, generally considered the most religious of all industrialized countries. Dawkins book has so far spent 24 weeks in New York Times bestseller top 15 for nonfiction. During a book tour in the US last year, Dawkins drew large and sympathetic crowds, including at some states (such as Kansas), more often associated with religious fundamentalism.

Some of the interest generated by Dawkins’s book is no doubt due to the author, whose books, including The Selfish Gene, have become standard texts in evolutionary biology. Whether or not one agrees with everything he says about the theory of evolution, it is certainly true that Dawkins is a gifted writer with a capacity to explain complicated issues in direct and clear language.

However, there is more involved than this. There is a hunger for alternative perspectives, for views that challenge supposedly universally accepted propositions. There is a latent and widespread oppositional sentiment, and Dawkins’s book appeals to a deep hostility to the religious fundamentalism and backwardness that increasingly characterize governments in Britain, the US and internationally.

Against the “appeasement” of religion

There are certain severe limitations to Dawkins’s presentation of religion, which will be discussed below. However, perhaps most laudatory in the book is its willingness to challenge not only religious orthodoxy of various stripes, but also those within the scientific community who insist upon attempting to reconcile religion and science. The perspective of these thinkers (who Dawkins dubs the “Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists”) is that science can best be defended from fundamentalists (such as those who want to ban evolution from public school curricula) by accommodating non-fundamentalist strands of religion. This is done, according to these thinkers, by insisting that religion and science need not be in conflict, that perhaps they are complementary, or at least address different questions.

The late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould has been closely associated with this perspective, arguing that religion and science occupy what he called “non-overlapping magisteria,” using a verbose term to cloak an extremely superficial idea. “To cite old clichés,” Gould once wrote, as quoted by Dawkins, “science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, and religion how to go to heaven.” Dawkins gives the adequate reply: “This sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment’s thought.”

One of Dawkins central claims is, “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.” In other words, if God exists and is anything more than a vacuous concept, he/she/it must have some effect on the world. This, certainly, is the belief of most religiously-minded people, who believe that God intervenes in the world, performs miracles, answers prayers, etc. Dawkins cites one experiment finding that patients who receive prayers don’t actually do better than patients who don’t receive them. This may seem a somewhat silly experiment (which was actually performed by supporters of religion) but it does illustrate the basic point—if religious phenomena exist, they can be tested scientifically.

While this is an important observation, there is something missing in Dawkins’s presentation of science and religion. He treats the “God hypothesis” as basically equivalent to the claim, for example, that a teapot is in orbit around Mars (a famous proposition given by Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that though he may not technically know that such a teapot does not exist, he is not obliged to be agnostic about it). His ultimate justification for his atheism is that it is very probable that God does not exist, just as it is very probable that there is no teapot orbiting Mars. The preponderance of evidence indicates, says Dawkins, that God does not exist. This “99 percent atheism” actually leaves the door open for skepticism if seriously challenged.

The God hypothesis, however, is a very different type of hypothesis from the teapot hypothesis. Indeed, it is not really a hypothesis at all, since it involves at its core the claim that the process of scientific investigation—including the testing of hypotheses— cannot arrive at truth (or at least the complete truth). The religious proposition involves the belief that there exists truth outside the possibility of scientific investigation, and therefore the statement that there can be no scientific justification for religious belief is—from the point of view of the religious individual—beside the point. One is merely question begging by asking, “But what are your scientific grounds for your non-belief in science?”

The conflict between science and religion lies at a more fundamental level than Dawkins’s empiricism. The foundation for atheist belief is not really that God is an unlikely proposition (though the hypothesis, if taken as a scientific hypothesis, is the most unlikely hypothesis one can come up with), but that atheism flows from a materialist world-outlook—a philosophical position that holds that everything that exists consists of the law-governed development of matter in its various forms. Since matter is law-governed, it can be subject to scientific investigation, and at the same time science requires the presumption that the objects of its investigation follow causal relationships. This, ultimately, is the central conflict between religion and science, which is conflict between materialism and idealism, rationality and irrationality.

The proof of the materialist world outlook lies in the entire historical experience of mankind in its interaction with nature, particularly in the extraordinary development of scientific knowledge over the past several hundred years. The proof of materialism is demonstrated in this historical practice, whereby mankind has not only formed hypotheses, but realized these hypotheses in the transformation of the material world.

It has become a fad among those who argue that science and religion are compatible, while also arguing strongly for the teaching of evolution in schools (and perhaps most prominent among these is Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education), to make a distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Science, according to these thinkers, depends on methodological naturalism—the assumption during scientific experimentation that there exists nothing outside the material world of cause and effect. This is distinct from the claim that there is actually nothing outside of this material world of cause and effect.

Such an argument, taken up by those who would defend science education, in fact undermines the foundation of science altogether, since it eliminates any solid connection between scientific investigation and reality. There may exist a God—or any other supernatural entity—but science can never discover this underlying truth (what Kant would term the noumena), since science relies on the assumption of causal relationships and natural law-governed processes, which supposedly may or may not allow humans to arrive at a complete understanding of the universe.

The ability of science to predict and transform the material world demonstrates, however, that it is not only a useful method, but a means of arriving at an understanding of the real world. Through a rigorous system of observation, reason, hypotheses and experimentation, science allows humans to arrive at truths about the world as it is “in itself.” It is a systematic means of testing the truth of our conceptions through practical interaction with the world. Its rationality is what distinguishes science from religion, which in one way or another relies on the irrational, on superstition, on “faith.”

Religious belief and social history

Dawkins does not deal seriously with any of these philosophical issues, and his defense of atheism, while important, is ultimately unconvincing and superficial. He devotes a considerable amount of space in his book to discussing the various “proofs” for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the argument from design, etc.), all of which have been refuted a hundred times already, and to which Dawkins adds nothing new. Most of these proofs (such as the assertion that every effect must have a cause, a recession that must lead ultimately to an uncaused cause, which is God) are not remotely convincing to anyone who does not already believe in God, and their refutation will not in general be convincing to anyone who does.

On the more frequently invoked “argument from design,” Dawkins points out that Darwin put an end to this proof in his theory of evolution, which explained how complex, apparently intelligently-designed organisms, are the product of a long process of natural selection.

In discussing the origins and perpetuation of religious beliefs, much more is required than a review of the various proofs for God’s existence. A scientist must also examine why these beliefs arose and why they are perpetuated. Here Dawkins enters what is for him somewhat foreign territory, and he frequently stumbles, due in large part to his failure to take seriously the role of social relations in shaping and perpetuating religious belief.

To adopt a materialist, scientific, approach to religion is first of all to recognize that religion is fundamentally a product of society. Culture is a social, not an individual, phenomenon, and in the process of his development the individual adopts in one form or another ideas present in the broader social milieu. A materialist explanation of religious belief must therefore be rooted in a materialist approach to society. As with many natural scientists, however, Dawkins does not carry through his materialism to social and cultural history. He ends up resorting to various idealistic explanations for religious belief.

