The Darwin Wars: New Book Reopens Old Scars

In the late 1970s, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould reopened an episodic war between Darwinists over the question whether evolution is gradual or jerky with their theory of “punctuated equilibria.”  Even though both sides presented an evolution-as-fact face to the public, the bitterness of the attacks between the orthodox gradualists like Richard Dawkins and the punctuationists provided endless fodder for creationist sound bites.  Gould is now gone, but Eldredge continues to rankle his foes, as can be seen in a review of his new book Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene (W.W. Norton, 2004) by Robert Foley (U. of Cambridge, UK) published in the Aug. 5 issue of Nature.¹  Gradualism is not the issue of this book; instead, Eldredge attacks another major evolutionary bastion: the “selfish gene” hypothesis and its promoters, the evolutionary psychologists and “ultradarwinists” who reduce everything in life to sex.  First, Foley’s synopsis:

Eldredge’s argument is straightforward.  Sex for most animals, including or even especially humans, does not happen very often.  Most of life is filled with growing up, finding enough to eat and avoiding predators.  Sex is only occasionally interspersed among these activities – I leave it to other readers to quantify this, as I suspect there must be considerable variation.  Indeed, this is one of Eldredge’s main points: there are some individuals – and we’re talking about humans here – who never have sex.  What follows from this, Eldredge argues, is that because sex is relatively rare, it must, in evolutionary terms, be relatively unimportant.
    The next step in the argument is that sex is the source of the ‘selfish gene’ or ‘gene-centred’ model of evolution, so this model clearly must be wrong.  Selection is not for sexual and reproductive success alone, but affects all the other events between birth and death.  As Eldredge says, life is for living, not for having sex and reproducing, so fitness for life – not for the ability to spread genes – is what the game is all about.

    This otherwise straightforward argument has drastic ramifications for neodarwinism, apparently, because Foley considers Eldredge’s views “too extreme.”  Though he acknowledges his foe to be “an invertebrate palaeontologist and one of the major figures in the macroevolutionary debates of the 1970s and 1980s,” he can hardly restrain his indignation that Eldredge would try to “tear down the whole edifice of reproduction-driven neodarwinian behavioural and evolutionary ecology.”  Eldredge admits as much; according to the blurbs, the book aims to “shatter myths, recast darwinism and fundamentally change the way we understand our own evolution.”  This is too much for Foley: “If Eldredge’s explicit idea is correct, then anyone reading this book should emerge completely purged of the orthodox model of evolution as a process of enhancing reproductive success.”  Not unexpectedly, Foley believes Eldredge has failed miserably, and is nearly blind:

Is this the end for those Eldredge portrays as the ultradarwinists – notably Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, all evolutionary psychologists and probably most behavioural ecologists?  Has Eldredge demolished gene-centred evolutionary theory?  Hardly.  The logical error in Eldredge’s argument is so breathtakingly obvious that one can only wonder how he has missed it.  Reproductive success is not just about having sex.  Take virtually any animal, and certainly it may spend relatively little time actually copulating, but what Eldredge isolates as the economic sphere is clearly not independent of sex and reproduction.  How an organism grows – with males of many species being larger than females, for example – is not an isolated biological phenomenon, but represents an individual (through its genes) positioning itself to compete well in the reproductive arena.  Its social behaviour, being competitive or cooperative, and its feeding ecology are all part of its reproductive strategy – and hence are selected not just for their own efficiency, but for the extent to which they contribute to reproductive success.  Countless studies across vast numbers of species have shown how patterns of ‘economic’ behaviour are related to reproductive strategies and success.

So Foley seems to be saying, it is all about sex.  Economic behaviors (foraging, feeding, staying healthy) all have sexual reproduction as the bottom line and ultimate strategic purpose.  Does Eldredge’s antipathy to gene-centric evolution have a deeper philosophical motivation?  Foley notes that Eldredge wants to avoid the dark chapters of Darwinian history:

Humans are the central concern for Eldredge.  It is to his credit that his primary argument is not that selfish-gene models do not apply to humans because they are different, but that selfish-gene models do not work for any organisms, and therefore apply even less to humans.  Ultimately, as the final chapters make clear, this book sees in classic neodarwinism the dangers of biological determinism, and views evolutionary psychology in particular as the modern version of the older threats of social darwinism and eugenics.

Balderdash, Foley thinks: the evidence Eldredge cites is anecdotal and “hardly constitute[s] serious scientific study.” (Presumably, this means that sex is the be-all and end-all for human evolution, too; life is not “just” for living).  It’s in the final paragraphs that Foley’s venom is barely diluted:

It may seem harsh to criticize so heavily a book written in such an extraordinarily popular and friendly manner – this is not a scientific monograph, after all.  However, the claims made here are so strong, so polemical and so tilted towards making reproductive fitness seem like an irrelevance in the evolutionary process that it would be inappropriate not to point out the extent to which a naive reader might be misled.  There are many oversimplifications and difficulties with the strongly adaptive models of human evolution constructed by evolutionary psychologists and behavioural ecologists, but Eldredge’s approach is too extreme to bring these out in any way that might usefully influence future developments.

No fear, Foley says; this book may irritate but not convert. 

If you are in the mood for some relentless Dawkins-bashing, or want a rush of arguments against biological determinism, then you might enjoy it.  But if you are a neodarwinian in search of a road-to-Damascus experience, this is not the place to find it.  And if you are a neodarwinian not looking for such an experience, you had better avoid this book, as its superficiality, inconsistency and misleading logic will only irritate.  On the other hand, you need not have any fear of having your evolutionary world turned upside-down.  I closed the book with a sigh of relief.

Pretty harsh words against “an invertebrate palaeontologist and one of the major figures in the macroevolutionary debates of the 1970s and 1980s.”

¹Robert Foley, “Sex under pressure,” Nature 430, 613 – 614 (05 August 2004); doi:10.1038/430613a.

Dawkins-bashing is the same kind of entertainment as professional wrestling; the body-slams look fierce but the outcome is rigged, and you know that even if one lug seems to be getting the upper hand, the other lug might make a surprise comeback.  You probably didn’t expect to be seeing such a bitter slugfest in the pages of Nature.  This was as fun as watching Osama and Saddam gas each other.  Too bad for the Darwin Party the brawl was visible to the creationists.
    Intramural wars in the Darwin Party are nothing new; they go all the way back to the Mosstuh himself.  Charlie’s best friends, Huxley, Asa Gray and Lyell, could not stomach some of his ideas.  We saw last month Ernst Mayr review a number of severe disputes in the Darwin camp during the 20th century (see 07/02/2004 headline).  These included conflicts over the rate of evolution (gradual vs. saltational), some that can be traced back to 1859.  And philosophical arguments between determinists and free-willers, and between those who believe human sexuality needs self-control vs. those who want to justify unrestrained sexual passion, are as old as mankind itself.
    What is more interesting about this book review is that Eldredge’s stabs, and Foley’s counterstabs, cut deep into the muscle of Darwinian theory.  To see that issues of such magnitude could cause such bitter divisions within the Darwin Party’s own camp is tantamount to watching an organization debating the validity of its own founding documents and core beliefs.  These combatants may be tossing furniture at each other within the same house – the house of Charlie – but a house divided against itself cannot stand.  No wonder there are more and more who find Darwinism unconvincing (see next headline).