17.12.1998

Philosophy, history and biology: Towards a critique of science

Danny Hammill reviews ‘Lifelines: biology, freedom, determinism’ by Steven Rose (Penguin 1998, pp334, £8.99)

Turn on the radio. Open the newspaper. What do you get? Some scientist or dilettante journalist triumphantly announcing the discovery of a ‘new gene’ for this or that.

In fact, there appear to be genes for almost everything: crime, intelligence, alcoholism, depression, musical ability, aggression, homosexuality, mothering, etc. Two years ago Daniel Koshland, then editor of the much respected journal Science, even suggested that there might be genes for homelessness. It is surely only a matter of time before some previously unknown scientist in California amazes us with the discovery of a ‘communist’ gene.

The new book by biologist Stephen Rose is a refreshing antidote to this pseudo-scientific irrationalism - which he terms “neurogenetic determinism”. If anybody can rise to the anti-reductionist challenge it is professor Rose. In the 1960s and 70s he was part of the radical science movement. He co-edited and co-authored a series of books such as The political economy of science, Against biological determinism, Towards a liberatory biology, The dialectical biologist and Not in our genes.

Somewhat controversially, Rose argues that scientific endeavours like the Human Genome Project - the goal of which is to map out the three-billion-DNA-letter recipe for humankind - have ensured that this stream of genetic/neurogenetic determinism is becoming a raging torrent. In particular the Human Genome Project offers the universal panacea of genetic engineering to solve the ills of the human race. (James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of DNA in 1953, at one stage cruelly dismissed the Human Genome Project as a task only fit for trained monkeys.)

As Rose is quick to point out, this means there is bigmoney to be made by the peddling of idealist illusions in the supposed omnipotent power of science - or perhaps we should say scientism, the moneyed-back rule of technocrats, experts and specialists. He who pays the piper tends to call the tune. Rose correctly writes: “And where there are genes, genetic and pharmacological engineering holds hopes for salvation that social engineering and politics have abandoned” (preface).

He cites the apparent outbreak of so-called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). According to official US statistics, up to 10% of all American children suffer from ADHD. One of the first symptoms of ADHD is being a nuisance in the classroom or an inability to accept the authority of the teacher. Once diagnosed, the recommended treatment is to give the sick child an amphetamine-type psychotropic drug, which calms little Johnny down. Drugs companies are making big money producing anti-ADHD ‘medicines’. Interestingly, The Guardian seems to think this a good idea. A recent editorial trumpeted how “the cure for illnesses like maniac depression may emerge from genetic engineering research” (December 9).

Vitally, Rose places the current passionate debates firmly in their historical-political-social context. The origins of neurogenetic determinism hark back to the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s - which was very strong in the United States and among some establishment circles in Britain (Winston Churchill, for one, was an enthusiastic devotee of semi-fascistic eugenic theories). It flared up again as part of the conservative backlash to the radical-progressive movements of the 1960s - civil rights, gay and women’s liberation, anti-imperialism, etc. In the mid-1970s, neurogenetic determinism made a determined comeback, initially in the shape of sociobiology, whose guru, in many respects, was Edward Wilson. His 1975 Sociobiology: the new synthesis was the determinist’s manifesto.

One year later the ‘theoretician-polemicist’ Richard Dawkins published his best-selling and groundbreaking The selfish gene, which has been championed by all reactionary determinists everywhere. It needs to be said here that this work has been almost universally misunderstood - mainly by his zealous supporters, especially in the bourgeois media. Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’ theory is a radical application of the mathematical-statistical models you find in game theory - especially the evolutionary stable strategies devised by John Maynard Smith for the study of animal behaviour. Dawkins’ genes are not ‘selfish’ in the sense some might refer to ‘gay’ or ‘aggressive’ genes. They are intended to ensure that their possessors do what is necessary to replicate, so copies can be passed down to the next generation - which may of course include ‘cooperative’ or ‘altruistic’ behaviour.

However, despite the many insights and flashes of brilliance in The Selfish gene, Dawkins’ central thesis has an ineluctable reductionist logic to it. Here lies Rose’s violent objection. “Dawkinsology”, as Rose terms it, is centred on a gene’s-eye view of the world. The living organism itself, the wider environment, the role of chance and accident - ie, contingency - become obscured, if not dismissed. Natural selection is, literally, everything - there are no limits to its power.

