Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove

Author:David Stove
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-08-13T21:10:00+00:00

AMONG HUMANS, then, as among kookaburras, rats, and indeed all the higher animals, the infants are more selfish than the adults. They are also, of course, more helpless. Nor is this conjunction of attributes accidental: there is an obvious connection between helplessness and selfishness. An animal that is helpless, whether through infancy, injury, illness, or age, if it is to survive at all, can do so only by accepting from others good offices which it cannot reciprocate: that is, only by adopting the selfish policy of "take rather than give." And the greater the degree of its helplessness, the greater must be the excess of "take" over "give" in its policy; that is, the greater the degree of its selfishness must be.

In our species, the helplessness of infants is both more extreme and more prolonged than in any other species. This fact was noticed by Anaximander about z,6oo years ago, and it suggested to him that our species must have evolved from some other: from some species which was a good deal more businesslike than ours is, in what is called in commerce "the replacement of existing stock." His observation is, indeed a most pregnant one, and its implications have perhaps not been entirely exhausted even yet. It implies, for example (since the more helpless an organism is, the more selfish it must be to survive), that human infants are also more selfish than the infants of any other species. I have never heard of any observations which contradict this corollary, or even appear to do so.

Anaximander's law (as we may call it), though it goes deep, is only a comparative proposition. It does nothing in itself, there fore, to prepare us for the absolute degree of infant helplessness which we find by experience in the human case. This is something absolutely staggering, indeed scarcely credible. It would be thought altogether incompatible with our species' surviving, and would be rationally thought so, if we did not, from other sources, happen to know better. Newborn humans are far more helpless, even, than (for example) the half-inch blobs which are newborn kangaroos.31 Even after ten weeks, a baby still cannot even use its hands to guide its mother's nipple towards its mouth. As a way for the most intelligent, inventive, and capable beings on earthand perhaps anywhere-to begin, this seems more than a little odd. Yet it is the way they begin, and the only way they can begin. The bypassing of infancy is not contemplated even by the most wildly speculative of genetic engineers.

That the infants of our species are more selfish than those of any other would be a telling blow in favor of the selfish theory, if it were taken on its own. But it has to be taken in conjunction with another fact which we know independently: that our species has survived for a very long time. And then it is a telling blow against the selfish theory. That our infants of each new generation are uniquely helpless

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