Historical materialism—that is, Marxism—sees ideology, including religion, as rooted in the process of production and the social relations humans enter into in order to produce. As Marx wrote in his famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

On the one hand, religion is perpetuated by the ruling elite during different stages of historical development as a means of justifying particular social arrangements. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Catholic Church in Europe was one of the principal institutional and ideological props of feudalism, not to mention one of the largest landowners. With control over the productive forces, the ruling elite, in alliance with the church, could perpetuate religious belief through myriad means. In addition to justifying various hierarchies, religion has been used to tell the poor and exploited that salvation lies in the next world, rather than this one.

On the other hand, religion frequently plays the role of “opiate,” i.e., it provides comfort for the poor and exploited, a hope for salvation and a better life in another world. For this reason, religious ideology can have a receptive response among broader sections of the population. Religion, Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions.”

Of course, the history of religion, like that of any ideological phenomenon, is complex. Religious ideology takes on a semi-independent existence, with its own internal logic. There is also a trend in religious evolution. As humans come to understand the natural world through the process of scientific explanation, the concept of God has tended to become more abstract, more removed from day-to-day events. Religion tends to occupy the realms of human experience that scientific knowledge has yet to penetrate, though this is not an entirely linear trajectory. In general, however, social progress has been associated with the advance of science and the retreat of religion.

The point is that this explanation of religion imbues any discussion of religion with the social content necessary for its comprehension. Dawkins completely dismisses this perspective. “Nor are Darwinians satisfied by political explanations, such as ‘religion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass’,” he writes. “It is surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of another life, which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and thereby benefited their owners. The question of whether religions are deliberately designed by cynical priests or rulers is an interesting one, to which historians should attend. But it is not, in itself, a Darwinian question. The Darwinians still want to know why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings.”

This is a fair enough point when discussing the historical origins of religious belief in the evolution of man (though the talk of “cynical priests and rulers” is a mechanical and one-sided presentation of the Marxist theory of religion, which Dawkins here alludes to without naming). Given the way in which religious beliefs of some sort or another have emerged on numerous occasions in almost every society, it is certainly legitimate to ask if there is something in our biological makeup that predisposes human society to adopt religious conceptions, even if one insists that the social dimension takes precedence in man’s later development. There might be other ideologies that could serve the same social function as religion does, so one is led to ask why religion predominates. Dawkins would like to discuss what it is in our evolutionary heritage that makes religious explanations particularly attractive, that makes religious ideology particularly universal. We will return to the limitations of this approach below, after first going into some detail about Dawkins’s views on the question that he would like to focus on.

In giving his own answer, Dawkins notes that an evolutionary explanation of religious belief need not postulate an evolutionary benefit for religion itself. “I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else,” he writes. “More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to ‘think by-product.’ When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question.”

Dawkins proposal for an evolutionary foundation of religious belief is not particularly profound: We have evolved to believe what we are told by our elders. This is beneficial, Dawkins says, because generally our elders are right, and those who believed what they were told benefited from the accumulated experience of their elders. This may be true, but it leaves open the question as to why it was religion that has been passed on from elders to children, rather than something else. The fact that Dawkins does not consider this obvious objection to his theory is an indication that he has not really thought through this question very seriously.

More promising is the theory presented by Daniel Dennett that religion is fundamentally misplaced intentionality. Humans evolved to interpret certain actions, particularly actions that they did not understand, to be the product of intentional agents. This was useful when dealing with actual intentional agents, because it allowed early humans to better predict the behavior of animals or fellow humans (a particularly useful quality as social relations developed). Religion is the imputation of intentionality on the natural world: It is a god that causes the rain to fall and the rivers to flood; it is a god that is the cause of life and death, etc.

While these various proposals are interesting, they are not particularly useful unless they are rooted in an investigation of the scientific evidence, including archaeology. As of yet, both Dennett and Dawkins have been engaging largely in armchair evolutionary biology in discussing this question.

More fundamentally, theories such as those proposed by Dawkins and Dennett do not further our understanding of the history of religion, which is really the most important question in understanding its persistence and nature today. Supposing that religion had an initial impulse in misplaced intentionality or in the tendency of children to believe what they are told, this does not explain why it should continue even when science has led us to the conclusion that this intentionality is in fact misplaced, and does not explain why children continue to be indoctrinated in the existence of fictional beings. It also does not explain why religion has evolved as it has over the years.

To deal with this question, Dawkins (and Dennett) resort to the theory of the “meme,” a supposed cultural equivalent of the gene. A meme is a purported “unit of cultural inheritance,” and certain memes have a greater tendency to reproduce themselves, etc. A more detailed critique can be found in James Brookfield’s review of Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomena. Here it is sufficient to note that by locating the basis for the spread of an ideology in the idea itself (rather than the society in which the idea emerges and spreads), the proponents of meme theory generally fall into an idealist interpretation of history, one that has great difficulty in explaining what accounts for ideological development.

Dawkins confesses the difficulty he has in explaining cultural evolution when he writes about the “moral zeitgeist,” which he says is “a mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades” and accounts for changes in moral or religious conceptions. He has no real explanation for the changes in this “moral zeitgeist,” but, Dawkins writes, “The onus is not on me to answer.”

If all Dawkins aimed to do was provide a logical proof for the non-existence of God, or propose theories for why religion may have emerged in the development of early human society, we might accept this statement. But in fact Dawkins aims to do much more. He wants to tackle contemporary social and political issues, and without any serious basis for explaining why religions persist he is left floundering, often finding his way into quite reactionary positions.

Religion and politics

The problem Dawkins and others confront in explaining religious and ideological change lies ultimately in their refusal to take up Marxist theory. Dawkins refers to Marx only once in passing, and deals with class theory only in the paragraph quoted above. For Dawkins, religion has no social or political significance. He treats it merely as an idea without any real connections to the more material conditions of life.

He writes, to cite one example, “The Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban [Christian fundamentalism in the United States] are good examples of what happens when people take their scriptures literally and seriously.” Certainly scripture plays a role, but both the Afghan Taliban and the “American Taliban” are products of deeper social relations in their respective societies, and in fact the differences between these societies impart different characters to the respective ideologies.

This approach to religion has definite political consequences. Early on in the book, Dawkins discusses the case of the anti-Islamic cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which produced sharp protests in February 2006. Press and governments around the world denounced the protests as attacks on free speech, and defended those who decided to publish the bigoted cartoons as proponents of free speech.

Dawkins accepts this interpretation entirely. One need not be a supporter of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism to recognize that what was really involved was not a defense of free speech by a Danish newspaper, but a deliberate provocation designed to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and elsewhere. The protests, on the other hand, reflected anger that was more than merely religious in character. There is seething resentment against the United States and European governments to their policies in countries composed largely of Muslims.

