Modern Mind

Extended Phenotype
(1982),
River out of Eden
(1995), and
Climbing Mount Improbable
(1996), with
The Selfish Gene
being reissued in 1989. There is a relentless quality about
The BlindWatchmaker,
as there is about many of Dawkins’s books, a reflection of his desire once and for all to dispel every fuzzy notion about evolution. 47 One of the arguments of the antievolutionists is to say: if evolution is a fact, why aren’t there intermediate forms of life, and how did complex organisms, like eyes or wings, form without intermediate organisms also occurring? Surely only a designer, like God, could arrange all this? And so Dawkins spends time demolishing such objections. Take wings: ‘There are animals alive today that beautifully illustrate every stage in the continuum. There are frogs that glide with big webs between their toes, tree-snakes with flattened bodies that catch the air, lizards with flaps along their bodies, and several different kinds of mammals that glide with membranes stretched between their limbs, showing us the kind of way bats must have got their start. Contrary to the Creationist literature, not only are animals with “half a wing” common, so are animals with a quarter of a wing, three quarters of a wing, and so on.’ 48 Dawkins’s second aim is to emphasise that natural selection really does happen, and his technique here is to quote some telling examples, one of the best being the cicadas, whose life cycles are always prime numbers (thirteen or seventeen years), the point being that such locusts reach maturity at an unpredictable time, meaning that the species they feed on can never adjust to their arrival – it is mathematically random! But Dawkins’s main original contribution was his notion of ‘memes,’ a neologism to describe the cultural equivalent of genes. 49 Dawkins argued that as a result of human cognitive evolution, such things as ideas, books, tunes, and cultural practices come to resemble genes in that the more successful – those that help their possessors thrive – live on, and so will ‘reproduce’ and be used by later generations.
    Daniel Dennett, a philosopher from Tufts University in Medford, near Boston, is another uncompromising neo-Darwinist. In
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
(1995), Dennett states baldly, ‘If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space, time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’ 50 Like Wilson and Dawkins, Dennett is concerned to drum evolutionary theory’s opponents out of town: ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea is reductionism incarnate.’ 51 His book is an attempt to explain how life, intelligence, language, art, and ultimately consciousness are, in essence, no more than ‘engineering problems.’ We haven’t got there yet, when it comes to explaining all the small steps that have been taken in the course of natural selection, but Dennett has no doubt we will some day. Perhaps the heart of his book (one heart anyway; it is very rich) is an examination of the ideas of Stuart Kauffman in his 1993 book
The Origins of Order: Self-Organisation and Selection in Evolution
. 52 Kauffman’s idea was an attack on natural selection insofar as he argued that the similarity between organisms did not necessarily imply descent; it could just as easily be due to the fact that there are only a small number of design solutions to any problem, and that these ‘inherent’ solutions shape the organisms. 53 Dennett concedes that Kauffman has a point, far more than any others who offer rivaltheories to natural selection, but he argues that these ‘constraints over design’ in fact only add to the possibilities in evolution, using poetry as an analogy. When poetry is written to rhyme, he points out, the poet finds many more juxtapositions than he or she would have found had he or she just been writing a shopping list. In other words, order may begin as a constraint, but it can end up by being liberating. Dennett’s other main aim, beyond emphasising life as a physical-engineering phenomenon, shaped by natural selection, is to come to grips with what is at the moment the single most important mystery still outstanding in the biological sciences – consciousness. This will be discussed