Rose steadfastly maintains that a “metaphysical assumption” lies at the heart of Dawkinsology. The purpose (telos) of life is reproduction, and reproduction of the genes are embedded in the “lumbering robots” (Dawkins) which constitute living organisms. Every living process is therefore in some way directed towards this grand goal. The sole activity and telos of these genes is to create the conditions for their own replication, packaged either in the form of a divided cell or a reproducing organism: the genes themselves actually direct the development and physiological function of the organism.

Logically, this means embracing the “adaptationist paradigm”, which decrees that every phenotypic feature - ie, the surface characteristics of every individual organism - must at the end of the day represent a character which either has been (naturally) selected or is available for selection.

These premises are clearly untrue - look at the dinosaurs. As Rose ironically remarks, the dinosaurs were presumably well adapted for millions of years until a bloody big meteorite - or whatever - wiped them out virtually overnight. Clearly natural selection is not the only force driving evolutionary change.

Lifelines is therefore dedicated to the fight against this strict adaptationist credo or “ultra-Darwinism” - which, it has to be said, seeks to go well beyond Darwin himself. Genetics as a form of destiny; DNA as ideology - here is Darwinism transformed from a materialist science into an all-enveloping dogma.

Driving his dialectical-humanist stakes into the heart of the matter, Rose writes how “drift or contingency are unacceptable” to the ultra-Darwinists,

“except as providers of the material variation on which on which selection can act ... The most comprehensive critique of the adaptationist paradigm challenges ultra-Darwinism by stressing the laws of higgledy-piggledy, the role of chance, of contingency, in evolution” (p231).

Crucially, Rose has set out to produce what he calls a philosophy of biology - not mere scientific refutation. A philosophical stance entails displacing the gene as the sole centre of attention, and replacing it with the living organism. The trajectory of life - our lifelines - depends on the highly complex interplay that occur within cells, organisms and ecosystems through time and space.

This perspective he calls homeo-dynamic. Naturally, homeodynamic systems are superior to homeostatic ones - which are predicated on the tendency of a regulated system to maintain itself close to some fixed point, like the temperature of a room controlled by a central heating system and a thermostat. In other words, a fundamentally non-dialectical approach to life itself.

Rose’s philosophical approach is explicitly derived from the historical materialism of Marx. To this end, he quotes from the great population geneticist, Thomas Dobzhansky, who famously stated that “nothing in biology make sense except in the light of evolution”. However, Rose amends this aphorism to give it a dialectical-materialist deeper truth. He adds that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of history, by which Rose means simultaneously the history of the planet and the history of the individual organism.

As opposed to the “metaphysical” ultra-Darwinists,

“We need instead to be concerned with process, with the paradox of development by which any organism has simultaneously to be and to become ... we must speak of the dialectic of specificity and plasticity during development, the dialectic through which the living organism constructs itself. The central property of all life is the capacity and necessity to build and maintain and preserve life itself, a process known as autopoiesis” (original emphasis, p18).

Guided by this autopoietical-materialist method, Rose is confidently able to state that it is inherent in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate. That is, to continually construct their own futures, albeit in circumstances not of their own choosing. The notion of radical indeterminacy “helps us escape the determinist trap” (p7).

Therefore, Rose looks to an alternative scientific approach. One which critiques all forms of neurogenetic reductionism and mechanical materialism - but ‘from the left’, as opposed to an idealist-New Ageist perspective. This requires an epistemological diversity/pluralism - but must be firmly committed to an ontological-holistic unity - ie, the construction of an integrative biology.

An essential component of the philosophical approach to biology favoured by Rose is the necessity to hammer out a critique of science. Science is not a mirror which simply ‘reflects’ objective reality. All scientific disciplines are historical-social constructs. Therefore, all the multifarious answers provided by science “are imbued with social and political significance” (p7). The spirit of reductionism which pervades science today has been inherited from the mechanical materialism which accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century.

