Modern Mind

animism, Bergson’s vitalism, and above all Marxism, which presents itself as a scientific theory of the history of society. Monod therefore saw science not simply as a way ofapproaching the world, but as an
ethical
stance, from which other institutions of society could only benefit.
    Not that he was blind to the problems such an attitude brought with it. ‘Modern societies, woven together by science, living from its products, have become as dependent upon it as an addict on his drug. They owe their material wherewithal to this fundamental ethic upon which knowledge is based, and their moral weakness to those value-systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer. The contradiction is deadly. It is what is digging the pit we see opening under our feet. The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.’ 36
    Monod’s vision was broad, his tone tentative, as befitted someone new to philosophy, feeling his way and not trained in the discipline. His vision of ‘objective knowledge’ largely ignored the work of Thomas Kuhn and would come under sustained attack from philosophers in the years that followed. But not all the biologists who came after Monod were as humble. Two other books published in the mid-1970s were much more aggressive in making the link between genes, social organisation, and human nature.
    In
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
(1975), the Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson intended to show the extent to which social behavior – in all animals, including man – is governed by biology, by genes. 37 Widely read in every field of biology, and a world authority on insects, Wilson demonstrated that all manner of social behavior in insects, birds, fish, and mammals could be accounted for either by the requirements of the organism’s relationship to its environment or to some strictly biological factor – such as smell – which was clearly determined by genetics. He showed how territoriality, for example, was related to food requirements, and how population was related not only to food availability but to sexual behavior, itself in turn linked to dominance patterns. He surveyed the copious evidence for birdsong, which showed that birds inherit a ‘skeleton’ of their songs but are able to learn a limited ‘dialect’ if moved. 38 He showed the importance of bombykol, a chemical substance that, in the male silkworm, stimulates the search for females, making the silkworm, according to Wilson, little more than ‘a sexual guided missile.’ 39 As little as one molecule of the substance is enough to set the silkworm off, he says, which shows how evolution might happen: a minute change in either bombykol or the receptor structure – equally fragile – could be enough to provoke a population of individuals sexually isolated from the parental stock. Wilson surveyed many of the works referred to earlier in this chapter – on gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, and elephants – as well as the studies of
Australopithecus,
and produced at the end of his book very contentious tables claiming to show how human societies, and human behavior, evolved. This produced a hierarchy with countries like the United States, Britain, and India at the top, Hawaii and New Guinea in the middle, and aborigines and Eskimos at the bottom. 40
    Wilson’s arguments were rejected by critics as oversimple, racist (he was from America’s South), and philosophically dubious; they called into question the entire concept of free will. A more technical area of controversy, but veryimportant philosophically, related to his discussion of altruism and group selection. If evolution operated in the classical way (upon individuals), critics asked, how did altruism arise, in which one individual put another’s interests before its own? How did group selection take place at all? And here the second book published in the mid-1970s provided a clearer answer. Perhaps surprisingly for nonbiologists,
The Selfish Gene
contained a fair amount of elementary mathematics. 41
    Its author, Richard Dawkins from Oxford, imagined in one of his crucial passages a bird population made up entirely of either hawks or doves. Hawks always fight but doves always back down. Now enters the mathematics. Dawkins attaches relative – and entirely arbitrary – values to various encounters. For example, the winner in a contest