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Stove on Gene Worship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
David Stove's sarcastic dismissal of sociobiology rests on a false dilemma.
Cuckoos lay their eggs in reed-warbler nests, and the large gape of cuckoo chicks so readily triggers the feeding reflex of the adult warbler that the warbler chicks go underfed. However, argues Stove, the cuckoos (or the cuckoos' genes) are ