Dawkins Vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest - Softcover

Sterelny, Kim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840467800 ISBN 13: 9781840467802

Publisher: Icon Books, 2003

Synopsis

An international bestseller when originally published, this brand-new and completely revised edition updates the story of one of science's most vigorous arguments. Science has seen its fair share of punch-ups over the years, but one debate, in the field of biology, has become notorious for its intensity. Over the last twenty years, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have engaged in a savage battle over evolution, which continues to rage even after Gould's death in 2002. Kim Sterelny moves beyond caricature to expose the real differences between the conceptions of evolution of these two leading scientists. He shows that the conflict extends beyond evolution to their very beliefs in science itself; and, in Gould?s case, to domains in which science plays no role at all.

About this title

About the Author:

Kim Sterenly is the author of several books, including "Sex and Death" (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and "Thought in a Hostile World" (Blackwell, 2003). He works in the philosophy departments at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and the Australian National University, Canberra.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

A Clash of Perspectives

Science in general, and biology in particular, has seen its fair share of punch-ups. In the 1930s and 1940s, Britain’s two greatest biologists, J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fisher, feuded so vigorously that their students (John Maynard Smith tells me) were hardly allowed to talk to one another. But their behaviour was civilised compared to the notorious feuds in biological systematics between cladists – notorious for wielding unintelligible terminology and vituperation in equal measure – and their opponents. Mostly these fights are kept more or less in-house, often because the issues are of interest only to the participants. Almost no one except systematicists are interested in the principles by which we tell that Drosophila subobscura is a valid species. But sometimes these disputes leak out into the open. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have different views on evolution, and they and their allies have engaged in an increasingly public, and increasingly polemical, exchange.

At first glance, the heat of this exchange is puzzling. For Dawkins and Gould agree on much that matters. They agree that all life, including human life, has evolved over the last 4 billion years from one or a few ancestors, and that those first living things probably resembled living bacteria in their most crucial respects. They agree that this process has been wholly natural; no divine hand, no spooky interloper, has nudged the process one way or another. They agree that chance has played a crucial role in determining the cast of life’s drama. In particular, there is nothing inevitable about the appearance of humans, or of anything like humans: the great machine of evolution has no aim or purpose. But they also agree that evolution, and evolutionary change, is not just a lottery. For natural selection matters too. Within any population of life forms, there will be variation. And some of those variants will be a touch better suited to the prevailing conditions than others. So they will have a better chance of transmitting their distinctive character to descendants.

Natural selection was one of the great discoveries in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). If a population of organisms vary one from another; if the members of that population differ in fitness, so one is more likely than another to contribute her descendants to the next generation; if those differences tend to be heritable, so the fitter organism’s offspring share her special characteristics, then the population will evolve by natural selection. Australia is renowned for its poisonous snakes and of these the taipan is the most famously venomous. Let’s consider the mechanism through which it became so impressively lethal. If a population of taipans differ in the toxicity of their venom; if the more venomous snakes survive and reproduce better than less venomous ones, then taipans will, over time, evolve more toxic venom. Gould and Dawkins agree that complex capacities like human vision, bat echolocation, or a snake’s ability to poison its prey evolve by natural selection. And they agree that in human terms, natural selection works slowly, over many generations. Bacteria and other single-celled organisms whip through those generations at speed, and that is why drug resistance outpaces new drugs. But for larger, more slowly reproducing organisms, significant changes take tens of thousands of years to build.

Adaptive change depends on cumulative selection. Each generation is only slightly different from the one that precedes it. Perhaps, very occasionally, a major evolutionary change appears in a single generation, as the result of one big mutation. But the parts of an organism are delicately and precisely adjusted to one another, so almost all large, random changes are disasters. Adding a horn to a horse’s head might seem to provide it with a useful defensive weapon, but without compensating changes to its skull and neck (to bear the extra weight) it would be not only useless but detrimental. So large single-step changes, Gould and Dawkins agree, must be very rare. The normal history of an adaptive invention is a long series of small changes, not a short series of large changes.

Yet Dawkins and Gould have clashed heatedly on the nature of evolution. In two notorious articles in New York Review of Books, Gould scathingly reviewed Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, a work of Dawkins’ intellectual ally Daniel Dennett. In 1997, there was a better tempered but no more complimentary exchange in Evolution, as they traded reviews of each other’s most recent creation.

Dawkins and Gould are representatives of different intellectual and national traditions in evolutionary biology. Dawkins’ doctoral supervisor was Niko Tinbergen, one of the co-founders of ethology. Ethology aims to understand the adaptive significance of particular behavioural patterns. So Dawkins’ background sensitised him to the problem of adaptation; of how adaptive behaviours evolve in a lineage and develop in an individual. Gould, in contrast, is a palaeontologist. His mentor was the brilliant but notoriously irascible George Gaylord Simpson. The match, if it exists, between an animal’s capacities and the demands of its environment is less obvious with fossils than with live animals. A fossil gives you less information on the animal and its environment. So it is tempting to suppose that the passion of these exchanges reflects nothing deeper than competition for the same patch of limelight, magnified by different historical and disciplinary perspectives. I think that suspicion would be misplaced, and it’s my aim in this book to explain why. Despite real and important points of agreement, their clash is of two very different perspectives on evolutionary biology.

Cont’d.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1840467800
• ISBN 13: 9781840467802
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208