The fact that discontent in many regions of the Middle East and other areas often takes a religious character is also a product of historical and political factors. The perspective of secular bourgeois nationalist movements has failed utterly, secular socialist and internationalist movements have been systematically betrayed by Stalinism, and the United States and other powers have worked for a long time to undermine secular movements of all stripes because they have viewed these movements as more of a threat to their interests than religions movements. Both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are in part products of the American intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US waged a proxy war against the Soviet Union by generously funding the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists. On the other hand, a movement such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories—which is very different phenomenon from Al Qaeda—has gained traction in part because it provides critical social resources and services not provided through any other channels, particularly as the Palestinian Liberation Organization has moved increasingly to the right, accommodating itself to American imperialism.

Dawkins’s blindness to the social and political roots of religious ideology leads him toward quite reactionary positions. He goes so far as to quote approvingly the words of Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, who has written: “Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?”

One rubs ones eyes in disbelief when one reads the uncritical representation of these words by Dawkins. The Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity is an evangelical outfit whose main aim is to promote anti-Islamic chauvinism, which is precisely the aim of Sookhdeo’s sentence quoted above. One might give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he quotes without real knowledge of who he is quoting, but regardless it is certainly a misfortune that Dawkins, an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq and an opponent of Christian ideology as much as Islamic, should lend his authority to such a vile perspective. But such is the consequence of remaining blind to the social and political issues that lie behind most religious questions. Approaching such matters from an idealist perspective, Dawkins is easily led to the conclusion that Islamic fundamentalists must simply be a product of Islam as a religion, and this leads him into the same bed with such utter reactionaries as Sookhdeo.

There is a tendency among the advocates of atheism—and this is perhaps most clear in the works of Sam Harris, who Dawkins also quotes approvingly on several occasions—to adopt a contemptuous attitude toward the religiously-minded population, which is still a majority of the working class around the world. Since religion is conceived of only as an ideological phenomenon, it is ultimately the population itself that is to blame for belief in religion and whatever policies are justified in the name of religion. Not only does this often lead to right-wing political positions, it also fails utterly in offering a suggestion for how the influence of religion can be diminished.

Marxists too want to undermine the influence of religious movements, in the Middle East, in the United States, and around the world. Religion is inherently anti-scientific. It cloaks the real nature of society and repression, and it often serves as an ideological buttress for social reaction and militarism.

However, to realize this aim requires that one first of all comprehend the actual social and political basis of religious belief. As Marx wrote in the same work quoted above, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their conditions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions...Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”

In other words, the fight for scientific consciousness among masses of people, and with this a materialist world outlook, must be bound up with the attempt to explain to people the real nature of society and oppression. It must be bound up with a political struggle and a socialist movement.

Dennett's dangerous idea

From the WSWS, For the full article, click here.

Dennett’s dangerous idea

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel Dennett, Viking Adult, 2006, 464 pages, $26

By James Brookfield
6 November 2006

American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, was attacked from the right last February in the pages of the New York Times Book Review by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic.

This attack prompted a reply that was posted on the World Socialist Web Site. The reply promised that a review of the book itself would soon appear on the site. The review follows here.

The central thrust of Dennett’s book is that the methods of science should be used to scrutinize religion. Dennett argues that religion is of such immense social and political significance that it behooves mankind to turn the attention of the “best minds on the planet” to its study. All taboos should be set aside.

As Dennett says, “Up to now, there has been a largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other researchers will leave religion alone, or restrict themselves to a few sidelong glances, since people get so upset at the mere thought of a more intensive inquiry. I propose to disrupt this presumption, and examine it.”

This “unexamined mutual agreement” is the first spell that must be broken. The second, Dennett writes, is the spell of religion itself.

For Dennett, religion, though it requires belief in the supernatural, is itself a natural process, “a human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures, patterns and the like that obey all the laws of physics and biology, and hence do not involve miracles.” To frame the issue this way, Dennett points out, makes no claim about the existence of a supernatural being, only that the processes of religious observance are natural ones and therefore subject to rational inquiry and scrutiny.

***

The strengths of Dennett’s book lie in its materialism and the fact that it makes reference to a wide body of contemporary research on these subjects. It also suggests a new and potentially fruitful philosophical approach to the study of religion. It suggests several lines of inquiry that should be pursued in the future.

Also notable are the sections that protest the supposed positive correlation between religious belief and morality. “The misalignment of goodness with the denial of scientific materialism has a long history, but it is a misalignment,” says Dennett. “There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than someone who believes in ‘the spirit.’ ”

He adds that there “are plenty of ‘deeply spiritual’ people—and everybody knows this—[who] are cruel, arrogant, self-centered, and utterly unconcerned about the moral problems of the world.”

Breaking the Spell does have, however, significant limitations. While the centrality of neo-Darwinism to his outlook contributes to an historical approach to the development of religion, Dennett does not add to this a theoretical framework for considering the development of human society. Dennett treats human history in a very abstract, non-concrete form. While some form of abstraction is necessary in any theory of social development, much can be lost in the process. This is the case in Breaking the Spell, where man is treated in an almost exclusively natural sense.

For this reason, although Dennett’s proposed account of the primitive origins of religion contains many interesting insights, his elaboration of the transformation of “folk religion” to “organized religion” is weaker.

“The major religions of today are as different from their ancestral versions as today’s music is different from the music of ancient Greece and Rome,” says Dennett. “The changes that have been established are far from random. They have tracked the restless curiosity and changing needs of our encultured species.” There is an element of truth here, but Dennett’s explanation of the development of religion from early to modern society does not go much beyond this statement.

Dennett ignores the fact that religion has found fertile ground for development, not simply as a body of abstract, ideal “replicators,“ driven by their own separate logic. The changes in the prevalent forms of religion cannot properly be accounted for as adaptations to human beings’ “relentless curiosity.”

Rather, religious conceptions had to have found a “substrate” (to borrow a term from the natural sciences) in real, historically concrete societies—i.e., in the deeply polarized social fabric that has characterized every stage of man’s historical development following the most primitive societies.

The rooting of ideology, including religion, in economic relations is a central conception of Marxism, a point with which Dennett must be familiar. Unfortunately, however, it comes as little surprise to see that Dennett is openly dismissive of Marxism. Still worse, his dismissiveness generally takes the form of disregarding the Marxist tradition.

It is not that Dennett has adopted a position opposed to Marxism and argued openly against it. Instead, he imagines that the Marxist critique of religion can simply be ignored. There is nothing in Breaking the Spell, for example, that suggests that Dennett has read the criticism of religion written from a genuinely Marxist standpoint, such as Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity or the writings of Marx and Engels on the subject.

