The origin of the specious: on the worldview of the sociobiologists.(Science)

HOW ARE YOUR GENES today? Mine are in especially fine fettle and one group of them, the writing genes, have directed me, via electrochemical stimuli, to write this little piece. Those who disagree with what I have written below should direct their complaint to my genes, not me. I act merely as their agent in this matter. And I warn you not to expect a decent reply from them. They are selfish little bastards with not an ounce of common decency. But, before I begin, let me tell you a true story.

There was a time, not all that many years ago, when some government agencies in Australia employed field-based scientists to assist farming communities rather than to sit in offices writing mission statements and attending personal improvement courses. There were pasture scientists, sheep and cattle specialists, and even people to advise on such lowly tasks as poisoning rabbits or spraying Paterson's curse. One such specialist, a colleague of mine, was a soil scientist. He once visited a farm to advise on an erosion problem and, in the course of general conversation, the topic got around to geology. "See those volcanic rocks," he said to an old cocky, "they are Pliocene, about 6 million years old." Now it so happened that, some eight years later, another colleague of mine from the old Department of Agriculture visited this same farm to advise on pasture treatment (for red-legged earth mites, as I recall). They drove past the same outcrop. "See those rocks," said the old cocky, "they're six million and eight years old."

I tell this tale merely to highlight the fact that we tend to believe everything the scientists tell us. This is entirely understandable. In the last two hundred years, science has transformed the way we live. It has been hugely successful in explaining so much that was hitherto unknown, of exploding superstitions, and of showing that the material world around us generally operates in ways wholly explicable via knowledge of scientific laws.

A few months ago, one such scientist, Richard Dawkins, published a book called The God Delusion. A good many people, it seems, took this to be a scientific book, and like the old farmer, believed it had to be absolutely true. But it is, in reality, a book about scientism, something entirely different. Scientism is a religious belief system which elevates certain scientific theories, notably evolutionary theory, to the status of a cosmological explanation. The extrapolation from certain scientific facts to a cosmology (using this word in its philosophical sense) is an act of faith. Many fail to see this distinction. It is one of the great ironies of our time that while no former generation has been better educated than ours (in terms of access to learning at any rate), no earlier generation, taken "in a lump", is as credulous as ours. Malcolm Muggeridge once wisely observed that universal education, in our case, has done little more than to enhance credulity and enlarge stupidity.

One of the best measures of the religiosity of a book is the number of indignant letters and articles it attracts. Straightforward books of science tend not to attract much comment, but books on scientism seem to strike some sort of very sensitive collective nerve. It is hardly surprising then that recent issues of Quadrant should have devoted so much print space to Dawkins and his religion masquerading as science. Even the worthy Editor, normally impeccably aloof and an exemplar of the principle of disinterested enquiry, was coaxed into a partisan position and thanked God for being an atheist. I am, of course, pleased that he thanks God for anything. And I am pleased that he does at least have a clearly enunciated position. "Orthodoxy is my doxy," said Bishop Warburton; "heterodoxy is another man's doxy."

I confess that I have not bothered to read Dawkins' latest thriller, but I have read earlier books of his on sociobiology and I have read books, or parts of them, by Edward O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich and others of this stable. I know what Dawkins' general thesis is in The God Delusion and it follows naturally from the subject matter of his earlier books.

The prophecies and revelations of these science popularisers remind me a great deal of my favourite cartoon character, Foghorn Leghorn. All chest and no substance, he struts about the American barnyard offering opinion on all manner of subjects and stirring up trouble. He particularly likes to belabour the sleeping farm dog with a big waddy for no perceptible reason. He is perfectly incapable of listening to anyone else--"Listen to me when I talk to you, boy." He is an offensive know-it-all who actually ...