WeeklyWorker

28.01.2010

Dawkins and Dennett defended

Bob Potter takes issue with Jack Conrad and dismisses primitive communism as make-believe

What a disappointment the Jack Conrad supplement turned out to be (Weekly Worker December 17 2009). Titled ‘Origins of religion and the human revolution’, it offered an “assessment of some main theories” and asked “what apes can teach us”; instead it largely consisted of assertions and misrepresentations of ‘non-Marxists’ working in the field, before devoting half of the text to three ‘Marxist authorities’(?) - Harman, Engels and Knight - who presumably the author felt worthy of proper evaluation.

In the opening paragraph the reader is ‘reminded’ that “in all likelihood our ability to acquire and transmit abstract ideas, including religious ideas, results from the rapid growth of brain size, not least in the frontal cortex, which is associated with pre-modern Homo sapiens, and which makes us capable of symbolic thought, furious creativity and ‘extraordinary’ feats of deception” and towards the end of the essay the ‘big brain’ hypothesis is reiterated in discussion of the Chris Knight text.

Although ‘big brain’ theory has been popular from the days of Gordon V Childe, it is not supported by much of modern research. Brain size appears to have less of a relationship with behavioural repertoire and cognitive capacity than has been assumed. Charles Darwin recognised the “extraordinary activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter; thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a pin’s head.”[1] Most probably, the brain of our distant relatives, the Neanderthals, was larger than ours - most markedly their females!

Expanding on Knight’s support for the obsolete ‘big brain’ as an “evolutionary advantage”, Conrad talks of the ability of the human female to cooperate, ignoring current work on the achievements of the social structures among (tiny-brained) insects for individual social recognition of nest-mates and social learning abilities: consider nest architecture, symbolic communication, nest climate control, large repertoires of chemical communication signals, complex strategies of consensus building and unique behavioural adaptations, such as slave-making, agriculture and well coordinated territorial wars. How do insects generate such diversity and flexibility of behaviour with so few neurons?[2]

Dismissed

Then there is the section on neo-Darwinism - and the attempts of “this school” to explain religion “by extrapolating from the ways they imagine our ancestors were evolved to behave in their ‘garden of Eden’ on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago”. Fair comment indeed, when Conrad makes brief references to 17th century theorists, but included in this section we progress to Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

The impression given to this reader is that we start with the understanding that anybody writing on the subject of religion who does not complete every chapter with a declaration that every aspect of whatever they have to say demonstrates the need to involve the ‘class struggle’, as seen through the party’s spectacles, is necessarily bourgeois and must be exposed as such.

Our comrade deals with all three of these ‘bourgeois philosophers’ in less than three paragraphs. That is a great tragedy, for these three have much to say on the topic of religion and religious belief and masses of people in the general population are busy reading their books at this time.

Their enemies (Jack Conrad is amongst them) have created a straw man: a ‘genetic determinism’ that believes genes control every aspect of our lives with no reference to the environment. Since this caricature does not exist outside the brains of those who invented them, the ‘nurturists’ like Steven Rose have resorted to misreporting and doctoring quotations from the ideas developed in The selfish gene (1976). Rose, for example, who was co-author of the dogmatic book Not in our genes (1984), quotes Richard Dawkins as saying: “They [the genes] control us, body and mind.” In fact, Dawkins wrote: “They created us, body and mind”. None of those working in the field ever claimed we are exclusively determined by our genes.

Likewise, Conrad clearly misses the point Dawkins is suggesting, when he dismisses, in a two-sentence aside, the ‘meme as new replicator’ hypothesis. It is Dawkins’ rational attempt to grapple with an association between the ‘nurture’ factor and the ‘genetic equation’.

The provisional theory is that memes evolve by a process of natural selection (vaguely similar to the parallel biological procedures) being spread automatically by their ‘hosts’; like genes, they do not necessarily act to their host’s advantage. There are three main problems with ‘meme theory’: there is no way of specifying a meme ‘unit’ - how might we talk of ‘the smallest (cultural) elements replicating themselves with reliability and fecundity’? Secondly, there is, as yet, no consistent theory of a mechanism for storing and copying memes; finally, in principle, memetic evolution is ‘Lamarckian’. In a very fundamental sense, meme theory is not a mirror image of gene theory.