Dennett’s decision to ignore the Marxist critique of religion is the most severe handicap in the direction that he has adopted in Breaking the Spell and amounts to a type of intellectual dereliction of duty. Dennett defines himself as a philosopher, not simply a popularizer of science or advocate of atheism. Considering this point, it is not justifiable for him to look past what Marxism has to say on the subject of religion.

To be sure, the popular misidentification of Stalinism and Marxism is partially responsible for the fact that Western academics tend to ignore Marxism with little protest. But this decision also has to do with the virtual illegalization of Marxism, particularly among US academics, a process that has landed so much of scholarship in the humanities in a deep impasse. Consider, if only briefly, what is being left out.

Marxism insists that religion is a form of ideology and, as such, must ultimately be explained on the basis of the material economic relations of men living in society. Explaining the point in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels wrote: “Still higher ideologies, that is, such as are still further removed from the material, economic basis, take the form of philosophy and religion. Here the interconnection between conceptions and their material conditions of existence becomes more and more complicated, more and more obscured by intermediate links. But the interconnection exists.”

Religion, according to Engels, stands so far from the economic relations of society that it seems to be alien to it, but it is actually dependent upon it. “Religion arose in very primitive times from erroneous, primitive conceptions of men about their own nature and external nature surrounding them. Every ideology, however, once it has arisen, develops in connection with the given concept-material, and develops this material further; otherwise, it would not be an ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. In the last analysis, the material life conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on determine the course of the process, which of necessity remains unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology.”

The Marxist counter-argument to Dennett is not some sort of crude and simplistic materialism that considers important only the class structure of society and techniques of production. It does not deny that ideas and fields of inquiry have their own histories. But Marxism does recognize that material factors are ultimately to be found at the root of all ideology, of which religion is a part.

The history of ideas and the development of man’s productive forces are completely intertwined, but the latter must serve as the basis for understanding the former. Any convincing explanation of religion must come to terms with the manner in which it has served to protect the interests of the ruling classes of society.

To reply to a charge often leveled at Marxists, and called to mind at one point in Breaking the Spell, this does not mean that religion is simply a conspiracy of priests and rulers to hoodwink the majority. But the significance of the central tenets of religion cannot fully be comprehended without an understanding of the class interests of the major social layers in the society in question.

The false solace that religion offers has played and still plays today a critical part in retarding the growth of class consciousness among the working class and other oppressed layers of society. Official morality, sanctioned by religion, inevitably justifies the essential characteristics of the existing social order and exerts a paralyzing and generally mind-numbing grip on the exploited classes of society. Those whose attention ought to be focused on the improvement of their conditions of life on earth—not on dreams of an afterlife—are trapped by religion. This is the meaning of Marx’s aphorisms that religion is the “opium of the masses” and the “sigh of the oppressed.”

More generally, as Engels explained, underlying the religious conflicts throughout history—from the development of monotheisms to the expansion of Christianity after the collapse of the Roman Empire, to the explosion of the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism and even the rationalist attack upon religion during the Enlightenment—have been conflicts among the major classes of society. During this entire period, the ideological expression of the class struggle, particularly between different layers of the feudal and early bourgeois elites , could take only a religious form.

The most common alternative notion among those who study religion is an idealized conception. What Engels wrote of Feuerbach could be justly applied to Dennett: “In the form he is realistic since he takes his start from man; but there is absolutely no mention of the world in which this man lives; hence, this man remains always the same abstract man who occupied the field in the philosophy of religion.”

To put it somewhat differently, because Dennett never really examines the social history of man, his hypotheses about the development of religion after agricultural societies arose have a contrived feel to them. Man as Dennett imagines him, naturalistically, substitutes for historical man. An imagined history is substituted for the real one.

The danger of adopting an excessively speculative, somewhat imagined starting point for inquiry is demonstrated rather clearly in another way in Breaking the Spell. Dennett’s relative disinterest in the actual social dimensions of human society renders him vulnerable to complete misunderstandings of the present political situation.

Alongside pleas for religious tolerance and the ending of poverty (rather naively expressed), Dennett includes statements that reflect a stark misapprehension of contemporary reality. To cite one example: “Consider the current situation in Iraq,” he says, “where a security force is supposed to provide a temporary scaffolding on which to construct a working society in post-Saddam Iraq. It might actually have worked from the outset if the force had been large enough and well enough trained and deployed to reassure people without having to fire a shot.”

This is written as though the war against Iraq was, or ought to have been, an exercise in benevolence! We would not suggest that these statements make Dennett some sort of pro-imperialist ideologue. But he seems to take at face value much of what passes for political wisdom among the elites in the US, at least as articulated by the Democratic Party. Dennett’s belief that the US military is in Iraq to establish a “working society” is all the more striking given that a clear majority, even in the US, is openly hostile to the war and highly suspicious of the official reasons—i.e., the lies—given to justify it.

Notwithstanding these important qualifications, however, the appearance of Breaking the Spell is certainly to be welcomed. To the extent that Dennett’s proposal for scientific scrutiny of religion is taken forward, particularly if informed by a real familiarity with the Marxist tradition, the intellectual stranglehold of religion in contemporary life will be undermined.

S. S. Chetverikov

I have been reading Chetverikov's 1926 essay "On Certain Aspects of the Evolutionary Process from the Standpoint of Modern Genetics." I am posting my notes on the essay here, since I think his work would be well worth disseminating, as part of a broader study of the contribution of Soviet geneticists of the 1920s to the great evolutionary synthesis. I will comment more on his work in future posts. These are mainly excerpts from what I take to be the most important sections.

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov (1880-1959) was one of the first theoreticians of the evolutionary synthesis, a scientific movement that sought to place evolutionary theory firmly within the framework of modern genetic theory. He was apparently involved in anti-government activity as a student in Moscow around the time of the revolution of 1905. He was arrested at one point during this period. He was arrested and banished from Moscow in 1929, during the early period of Stalinist repression, perhaps for being involved in an exclusive genetics discussion group, being opposed to the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or after being denounced to the political police by one of his students. His work on genetics ended conclusively in 1948 with the rise of Lysenkoism. Chetverikov had a profound impact on other thinkers of the synthesis, particularly Ernst Mayr. In addition to theoretical work, he conducted important studies of the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, building on the research of Morgan. He used an inbreeding technique to reveal recessive alleles.

The basic question of the evolutionary synthesis, as formulated by Chetverikov: “How can one link evolution with genetics, and bring our current genetic notions and concepts within the range of those ideas which encompass this basic biological problem? Would it be possible to approach the question of variability, the struggle for existence, selection, in other words, Darwinism, starting not from those completely amorphous, indistinct, indefinite opinions on heredity which existed at the time of Darwin and his immediate followers, but from the firm laws of genetics?”

1. The Origins of Mutations in Nature

Problem of the relative absence of mutations in nature, compared to the number of mutations observed during the course of laboratory work.

