X-Message-Number: 32382
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: What Darwin Got Wrong
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:10:56 +0100

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/06/what-darwin-got-wrong

What Darwin Got Wrong....

The explanation for this might be the seductive myth that underlies  
it. That myth had its roots in Victorian social Darwinism but today it  
flows largely from two books - Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity  
(1971) and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). Both these  
books, of course, contain lots of good and necessary biological facts.  
But what made them bestsellers was chiefly the sensational underlying  
picture of human life supplied by their rhetoric and especially their  
metaphors. This drama showed heroic, isolated individuals contending,  
like space warriors, alone against an alien and meaningless cosmos. It  
established the books as a kind of bible of individualism, most  
congenial to the Reaganite and Thatcherite ethos of the 80s. Monod  
first showed humans in Existentialist style as aliens - "gypsies" in a  
foreign world - and, by expanding the role of chance in evolution,  
concluded that our life was essentially a "casino". Dawkins added  
personal drama by describing a population of genes which - quite  
unlike the real ones inside us - operate as totally independent agents  
and can do as they please. It is no great surprise that these images  
caught on, nor that they can now persist whether or not the doctrines  
linked to them turn out to be scientific.


David Stodolsky
  Skype: davidstodolsky

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