Distortions
Does Mary Midgley give Richard Dawkins a percentage? She certainly should. She’s making a full-time career of telling him to stop doing things he doesn’t do.
Midgley’s new book continues her many years of taking neo-Darwinists to task because, she says, they distort the legacy of the great English naturalist who inspired them.
Yes, many years. Many, many years. More than thirty of the bastards. She was told she had it all wrong the same number of years ago, but her new book continues the same old bullshit she was told was all wrong all those years ago. I’d say she owes Richard a cut.
And what’s this crap about “distorting” Darwin’s “legacy,” anyway? Does she think Darwin wrote a gospel? Does she think Darwin’s work is supposed to be frozen in amber so that everyone can stand around and admire it, along with the work of Albert the Good and Gladstone and Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Darwin was a scientist. His work was and is supposed to be expanded, corrected, falsified, improved, used, stretched out of shape. It’s not a sculpture or a carpet, it’s a theory; it doesn’t need to be protected from the breath of the nasty modern sciencey types with their iPods and blue jeans and tendency to swear. Those nasty modern sciencey types are Darwin’s colleagues; he has a lot more in common with them than he has with obstinate one-idea (and that a wrong one) Midgley.
Midgley argues that the neo-Darwinist perspective rests on an ethos of free-enterprise competition distorted by “the supposedly Darwinian belief in natural selection as a pervasive, irresistible cosmic force” that operates in social and metaphysical realms as well as in physical, biological ones. It results, she writes, in “unbridled, savage competition between the genes” that operates with mythic force within any individual body.
Apparently she has learned nothing since 1979, the date of the original (widely-derided) paper. Her legacy is serenly undistorted – for what that’s worth.
Dawkins may be one of the most misrepresented authors alive today. Not misunderstood – because he writes clearly – misrepresented because his critics don’t want to accept to his conclusions. Just because genes “act” selfishly doesn’t mean humans must act selfishly. Just because natural selection is often cruel doesn’t mean that it is not true or that all relationships must be competitive. You would think a philosopher would understand the difference “is” and “ought.” I didn’t even mention “The God Delusion” and its critics…..
Here is what Professor Dawkins said only recently about Mary Midgley:
Heh. Just as I said. More than thirty years ago.
Honestly…it’s cringe-making.
Frans de Waal also seems to get Dawkins wrong in a way similar to Midgley.
I’ll have to find a reference.
Perhaps de Waal and Dawkins have sorted things out as this video seems to suggest (relevant discussion starts at 6:24), although the discussion is abruptly cut off just as it could be getting interesting.
http://atheistmovies.blogspot.com/2010/04/richard-dawkins-interviews-with-frans.html
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Glendon Mellow, Skeptic South Africa and Wayne de Villiers, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Distortions http://dlvr.it/GC6F4 […]
There’s an extensive intellectual industry focused on Darwinian re-interpretation, the starting point for which is always expositing on how somebody else is getting it wrong. It’s a rich tradition.
Dawkins has to be one of the frontrunners, no question.
I’m surprised by how equanimous Dawkins seems when people do this to him. “Holy cow,” I think, “he’s that used to it.”
Ow! Ow!
Marvel Comics’ cosmology is more realistic than this!
Nick Matzke stepped up to put in a defence of Midgely over at Jerry’s place.
Missing the point of the Selfish Gene in order to endlessly fuck the “Dawkins claims evolution means humanity is innately selfish and that means he’s a Tory and Tories are bad, bad, bad” chicken is justified because Richard Dawkins was careless when using of the term selfish in the introduction to the first edition (and in what seems a clearly different context to the idea of the Selfish Gene) and the fact he clarified his views in the second only goes to prove she was right all along.
Apparently thirty plus years of weird lies, vitriol and wild claims to know what people actually mean (no matter how clearly they state otherwise) is supposed to appear less bug fuck crazy because Richard Dawkins made a mistake and then corrected himself.