Genetics is the basis for speciation and evolution. It is not simply a purifying mechanism, in which some basic species substance is conserved throughout all time. “We have already seen in several examples mentioned above that mutational variability touches upon various characters greatly different in significance. Alongside of the least salient traits, such as the color of the body, such important characters of Drosophila are changed as venation, wing structure, etc., which are fundamental in the modern systematics of insects for distinguishing the higher systematic categories. Consequently, it is necessary to acknowledge as completely erroneous the idea which some express, that mutations deal in only a superficial way with species traits, being characteristic of differences between varieties, while, apart from these small aberrations, there is a ‘basic substance’ of organisms which is not subject to mutational changes. Because of this, it is argued, the process of evolution, the process of the transformation of whole organisms into others, could not be achieved by means of mutations. Speaking figuratively, it is claimed that with all mutations, a fly always remains a fly, and a rat a rat, and never does the latter produce deviation in the direction of a rabbit or a dog.

“But here two concepts are confused: the diversity of characters subject to genotypic variability, and the scope of variability, i.e., the amplitude of deviation. Actually, we see that absolutely all parts of the organism are subject to genotypic variation. But, although genotypic variability is discontinuous, its leaps, naturally, cannot be infinitely large, so that the amplitude of aberration is limited, and the limit is determined by the structure of the genes themselves. Abrupt and profound changes of the organism are possible only be means of a prolonged accumulation of mutational changes, of long-termed stratification of one deviation upon another.”

2. Mutations under conditions of free crossing

Formulation of the biological species concept. “The definition of species, as an aggregate of individuals constituting a single freely intercrossing complex…” That is, a species is a unity of difference. Morphological difference by itself does not imply the existence of two species. “And from our genetic experiments on the most diverse animal and plant organisms, we now known that it is possible to create two groups of such organisms, which will differ from each other by a perfectly concrete complex (theoretically speaking, as large as one wishes) of morphological characteristics, which are not connected by intermediate forms; that is, having a so-called morphological hiatus, but at the same time belonging genetically to the same species.” Incidentally, this highlights the difficulties associated with determining species structure when looking at fossil material.

Variation is essential to the species concept, and is necessary for the operation of natural selection. But how is variation maintained? Objections were raised to Darwin’s theory from an engineer, Professor Jenkins, that the free crossing of individuals (under the assumption of blended inheritance) would quickly dissolve any new deviation. Led Darwin to move away from hard inheritance in explaining the persistence of variation, to Lamarkian theories. A.R. Wallace refers to “the swamping affects of intercrossing.” To truly understand variation and the maintenance of variation, we need genetics.

Hardy’s law of equilibrium under free crossing. “the relative frequencies of homozygous (dominant as well as recessive) and heterozygous individuals, under conditions of free crossing and in the absence of any kind of selection, remain constant, provided that the product of the frequencies of homozygous individuals (dominant and recessive) is equal to the square of half of the frequency of heterozygous forms.” pr = q². “Since for any value of p and r a value of 2q may be found to satisfy the equation…a freely crossing population may be in a state of equilibrium with any proportions of homozygous dominant and recessive forms.”

Law of stabilizing crossing (Pearson’s law): “under conditions of free crossing with any initial ratio of frequencies of homozygous and heterozygous parental forms, a state of equilibrium will be established in the population as a consequence f the very first generation of free crossing. Thus, should a state of equilibrium in a freely crossing population be disturbed from without, as a result of the very first subsequent crossing, which we will call stabilizing crossing, a new state of equilibrium is established within the population, at which the given population will remain until some new external force removes it from this state.” Among these external forces, we may include selection and mutation.

These laws imply that mutations may appear and then subsist in a population in heterozygous form, only rarely being expressed phenotypically. “A species, like a sponge, soaks up heterozygous mutations, while remaining from first to last externally (phenotypically) homogeneous.” “The older the species, the more mutations are accumulated within it, the more frequently is one or another of them disclosed in the homozygous state, and the more the species becomes externally genetically variable. Generally speaking, all other conditions being equal, genotypic variability of a species increases proportionally to its age.”

The smaller the population size, the greater the probability that absorbed mutations will express themselves phenotypically. Basis for a theory of speciation based on isolation, which foreshadows Mayr’s work. “If we imagine that the total number of individuals of a given species N, is subdivided into a series of isolated colonies, then the frequency of origin of new mutations within the limits of the entire species will not suffer, but the probability of reappearance of each such mutation will be once more considerably increased, depending on the reduced size (n) of the colony, within which it originally arose. Thus, we approach a more profound understanding of the enormous role which the factor of isolation plays in the origin of species variability…A species, as we have tried to show above, represents limitless diversity of genotypic combinations, and each isolation creates in it at once the exceptionally favorable conditions for the manifestation of heritable variations...And so, isolation, under the conditions of a process of continuous accumulation of mutations becomes, by itself, a cause of intraspecific (and consequently, interspecific) differentiation. Of all the factors contributing to the break-up of a species into separate non-interbreeding colonies, it is necessary, naturally, to put spatial, geographical isolation in the first place as the most powerful and common factor of intraspecific differentiation.” Also, isolation in time (different mating cycles), or ecological isolation. Isolation at the margin of a population, where the struggle for existence is more intense.

3. Natural selection

Free crossing vs. natural selection: “In the foregoing analysis of free crossing, we tried to establish its role as a factor stabilizing a given population. In its very essence it is a conservative factor, preserving the genotypic composition of the species in the condition in which it is found at a given moment. Natural selection (and, in general, selection in any form) is, in this connection, its direct antagonist. If free crossing stabilizes the population, then selection, on the contrary, all the time displaces the equilibrium state, and, if in this sense we may call free crossing a conservative principle, then selection, undoubtedly, is the dynamic principle, leading ceaselessly to modification of the species.”

Intensity of selection. Difference in the mechanics of allele distribution for recessive and dominant traits. A mutation that is beneficial will rapidly spread in its initial phases if it is dominant, but it takes longer to eliminate the less beneficial allele after the dominant allele has spread through much of the population (since selection will have a difficult time acting on the recessive, less beneficial allele, when there is a low probability that it is expressed phenotypically). On the other hand, a mutation that is beneficial but recessive, will take a long time to spread during the initial phases, but will proceed much more rapidly once it has spread to a substantial section of the population. This is because during the initial phases, it will only very rarely be expressed in the phenotype of an organism. However, even a trait that has only a small benefit will tend to spread throughout the entire population after sufficient generations. New mutations will not be lost after one generation.

Another conclusion: “transformation change of a freely crossing population—species, the replacement of the less adapted form by the more adapted one, in a word, the process of adaptive evolution of the species, always proceeds to the end… This conclusion is very important for an accurate understanding of the role of various features in the evolutionary process. Under conditions of free crossing, that is, until there is isolation…the struggle for existence and natural selection can continuously alter the physiognomy of the species, can disseminate more and more new adaptive characters through the whole mass of individuals of the species, can perfect any features of its organization, but never under these conditions does the species give rise to a new species, never will there be a subdivision of the species into two, never will speciation occur.” If selection should cease to operate on the trait while the process is not complete, this will result in stable polymorphism.

