Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect

Believe me, the last thing I want to do this morning is sit down and take apart another dumb article holding Richard Dawkins responsible for all the world’s wrongs.  I saw this article a few days ago when it was published on Alternet, but this morning it was republished on Salon with the same title: “The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins“, and since Salon is read more widely than Alternet  (though they’re both dire), I dipped my squib and got to work. Salon, of course, is a Regressive Leftist rag that will go to any lengths to smear people like Sam Harris and Dawkins. And their lack of journalistic standards is instantiated in the article at hand.

I seem to becoming to Richard what Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) was to Charles Darwin: a smaller fish who assumes the burden of defending the Big Shark.  But Richard is my friend, he’s not going to do this himself, and I feel that for his sake, as well as that of evolutionary biology (which is misrepresented in this piece, as it often is in Dawkins hit-pieces), I have to set the record straight.

The author of this dreadful article is one Jeremy Lent, an author who’s touting his new book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. He’s also head of a think tank called The Lilogy Institute,  Th aims of the institute seem to involve a kind of wooish holism:

Instead of the conventional view that our human existence is split between mind and body, liology sees our human organism as an integrated whole, where our thoughts are embodied and our bodies possess an intrinsic intelligence.

Liology sees no fundamental split between rigorous science and the source of meaning in life. Instead, it sees current findings in systems biology and complexity science as pointing the way to understanding our place within the infinitely complex and mysterious natural world in which we have evolved.

Instead of the conventional search for a transcendent source of meaning, liology finds the most profound meaning in life arising from our intrinsic connectedness with every cell and integrated system within our own bodies and with every living entity in the natural world in which we are embedded.

It goes on from there, but I still have little idea of what this means except that it extols interconnectedness and holism, a theme of Lent’s attacks on Richard. Lent has four Big Points, all of which are wrong—in fact, they’re not even wrong.  I’ll take them in order.

1.) Dawkins’s ideas are wrecking the planet by encouraging unbridled capitalism, selfishness, wealth inequality, and a rampant reductionism that will wreck the truly holistic and interconnected view of life that we must embrace to save our planet.

I kid you not. Dawkins is Satan or the anti-Christ. Here are a few quotes from Lent. He begins with the KPFA deplatforming controversy and then says this:

What this controversy misses, however, is the far greater destructive force of other ideas Dawkins has promulgated over decades, which have helped form the foundation of a mainstream worldview that endorses gaping wealth inequalities and encourages the wanton destruction of the natural world.

There’s more:

The damage that Richard Dawkins has caused our global society goes far deeper than any hurtful comments he has made about Islam. As we face the gaping inequalities caused by uncontrolled capitalism, along with the looming threat of catastrophic climate change and other impending global crises, we must recognize the role that Dawkins’s ideas have played in forming the philosophical foundations of our unsustainable worldview.

. . .  just as religion has caused millennia of suffering based on delusional ideas, Dawkins himself has created a new delusional framework offering a false rationale for an economic and technocratic system destroying human and natural flourishing. The choice is not between religion and science, as Dawkins and his followers suggest. The real choice is between a flawed worldview that leads inexorably to globally destructive behavior and one that recognizes life’s deep interconnectedness and humanity’s intrinsic responsibility within it.

Now this is simply bullshit, and it rests on the three ideas (below) that Lent says that Dawkins has promulgated. They are these: that the “selfish gene” is somehow a both an explanation and a rationale for the idea that humans are “inherently selfish”;  that Dawkins’s reductionist attitude leads to a loss of meaning and wonder in life; and that by emphasizing the materialist and reductionist aspect of evolution, which devolves to genes, Dawkins somehow has prevented us from adopting the holistic, interconnected view of nature that is the basis of Lent’s “Lilogy” and the way to save the planet. Let’s discuss these briefly.

2. Selfish genes mean selfish people, ergo capitalism, inequity, and the destruction of human flourishing. This idea has been dispelled for years, yet it still persists in the minds of the ignorant. Over and over again, Richard has explained that the notion of selfish genes is a metaphor: genes behave as if they were selfish entities during natural selection, because the genes that replicate more prolifically are the ones that produce evolution, and come to predominate over time. This does not mean, as anyone knows who has read Richard’s work, that gene replication produces selfish entities. Altruism, parental care, and so on can evolve via selfish genes, through either kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Selfish genes can even produce a rudimentary but effective morality, as they apparently have in other apes. So Lent is wrong when he says that altruism is a “selfish behavior.” Rather, it evolved by genes that acted as if they were selfish. Here’s Lent:

Since Dawkins’s 1976 publication of “The Selfish Gene,” millions of people have come to understand evolution as the result of genes competing against other in a remorseless drive to replicate themselves. Ruthless competition is seen as the force that separates evolution’s winners from losers. Even altruism is interpreted as a sophisticated form of selfish behavior used by an organism to propagate its own genes more effectively. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins suggests, “because we are born selfish.”

It’s a harsh story, and one that has become a bedrock of modern economics, which argues that human beings are motivated by their own self-interest, and their collective self-serving actions result in the best outcome for society. This has led to a commonly accepted pseudo-scientific rationalization for laissez-faire capitalism, using the misappropriated term “survival of the fittest” to justify ruthless exploitation of the poor by wealthy corporations.