Fashions come and fashions go, not only in the clothes we wear, but the places we go for our leisure. It is the same with religious belief, or ideological belief: that is not to say the beliefs are not grounded in society, as are all viruses, and to see religion in this way makes sense to me: some viruses are lethal, others just a nuisance - Ebola will probably kill you, a cold might not even be noticed. To die with dynamite strapped to your body may be a quick way to heaven; loving your neighbour may be an alternative. In a social rather than a biological sense, Dawkins suggests the various ‘memes’ (wearing a baseball cap back to front; whistling a popular tune) hit a culture and temporally ‘change’ that culture. We move on - we do not ‘return’ to the earlier culture …

Having dealt with Dawkins in a couple of sentences, Conrad belittles (rather ignores) Daniel Dennett, who has contributed so much to our current investigations into the human mind and human consciousness - tackling again, but with the aid of modern computer technology, the fundamental problems concerning human existence posed by Kant and Hegel - into our explorations of the human mind and the origins of self-consciousness. Like his friend, Dawkins, his work, especially his Darwin’s dangerous idea (1995), shows how natural selection provides the underlying blueprint for understanding … and the probable origins of life, thought, language, highlighting the religious yearnings distorting disputes between scientists.

Conrad unbelievably reduces Dennett’s work in this way: “His main contention is that organised religion depends on ‘secrecy, deception and systematic invulnerability to disconfirmation’”; Although the statement in isolation is fair comment, it barely touches the body of Dennett’s very relevant contributions to cognitive science. Instead, Conrad focuses upon his brief address to an ‘enlightenment’ meeting (in California), reprinted in the New York Times in July 2003. But even that is misreported by Conrad. Two members of the Sacramento group had referred to themselves as ‘brights’, making it quite clear they based themselves on the 18th century American founders of ‘enlightenment’, Thomas Jefferson et al.

‘Brights’ (as Dennett explains) were defined as those “who don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny - or god. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death.” He pointed out that to be a ‘bright’ is not a boast, but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world-view.

To present these few off-the-cuff remarks as a ‘summary’ of Dennett is as pathetic as his similar snide remark against Dawkins for “courting notoriety” - in a sense, self-publicity has been part of Dawkins’ job, functioning as Oxford’s professor for the public understanding of science. His books are grippingly written, understandable by those with limited reading skills, and remain permanent best sellers. It is accepted he does not conclude each book with a call for ‘the communist revolution’ (as Conrad would define it) - and admittedly his God delusion (2006) is, in many respects, his least impressive book - but to deliberately disassociate from it “because of his arrogance” cannot be seen as a progressive tactic.

The irony is that Conrad leaves his ‘encounter’ with Dawkins and Dennett by expressing “a certain Pavlovian sympathy” for their belligerent atheism. He clearly does not realise that Pavlovian psychology may well have fitted with Stalinism, but today it is a relic from the behavioural past. So it is hardly surprising that when Conrad moves on to studies of apes - gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos - he does not appreciate that current work is no longer based on the behavioural approaches of Pavlov and Skinner, American sign language, etc; techniques that nevertheless did allow subject chimps to ‘create’ symbols they had not been taught by their carers. Indeed, Jane Goodall’s work was ground-breaking in many respects and her Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986) is a treasure-house of information regarding animal studies overall, going far beyond the observations carried out by her and her teams.

The massive evidence of animal abstract thought, intelligence, rationality, social interaction and the ability to lie and misrepresent reality to a fellow chimpanzee are not referred to in the Conrad overview; his portrayal of chimp lifestyle is often closer to that found in a Johnny Weissmuller film.