“We noted above that the role of free crossing in the process of evolution is a conservative one, striving to maintain the status quo, whereas natural selection acts as an opposing, dynamic factor. But if we bring into the scope of our analysis the process of continuous origin of new mutations as well, then this concept needs to be both changed and supplemented. While free crossing, storing and preserving within the species all the newly arising mutations, gradually unfixes the characteristics of the species, makes it less stable, and produces intraspecific differentiation, natural selection, on the contrary, preserves the stability of the species, its monomorphism. Removing and gradually eliminating all mutations, which in the last analysis appear to be harmful, natural selection purifies the species of contamination by accumulated variations, and, in the case of favorable changes, spreads them to all the individuals of the species, thereby reimposing on it homogeneity.”

On “adaptationism”. “Systematics knows thousands of examples where the species are distinguished not by adaptive but rather by neutral (in the biological sense) characters, and to try to ascribe adaptive significance to all of them is work which is as little productive as it is unrewarding, and in which one does not know at times whether to be more surprised by the boundless ingenuity of the authors themselves or by their faith in the limitless naïveté of their readers.”

“Not selection, but isolation is the actual source, the real cause of the origin of species.”

“Finally, even in those cases in which we are in a position to establish the presence of truly adaptive differences between species, genera, etc., it is necessary to be very cautious in accepting the idea that these differences are of a primary character, i.e., in recognizing that precisely they have given rise to a splitting up of the initial single form into two, thus leading to the process of speciation. It should not be forgotten that, as we just saw, every species in the course of its existence obligately undergoes as a whole Waagen’s adaptive mutation, should a favorable mutation, in our sense, arise, and thereby acquires an adaptive trait absent in its kin. A new species-distinguishing adaptive trait is established, but it is not the cause of the splitting-up of close forms, but on the contrary, its species-characteristic nature is a result of still earlier inter-specific differentiation.”

4. Genotypic milieu

Unity of the genotype, Genotypic milieu, pleiotropy. “The concept of pleiotropic action of genes consists of the idea that every gene may influence not only the specific character corresponding to it, but a whole series of others; generally speaking, the entire soma. In so far as we now accept the proven localization of genes in the chromosomes, and in so far as all cells of the body receive the full set of chromosomes, so in the ultimate differentiation of the cells determining some specific trait all genes can be influential, affecting by their action one or another form of manifestation of genes specifically corresponding to a trait.

“In this way, the former notion of the mosaic structure of the organism consisting of various, independent characters, conditioned by various, independent genes, is discarded. The genes remain pure and qualitatively independent of each other, but their manifestation, that is, the traits they condition, are now a complex result of the manifold interaction of all the genes comprising the genotype of the organism. And each individual is in the literal sense an “in-dividuum”—not divisible. It is not divisible not only in its soma, not only in the physiological functioning of its various parts, but indivisible in the manifestation of its genotype, its hereditary structure. Each inherited trait, the hereditary structure of each cell of its body, is determined by not just some one gene, but by their aggregate, their complex. True, every gene has a specific manifestation, its “trait.” But in its expression this trait depends on the action of the whole genotype.

“Each gene does not act isolatedly from the whole genotype, is not independent of it, but acts, manifests itself, within it, in relation to it. The very same gene will manifest itself differently, depending on the complex of other genes in which it finds itself. For it, this complex, this genotype, will be the genotypic milieu, within the surroundings of which it will be externally manifested.”

The attack on science

From the World Socialist Web Site. The full article is available here.

An account of the attack on science in the US

By Joe Kay
9 February 2006

The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, Basic Books, New York, 2005, 351 pp., US$24.95, CAN$34.95

There have been a number of books written in the past few years that deal with different aspects of the attack on science. Some of these are useful, bringing together certain material about the attempts by corporations and political organizations to undermine scientific conclusions. But most fail to make a serious analysis of what lies behind the attack on science.

Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science, falls clearly within this category. Mooney is a journalist who has written on scientific issues for publications such as Mother Jones, American Prospect and the Washington Post.

The fundamental flaw of his book is indicated by the title. Mooney sees the war on science, in the end, as simply the product of bad politicians—Republicans—who have to be reined in—by the Democrats. Such an approach, almost by definition, skirts over the more profound social and historical roots of the attack on science, as well as the Democratic Party’s own role in facilitating it.

***

There are deeper roots to the attack on science that Mooney misses entirely. The rise of modern science during the Renaissance and Enlightenment period was intimately bound up with the rise of the bourgeoisie as a dominant social class in Europe. In its struggle with the old feudal classes, which were generally allied with the Catholic Church and its promotion of religious dogma, the rising capitalist class took up the banner of rationality, knowledge and science.

The development of science was necessary for the development of the means of production, including the introduction of new technologies and new forms of communication and transportation. These advances strengthened the hand of the bourgeoisie and increased its economic power relative to the landed nobility. The bourgeoisie was at that time a progressive class, in the sense that its own interests as a class corresponded with the development of the productive forces.

What has happened since that time, so that the same backward—as Mooney notes, pre-Enlightenment—conceptions that were once the purview of the feudal aristocracy are now championed by the president of the United States, the head of state at the center of world capitalism? The answer lies in the changing relationship of the bourgeoisie to society as a whole: from a progressive and revolutionary class, it has become the principal force of reaction—the main barrier to the further development of the productive forces and defender of a historically outmoded socio-economic system.

Of course, this is not a new situation. The historical bankruptcy of capitalism has been long in the making. Backwardness is hardly a monopoly of the US government. One need only recall the barbarism of the fascist movements of the last century.

At the same time, it is not accidental that the anti-rationalist conceptions that animated these movements share common features with those that form the bedrock of the Bush administration. The attack on science and rationality is characteristic of a society in mortal crisis.

This does not negate that fact that over the past several decades there have been immense technological advances, centered on the development of computer technology. There are certainly sections of the ruling class in the United States that are concerned about the consequences that the anti-scientific conceptions promoted by Christian fundamentalists and their allies have for the skill level of American workers and the general ability of American firms to compete on the world market. There is also concern that the major scientific advances, such as those associated with stem cell research, will be made in countries that compete with US capitalism.

However, the general relationship of the American ruling class to the development of the productive forces is an antagonistic one. The growth of these forces brings with it not a strengthening of its position, but rather an intensification of the contradictions of American and world capitalism—above all the contradiction between globalized production and the nation-state system, and between the social character of production and the private ownership of the means of production.

At the same time, the expansion of scientific knowledge to broad sections of the population can only serve to intensify opposition to imperialism’s promotion of militarism and social reaction. If during the period of the great bourgeois revolutions reason was a tool to be used against feudalism, it now facilitates the struggle against capitalism.

