From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences
Edited by Connie Barlow
The MIT Press, 273 pp.
Reviewed by Dave Riley
There seems to be a frustrating paucity of informed debate within the environment movement. A certain sentimentality for Nature sits arrogantly on a greener-than-thou-stance which merges into a chlorophyll metaphysic. Greenness has religious proportions fundamentally personalised for each true believer.
From Gaia to Selfish Genes changes that around. In our concern for nature, we are best served by trying to understand rather than mystify it. This is what Connie Barlow bravely encourages in her anthology, culled from the works of biologists, geneticists, zoologists and sundry other theorists of the life sciences. Her contributors are an impressive list, each of whom has established credit before lay audiences. This is comprehensible stuff with sharp polemics to heighten the differences.
Current debates about heredity and environment, competition and cooperation, randomness and determinism, and the meaning of individuality are covered, beginning with the planetary perspective of James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis and concluding with the reductionist views of Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson. Barlow certainly has her favourites, but the collection is diverse enough for readers to draw their own conclusions.
This book simply begs you to make your own link between biology and philosophy, especially as it becomes very clear that the outlook of each contributor meshes in with their politics. While purportedly focused on the laws of nature, the discussion rests firmly on divergent views of human society. Natural history and human history aren't really that separate.
The central essay in this regard is by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. Drawn from their book Not in Our Genes, the writers compose a radical critique of reductionism — the belief that the properties of complex wholes can be understood in terms of the units of which they are composed.
Instead, the authors advocate dialectics, in which "the universe is unitary but always in change; the phenomena we see at any instant are parts of processes, processes with histories and futures whose paths are not uniquely determined by their constituent units". Lewontin and Kamin later applied dialectics — the core method of Marxism — to ecology in their book The Dialectical Biologist.
This view is different again from the holistic homeostasis expounded in James Lovelock's concept of Gaia, in which the earth's atmosphere seems to have been designed cooperatively by the totality of living systems. Almost like a new animism, Lovelock speculates that "Gaia may turn out to be the first religion to have a testable scientific theory embedded in it".
Perhaps too much of the book is given over to card carrying reductionists. Perennial questions over who or what we are were once answered succinctly by the eminent zoologist George Gaylord Simpson: "The point I want to make is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [when Darwin published The Origin of Species] are worthless and that we'll be better off ignoring them completely."
Latter-day biological determinism in the form of E.O. Wilson's sociobiology has reduced organic behaviour to the activity of genes. Richard Dawkins' outlook is a gene's eye view of life on earth, in which the immortal gene simply dons a different survival mechanism each generation. Culture, since it is not inherited, is transmitted mind to mind by "memes". Human existence is a compound of genes and memes.
All up, there are 35 contributors, though a good proportion get only an isolated paragraph. Favoured writers such as Stephen Jay Gould and Ashley Montagu are poorly served, and I could have done without the heavy angst of the old Cold Warrior Arthur Koestler.
Nonetheless, anyone with the slightest interest in natural history should take in this book as an introduction to further reading. You will be enthused into further research, and the ecology movement will be the better for it.