It is, however, a story that has been shown in recent decades to be erroneous at each level of its narration. Dawkins’s idea of the “selfish gene,” while still holding currency in the popular imagination, has been extensively discredited as a simplistic interpretation of evolution. In its place, biologists have developed a far more sophisticated view of evolution as a series of complex, interlocking systems, where the gene, organism, community, species, and environment all interact with each other intricately over different time frames.

Check out that link in the third paragraph! (Hint: it doesn’t go to any scientific discrediting.) In fact, the usefulness of the selfish-gene metaphor is alive and well, and has provided useful insights into how natural selection works. It is true that no behavior can evolve unless the genes underlying it outcompete alternative genes, but selection can produce behavior that involves compassion, care, and reciprocity. Yes, it must redound to the actor’s genes, but show me an evolved behavior that does not.

Further, Richard has always promulgated an ethic of compassion and unselfishness, which can overcome the real selfishness that is also an evolved part of our behavior. That is what he meant by being “born selfish,” for he certainly didn’t mean by that that every human being is solely out for itself, groupmates and relatives be damned.

Finally, it’s arrant foolishness to think that economics and capitalism are the outcome of The Selfish Gene. Need I point out that the book was published in 1976, but ideas of self-interest as underlying economics go back to Adam Smith? And Dawkins is not responsible for “Social Darwinism” justifications for capitalism, either, nor is Darwin. People are always looking for ways for science to justify their own bad acts, but that doesn’t make people like Darwin or Dawkins responsible for misappropriating what are, after all, simply scientific ideas about genetics. But it’s clearly and self-evidently wrong to blame “laissez-faire” capitalism on Dawkins. Shame on Lent for pulling such a shoddy move.

3. Dawkins’s reductionism and naturalism have taken the joy out of life. Yep, that’s what Lent says (my emphasis:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have been responsible for foisting a cruel myth on thinking people around the world: that if they reject the illusions of monotheism, their only serious alternative is to believe in a world that is harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning. Their ideas arise from a particular form of scientific thought known as reductionism, which holds that every aspect of our world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is “nothing but” the mechanical motion of particles acting predictably on each other.

I challenge Lent, or anyone, to find where in Dawkins’s work he’s said anything even remotely like this. Yes, he’s said we should reject the illusions of monotheism (and polytheism like Hinduism, which Lent curiously neglects), but has never claimed that this leads to a view of the world that is “harsh, selfish, and ultimately without meaning.”  In fact, Dawkins has repeatedly argued that embracing reality and science rather than numinous illusions makes the world more enjoyable and meaningful. Has Lent read Unweaving the Rainbow, or The Magic of Reality, and pondered the title of the latter work?

Lent has simply made stuff up here in an attempt to smear Dawkins. It is an old but untrue trope, which Lent may harbor in his unconscious, that atheism leads to nihilism. I suggest he go to Sweden and Denmark and observe all the joyless and lugubrious people in those godless lands!

4. Dawkins’s reductionism is not only untrue, but is ruining the Earth. To wit:

Richard Dawkins has been responsible for popularizing an updated version of this Cartesian myth, writing famously that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” adding: “That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.” Open any science magazine, and you’ll see genes described as programmers that “code” for certain traits, while the mind is discussed as “software” for the “hardware” of the body that is “wired” in certain ways. Thanks to Dawkins and his followers, this deluded view of nature as a machine has become ubiquitous, creating the moral sanction for corporations to treat the earth as a resource to plunder, beguiling techno-visionaries to seek immortality by downloading their minds, and inspiring technocrats to argue for solving climate change through geoengineering.

It goes on, touting Lent’s own ideas of holism, and heaping praise on Lynn Margulis (who accepted the discredited Gaia hypothesis), but let me say that there is nothing in Dawkins’s own writings that have justified or encouraged plundering the Earth, nor have I even seen a hint that people are using Dawkins’s writings as a rationalization to destroy the planet. Have the Koch brothers cited The Selfish Gene?

Scientific naturalism happens to be true, and everything comes down to the laws of physics, although we also see higher-order phenomena that are “emergent” in the sense that while we don’t know enough to predict them from the laws of physics, they must be consistent with the laws of physics. That is what reductionism means, and there is no “holism” completely independent of reductionism. That said, I’d like to see Lent’s evidence that corporations have relied on Dawkins’s ideas to justify plundering the Earth. Corporations have plenty of justifications for rapacity—when they even offer justifications—and the selfish gene is not among them.

Let us remember again that Dawkins’s genetic reductionism does not come with any ethical implications, and Richard has said that over and over again. Yes, people can misuse his ideas, as they did Darwin’s, but that is neither Darwin’s nor Dawkins’s fault.  And that is one of Lent’s big errors beyond his mischaracterizing the science. Lent’s other error is to claim that people have actually become rampant, Earth-destroying capitalists, as well as depressive nihilists who have no meaning in their lives, because of what Richard Dawkins has written.

Only someone set out to smear Dawkins could have written such nonsense, for there is simply no data, scientific or anecdotal, to back it up. Lent has blamed Dawkins for all the wrongs of the world because Dawkins is a convenient (though battered) scapegoat. That’s a common tactic, but is employed only by the malicious, the ignorant, and the publicity-hungry who want to use Dawkins’s name as clickbait. Lent, after all, has a book to sell.

h/t: Rodney