In a fundamental sense, the American ruling class is in conflict with truth. A figure such as Benjamin Franklin—who engaged not only in revolutionary politics, but also groundbreaking scientific research—represented that which was progressive in the emerging American bourgeoisie. Today, the American ruling class is aptly represented by a George Bush, who combines social reaction with intellectual poverty and cultural backwardness.

The inability of Mooney and similar writers to examine the deeper historical issues behind the attack on science reflects a definite political outlook. Ultimately, Mooney’s hope is that all the problems he outlines can be solved through support for the Democratic Party or even more moderate Republicans. He concludes his book by declaring that “we face a political problem, one that requires explicitly political solutions,” and calls for the American people to vote “today’s Right” out of office.

Cause and effect in biology and history

Mayr’s book Toward a New Philosophy of Biology is filled with truly profound and fascinating essays. In “Cause and Effect in Biology,” he discusses the question of determinism and prediction in biology. The question is quite important, because a mechanistic interpretation of the physical world, which considers only physical or physicochemical causes and explanations, fails to really account for biological phenomenon (and other, higher, levels of organization, including social development). This leads generally to supernatural explanations for life—vitalism, spiritualism, religion, etc.

In the works of Descartes, one finds this relationship—between mechanistic materialism and spiritualism—expressed quite clearly. The body is a machine, according to Descartes, something akin to a system of water pumps. This obviously fails to account for the great complexity of biological phenomena, particularly mental experience, and the soul is postulated to account for what can not be explained by analogy to a simple machine. And the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics (or rather, the attempt to explain all of the material world in reference only to this physics) is in fact quite compatible with the most varied forms of religious obscurantism, and Newton himself embodied these two ways of seeing the world (he devoted as much time to Biblical exegesis as he did to the creation of the new physics).

Mayr quotes C. Bernard as declaring, “We admit that the life phenomena are attached to physicochemical manifestations, but it is true that the essential is not explained thereby; for no fortuitous coming together of physicochemical phenomena constructs each organism after a plan and a fixed design (which are foreseen in advance) and arouses the admirable subordination and harmonious agreement of the acts of life…Determinism can never be [anything] but physiochemical determinism. The vital force and life belong to the metaphysical world.” Indeed, to a certain extent this argument is cogent, i.e., if you accept the premises, then the conclusion more or less follows. However, the question is really whether or not physiochemical determinism accounts for the entire scope of natural law governed processes. Similar arguments are brought out by those who would seek to deny that there is a science of history—history can not be a science because it cannot have the sort of laws that physics has. Popper has made a variety of this argument in some of his writings. The social analogy of vitalism, the idea that there is a special “life force,” generally associated with the soul or some metaphysical entity, has its analogies in the historical sciences—the “great man theory of history,” and other varieties of historical idealism.

Indeed, the relationship between biology and the science of human history is deeper. Biology is a historical science. As the great evolutionist Dobzhansky reminded us, “nothing in biology makes sense outside of evolution,” that is, outside of history. The rise and triumph of evolutionary biology, beginning with Darwin and becoming firmly established during the first decades of the twentieth century with the “evolutionary synthesis,” revolutionized biology, placing evolution at its core and requiring all biological phenomena to be understood in the process of their historical development.

Mayr quotes the physicist Max Delbruck (“A physicist looks at biology,” 1949): “Any living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.” That is, the biological entity—the cell, the organism, the species—is the product of a prolonged period of interaction between its ancestors and the surrounding world. To understand the entity, one must understand how it came to be, how its ancestors interacted and adapted to the totality of its organic and inorganic environment. For the purposes of categorization and experimentation, it can be abstracted from its historical and biological environment, but a truly concrete understanding of its nature comes only from cognition of this environment. Speaking more generally, Hegel once said that if one were to eliminate one speck of dust, the entire universe would collapse, by which he meant that the universe can only truly be comprehended as a unity of difference, and not as isolated essences.

In discussing cause and effect in biology Mayr distinguishes between two fundamental types of cause: proximate cause and ultimate cause. Among the proximate causes, one includes the physiochemical or immediate environmental factors that produce a biological event, e.g., the migration of a bird on a particular day. One might point to the temperature on that day, a certain neural state induced by the environment in the bird, etc. When one begins to explain the event in terms of the evolutionary heritage of the bird, its specific adaptations that have led it to migrate south when the weather turns cold, etc., then one is dealing with ultimate causes. “These are causes that have a history,” Mayr writes, “and that have been incorporated into the system through many thousands of generations of natural selection…[P]roximate causes govern the responses of the individual (and his organs) to immediate factors of the environment, while ultimate causes are responsible for the evolution of the particular DNA program of information with which every individual of every species is endowed.” The “purposiveness” of biological phenomena, which so impressed Bernard, is a product of these historical, ultimate causes.

In history, the proximate causes are those that deal with the particular individuals or political forces acting at a given stage of history—the assassination of the Archduke let the Austrian government to issue an ultimatum, sparking a network of alliances that led to World War I. The ultimate causes are those that refer to the deeper social forces at work—the rise of German imperialism, the conflict between the nation-state system of Europe and the globalization of the world economy, etc.

We come now to the problem of prediction in biology. According to Mayr, “The theory of natural selection can describe and explain phenomena with considerable precision, but it cannot make reliable predictions, except through such trivial and meaningless circular statements, as, for instance: ‘The fitter individuals will on average leave more offspring.’” While there are many types of biological predictions that can be made, “Probably nothing in biology is less predictable than the future course of evolution.”

It is worthwhile examining in some detail the four reasons that Mayr cites for the difficulty of biological prediction, because an important question that a Marxist would want to address is how a science of human history may have predictive power. It is one thing to explain something scientifically; it is another to be able to predict the future course of events. The first reason he gives is the “randomness of an event with respect to the significance of the event.” In particular, DNA mutations are random: “The occurrence of a given mutation is in no way related to the evolutionary needs of the particular organism or of the population to which it belongs.” Similarly with recombination. Second, “Uniqueness of all entities at the higher levels of biological integration.” Third, “extreme complexity.” And fourth, “Emergence of new qualities at higher levels of integration.”

I am not sure I see a problem with the latter three reasons. Mayr himself points out that the uniqueness of individuals still allows for statistical predictions, and draws an analogy to particles in a gas moving individually in different and unpredictable directions, but having predictable effects at a more macroscopic level. Moreover, extremely complex entities do not necessarily preclude predictability. Bring a fire to a man’s hand and he will withdraw it, regardless of how complex his biological constitution may be. One can predict the stages through which a man will pass in his biological development as well, because this extremely complex development is nevertheless regulated by genetic mechanisms. Finally, certainly with complex entities one sees the emergence of new characteristics, however one also sees the emergence of new laws, of new regularities, which allow predictions at the higher level of organization.

