Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think : Reflections by Scientists, Writers, and Philosophers by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Author:Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780199291168
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-05-01T10:00:00+00:00

ANTIPHONAL VOICES

Richard Dawkins and the problem of progress

Michael Ruse

Directionalist common sense surely wins on the very long time scale: once there was only blue-green slime and now there are sharp-eyed metazoa.1

ONE of the many attractive things about the writings of Richard Dawkins is his willingness to state his positions clearly and forcefully. No hiding of ideas in ambiguity or of saying one thing in the text and then qualifying it to death with a thousand footnotes. In the language of the Bible, Dawkins lets his yea be yea and his nay be nay. Nowhere has Dawkins been more forthright than in his endorsement of the idea of evolutionary progress. He believes in it, he has said so many times, and he has argued for it.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, this is a controversial position, with today’s evolutionists split down the middle on the issue. The entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is as enthusiastic about progress as is Dawkins. ‘Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard, including the acquisition of goals and intentions in the behavior of animals.’2 Stephen Jay Gould, the only man (apart from Darwin himself) to have competed with Dawkins’ supreme brilliance as a popular writer about evolution, was adamantly opposed to progress, speaking of it as ‘a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history’.3 It is a delusion engendered by our refusal to accept our insignificance when faced with the immensity of time.4

Let us ask some questions. First, what, if anything, has been the relationship between evolutionary thinking and thoughts of progress? Are we faced with an old dispute that we evolutionists, who take seriously the belief that the past is the key to the present, should consider? Second, why would the notion of progress be controversial? Third, what is Dawkins’ position on the idea of progress and is it new? Fourth, is Richard Dawkins right?

The idea of progress is a child of the eighteenth century, the Age of the Enlightenment.5 In the cultural realm, progress was the belief or conviction that things (education, living standards, knowledge) are getting better, and that we humans are the force behind the improvement.6 It is often thought to be an idea opposed to Christianity, but it is better to say that it is an idea opposed to the Christian belief in Providence, the idea that only through God’s grace can we expect real advance. In the biological realm, and everybody back then was quite explicit that analogy was being drawn with culture, progress meant that among organisms there is an order from simple to complex, from the least to the most, from (as was often said) the monad to the man. (Some put plants at the bottom, some put plants on a different scale.)

Organic evolution came into being on the back of biological progress. The early evolutionists, Denis Diderot7 and then Jean Baptiste de Lamarck8 in

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