Then and now

It might have been useful to have been more specific as to what the author means by ‘religion’. Surely a few paragraphs covering the theme of Rudolf Otto’s The idea of the holy (1923), the primitive feelings of awe (beyond ‘fear’), the feeling of absolute overpoweringness, combined with the exciting fascination with the unknown. Those few who have experienced natural isolation can be forgiven if they imagine similar thoughts to their own manifested in the consciousness of our primitive ancestors - in a very basic sense, replicated by the apes that have been observed watching the setting of the sun on the African savannah - that is one possible approach, anyway.

Very different is the religion that is organised, increasingly removed from and separated from the everyday life that gave it birth - transformed into an appendage, a tool for class rule. But even within this latter category, individuals will mostly fall into the extrinsic or intrinsic groupings. Members of the Church of England, for example, will often be there because ‘it’s the place to be seen’ - to be ‘somebody’ in the social hierarchy; more sincere believers might well be more at home in the evangelical, happy-clappy environment, where they can transcend their own feelings of inferiority (ie, ‘sinfulness’).

The final third of Conrad’s paper is largely devoted to a discussion (via Knight) around the mythical primordial primitive communist society that was replaced by class society following the suppression of the female. I prefer to leave this discussion to those who buy this ‘make believe’ - it is common to all religions, the perfect world corrupted by man’s ‘wickedness’ - a speculation that inevitably flows into ‘Marxism’, as it develops into a secular religion.

Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski is rarely mentioned nowadays and admittedly his methodology was flawed, (but he was the first to carry his research ‘into the field’, living with the natives in the islands to the north of Australia during World War I). His writings do much to guide us to an approach for understanding life in primitive societies; how magic and religion were integrated into the culture of those times, the separation of ‘religion’ being a much later development. These texts, written more than a century ago, are well worth a re-reading:

“I have seen the savage hunter at work: he knows his animals and their habits; he is familiar with the properties of his weapons, the strength of his spear and the flight of his boomerang. I have trusted myself to savage sailors on their frail craft over dangerous seas and under trying conditions. They understand wind and weather, stability and tides, in a truly reliable - that is, scientific - way. It is only because he is able to observe correctly and think clearly that, with his simple tools and limited cooperation, primitive man can master nature as well and effectively as he actually does.”[3]

In the same article, Malinowski draws the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘magic’, warning the reader of the mistake of assuming magic represented primitive science. Magic never undertakes to do that which primitive man can easily achieve by knowledge, manual skill and bodily effort, he insists. The Melanesian “savage” never digs the soil ‘by magic’, nor does he throw his spears ‘by ritual’ or sail his canoes ‘by spell’.

He lives in a world that is his living larder - raw material in spite of the unmanageable dangers surrounding him: wild animals, poisonous plants, storms and accidents. Here was a society where, I would argue, science and religion were at a much earlier stage of development - but they complemented each other. We know of no ‘conflict’ between the two fields. Humankind was learning to ‘take control of the physical world’, magic/religion was there to bring the members of the community together against a little understood and very frightening universe. But this situation was to change. With the historical advance of society and the creation of feudal and nation states, religion was destined to play a new role for the rulers of society.

Today the western world is in the throes of the latest ‘credit crunch’, and the various pundits either have no real understanding of capitalist economics or, alternatively, just shut their eyes and pray the common people will be satisfied with the homilies given them by government spokespeople and will not investigate economic matters for themselves.

Splashed across the front page of The Times of September 20 2008 was the prayer specially written by the Church of England’s “Rapid Response Prayer Unit”. Whereas Malinowsky leaves the reader feeling that in that society the magic/religion beliefs/practices were integrated with and made positive contributions to the life and culture of the Melanesian peoples, today’s church presents itself as an anachronistic absurdity, contributing nothing of value to individuals of the 21st century. Here is the prayer:

“Lord god, we live in disturbing days across the world. Prices rise, debts increase, banks collapse, jobs are taken away and fragile security is under threat. Loving god, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer. Be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands, and a light in the darkness. Help us receive your gift of peace, and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found.

“In Jesus Christ, our lord. Amen”

Notes

  1. C Darwin The descent of man London undated, p436.
  2. L Chittka, J Niven, ‘Are bigger brains better?’ Current Biology November 17 2009.
  3. B Malinowski Science and religion London 1931, pp70-71.