It seems to me that the first reason is the most significant. Evolution involves a large degree of randomness, and there is no direct relationship between the “evolutionary needs” of a population with this randomness. However, I am not convinced that this really eliminates the ability to make predictions about evolution either. Can one not predict that if one introduces a species of bird into an environment in which the only source of food favors birds with larger beaks, that the population of birds will evolve toward larger beaks? One knows that there is variation in beak size and this is governed by different allele frequencies. The larger beaks will tend to be selected for. Of course, the prediction is highly conditional—assuming that the birds do not find a different source of food; assuming that a mutation is not introduced that sends the population in a different evolutionary direction; etc. Nevertheless, randomness in mutation and recombination does not do away entirely with the ability to make predictions.

How to bring this discussion to the question of historical laws and historical predictions? While I have argued that predictions about biological evolution are still possible, I think the case can be made more strongly for social development, which involves very different forms of organization than biological evolution. Human societies are highly regulated in a way that biological populations in general are not, and this introduced very definite “evolutionary pressures” and much more predictable responses to these pressures. In particular, the process of production and the growth of the productive forces replaces evolution as the main driving force of the development of the human species [though of course biological evolution has not disappeared].

As Marx wrote, “In the social production of their existence, men inevitable enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production…The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life…At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production,” which begins an era of social revolution. “In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

There is no real correlate to class structure at a biological level. One sees for the first time in the history of life on earth the emergence of a dynamic social structure that, through culture (by which I mean the use of tools and knowledge and language that is transmitted from generation to generation outside of the framework of the genome), comes to dominate historical change within the population. The social requirements for the continued development of the productive forces and human society are much more definite than the evolutionary requirements for the continued development of populations in general. This is because the development of the productive forces imposes definite constraints on the social relations that will allow for their further development. For example, the socialization of the production under capitalism can only be continued and developed through the abolition of the private ownership of the productive forces. The internationalization of the productive forces can only be further developed through the abolition of the system of competing nation-states. In this sense one can predict the necessary stages in the development of human society, the “material transformation of the economic conditions of production…can be determined with the precision of natural science.” [In the comments section of this post, I elaborate on the issues raised in this paragraph. I have also changed above the phrase "socialization of the productive forces" to "socialization of production."]

I would also make the argument that the “selection pressures” imposed by the requirements of the productive forces produce the required “mutations”, or individual actions and persons, with far greater regularity than evolutionary requirements produce the needed mutations in DNA. The required personalities and political tendencies are more or less direct products of the social environment, though “more or less” here encompasses a great deal, since the relationship between the material base of human society and ideological manifestations is a complex one. However, this relationship allows for a sort of Lamarkian, or non-genetic evolution of human society, thereby reducing the amount of randomness. In human history, and not in biological evolution, the need for birds with bigger beaks actually leads to the production of birds with bigger beaks.

This by no means diminishes the need for conscious action among men, for all changes in the social relations of production must be mediated through these conscious actions. The role of the subjective factor in the conflict between different social forces requires that any definite predictions be conditional upon decisions and actions made by individuals and by parties. One can predict with absolute certainty the emergence in the coming period of enormous social struggles on an international scale; one can say with certainty that the crisis of world capitalism and the further development of the productive forces can only be resolved through an international socialist movement. However, the result of these struggles and the success of this movement is an open question that remains to be decided.

On the Unity of the Genotype

In his book, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Ernst Mayr has an essay entitled “The Unity of the Genotype” that is well worth examining. He summarizes the views of a theoretical lineage (beginning with the Soviet philosopher Chetverikov in 1926) through Mayr himself as follows: “Free variability is found only in a limited portion of the genotype. Most genes are tied together into balanced complexes that resist change. The fitness of genes tied up in these complexes is determined far more by the fitness of the complex as a whole than by any functional qualities of the individual genes.” This view must be counterpoised with the Mendelian conception, which it seems to me finds its most modern expression in the writings of Richard Dawkins, of the independence, the segregation, of genes. Here the gene (however this may be defined, a tricky matter) is treated as an isolated unit, the ultimate unit of selection. Evolution is understood as the changing of gene frequencies in a population.

In contrast, Mayr argues that it is necessary to treat the entire genotype as a unified complex of interacting parts. He traces this back to Darwin’s concept of correlation of growth, formulated in the Origin of Species, as the observation “that the whole organization is so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified.” Mayr brings in several different manifestations of the cohesion of the genotype, including Lerner’s concept of genetic homeostasis, the tendency for a population to loose some or most of an artificially selected trait when the selection pressure is removed; and the often-observed narrowness of hybrid zones, in which gene flow between two species that have come into contact with each other does not extend beyond a narrow band surrounding the area of cross-mating.

He draws the following conclusions from these observations: “(1) Since the fitness of a gene depends in part on the success of its interaction with its genetic background, it is no longer possible to assign an absolute selective value to a gene. A gene has potentially as many selective values as it has possible genetic backgrounds; (2) The target of selection does not consist of single genes but rather of such components of the phenotype as the eye, the legs, the flower, the thermo-regulatory or photo-synthetic apparatus, etc. …”

The concept of the cohesion of the genotype is useful, because it helps us comprehend certain features of the biological world that would otherwise be difficult to explain. There are, for example, only a certain limited number of animal “types,” the Bauplane: invertebrates, vertebrates, insects, arachnids, etc., and species within each type share a remarkable degree of similarity (the finger bones in a bat wing and in the hand of a human, e.g.). Why is evolution so conservative? Mayr suggests that one possible explanation is that a major change in the underlying structure of an organism (for example, the addition of a new set of extremities) is usually so disruptive to the expression of the genotype as a whole that it is strongly selected against. “The same phenomenon is illustrated by the gill arches that still dominate the ontogeny of land-living vertebrates,” he notes. “It is obvious in all these cases that development is controlled by such a large number of interacting genes that the selection pressure to eliminate vestigial structures is less effective than the selection to maintain the efficiency of well established development pathways.”

The concept also helps explain the evidence of highly uneven rates of evolution (periods of relative stasis or gradual change followed by relatively rapid change). The unity of the genotype acts as a stabilizing force, resisting major evolutionary change, however this stability can be disrupted in certain situations such as the breakaway of “founder populations” (small populations that are separated from the population as a whole), which are confronted with new environmental conditions. [Mayr was really the first theorist to develop this concept, which he called “genetic revolutions,” though it has since become eclipsed by Gould and Eldridge’s more dubious theory of punctuated equilibria, which it is sometimes argued is in conflict with Darwin’s theory of natural selection].

For the moment I am simply throwing this concept out there, but hopefully I will develop these ideas in future posts. I think that it is highly significant that the lineage emerged first among Soviet scientists in the 1920s, pre-Lysenko and prior to the major phases of Stalinist repression. A serious examination of the work of these geneticists would be well worth the effort.