The very last sentence of The Selfish Gene is “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
How anyone can read that and still think Dawkins is endorsing a political viewpoint based on selfishness is beyond me, at least not if that person is acting in good faith.
Another theme of this week is language that is obscure, or in other words sophisticated. Some of us are guilty of it, including myself. And so I make an extra effort to be more clear. Here is what George Orwell said about it:
I keep waiting for Midgley to have an Emily Litella moment, but after more than thirty years of her willful misunderstanding and misrepresentations of Professor Dawkins’ ideas, I’m losing hope that it will ever happen. Someone, please explain to me how this woman could ever rise to a position where anyone would even listen to her maunderings, much less plunk down good money for one of her books.
I have been given the impression that Midgley’s other work is worthwhile, though I cannot testify to this myself. This misinterpretation of The Selfish Gene is just shockingly obstinate, though. As others have pointed out, the final chapter is basically a rallying cry not to do everything that Midgley accuses him of endorsing. And the idea that Dawkins — Dawkins of all people! — is a free market fundamentalist is just bizarre. It would be rather like accusing Midgley of being a shill for the American beef industry.
Hey, maybe we should start a meme saying that Midgley’s 1983 work Animals and Why They Matter is an anti-vegan screed. “Animals and why they matter… nutritionally!” Makes about as much sense as characterizing The Selfish Gene as some sort of Randian propaganda…
Midgeley is stupid and humourless, Dawkins is very bright and often witty. She is vaguely aware of this chasm and resents him for it. There’s a personal vendetta here, not a genuine intellectual dispute. I pity her students.
“Midgley argues that the neo-Darwinist perspective rests on an ethos of free-enterprise competition distorted by “the supposedly Darwinian belief in natural selection as a pervasive, irresistible cosmic force” that operates in social and metaphysical realms as well as in physical, biological ones. It results, she writes, in “unbridled, savage competition between the genes” that operates with mythic force within any individual body.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the so-called “social darwinism” that has nothing to do with Charles Darwin? And nothing to do with real science either. I believe the term was used extensively by Richard Hofstadter in the 40s (although he certainly was not the originator of the phrase) to encompass a set of highly unpleasant social ideas that date at least back to Malthus. What does any of it have to do with Darwin or with a scientist like Dawkins? Or am I just confused? Or is Mary Midgley just confused – again?
To paraphrase Henry Higgins: Mary Midgley? Hah!!
If Dawkins is “distorting Darwin’s legacy”, wouldn’t that make him a “Darwin heretic”, with Midgley being the defender of orthodoxy?
The real villains here are the people who commision and publish her writings when she is in her Dawkins blind spot. She isn’t about to correct her mistakes at this late stage, and yet they still drag her out to do her dance. We should be sorry for her, and angry at them.
MM appears to have the absolutist mindset of many conservatives and chrisitians: they require sacred texts to revere, and they possess a natural abhorence of change.
That’s a good point, Ken. Bad publishers, no cookie.
This series of books is edited by Mark Vernon. Science bad, Dawkins worse, religion good. Heretics good so long as they are scientific heretics (pseudo-science very good). Gee, what a surprise.
Yes.
Mark Vernon should embarrass himself, but he doesn’t. Why is that?
I can’t wait to read her devastating critique Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Can you imagine a 21st century person believing that people can cast spells? Dennett’s belief in magic is right there on the cover of his book, the poor deluded man. I’m sure Midgley will set him straight very soon.
Ooh ya, good point, and plus also he thinks Darwin’s idea can cut your head off, and Hitchens thinks god is wandering around pouring arsenic into all the bottles, and Dawkins thinks evolution is a circus, with clowns and acrobats and popcorn.
I wonder if we can construct yet another Plantinga refutation going something like this:
If Plantinga’s god exists, it provides everyone with reliable cognition.
Mary Midgley can’t grasp the concept of a metaphor.
Ergo…
Well, I guess it’s nice to know that Christian philosophers can go senile too.