Rose’s approach has a precedent - as he openly acknowledges. At an international meeting on the history of science held in London in 1931, a Soviet social historian by the name of Boris Hessen delivered a paper entitled ‘The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia’. Far from Newton’s work being an act of pure scientific scholarship isolated from the social conditions of the time, said Hessen, his theories and experiments were shaped by the new economic demands of England’s rising merchant classes: the merchants needed accurate navigational tools for the ships which carried the imports and exports on which the Industrial Revolution would be built. The same goes for all the physical sciences throughout that century, outlined Hessen (for more details see N Bukharin et al, Science at the crossroads London 1971 - original edition: 1932). Who is to say that the 20th century is that different from the 19th century?

Rose makes another linkage. The current passion for reductionism amongst the “muscular” biologists and their advocates shows an inclination towards ‘physics envy’. The hierarchy of science elevates the ‘hard’ sciences of physics and chemistry to a near Olympian position - with physics perched right at the top with its “idealised predictive capacity” (p19). Under this schema, the overriding task of an increasingly reified science - with its “dichotomous partitioning” off of all living and social phenomenon - is to manufacture a limited number of universal laws which will explain the entire cosmos. Thus the great chase for the holy grails of Grand Unified Theories or ‘theories of everything’. In essence, GUTs seek to reduce chemical theory to a special case of physics, biochemistry to chemistry, physiology to biochemistry, psychology to physiology, and ultimately sociology to psychology - and hence back to physics. A clear example of this is Steven Weinberg’s runaway success, Dreams of final theory. Ultra-Darwinism feeds this desire for simple, pseudo-holistic explanations for the complexities of life.

Rose is equally scathing about the ambiguities and contradictions of Dawkinsology - his main target in Lifelines. Dawkins claims he is for “step-by-step reductionism”, but is against “precipice reductionism”. Similarly his eager acolyte, Daniel Dennett, author of the vast polemical-reductionist tome Darwin’s dangerous idea, is opposed to “greedy” reductionism.

But, says Rose, reductionism at the end of the day is still reductionism. Dennett “seems to believe that he can bungee-jump off the cliff edge, but that the elastic will pull him safely short of the hungry, snapping physicist sharks waiting for him at the bottom” (p88). Rose exposes Dennett’s belief in his ability to defy gravity.

In one of the most fascinating passages in Lifelines, Rose directs our attention to the “fundamental paradox” of the ‘selfish gene’ thesis. He quotes this passage from Dawkins:

“We are built as gene machines ... but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (R Dawkins The Selfish gene Oxford 1976, p215).

As Rose retorts, either we are the products of our genes or we are not. If we are, it can only mean that our genes are selfish and rebellious - clearly nonsensical. But if it is not our genes that are rebellious, then what is it that is? Rose explains:

“Implicit in [Dawkins’] argument is that somewhere there is some non-material, non-genetic force moulding our behaviour. This is dangerously close to Descartes, with his mind or soul in the pineal gland directing the mere mechanisms which constitute the body. For Descartes, non-human animals are of course mere machines, and I suspect that he would have been perfectly at home with Dawkinsology ... As a result, ultra-Darwinists re-import dualism - a dualism which is central to Christian theology, but absent from that of other religions, such as Buddhism or Confucianism - by the back door” (p214).

So, is ultra-Darwinism or neurogenetic determinism being hoist with its own petard?

Rose gives us numerous insights into the weird and wacky world of genetic determinism. Like some theories of kin selection. The more genes parents share with their children - or so the theory of ‘assortative mating’ goes - the more care (or ‘investment’) they give them. So, when Rose attended a meeting of the prestigious Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour at London Zoo, two sociobiologists solemnly reported that parents who both voted Conservative were more likely to send their child to a private school than if one parent voted Conservative and the other Labour. QED. Their reductionist logic went as follows:

“1. There is evidence for the heritability of political views [or a preference for the music of Pink Floyd - DH].

“2. Therefore a couple who both vote the same way are likely to do so because of assortative mating.

“3. A measure of parental investment in a child is whether they are prepared to pay for his education privately than send him to a state school.

“4. Therefore couples who both vote the same way are more likely to send their child to a private school than are couples who vote differently” (p203-3).

According to Rose, everyone apart from himself was taking these views seriously. Worse, this reductionist balderdash is seeping into mainstream discourse. Just listen to Lord Bragg and his friends - if you can bear it.

Rose’s rational optimism and burning clarity is inspirational. We are more than the sum total of our genes. We can - and must - shape our own future.

Danny Hammill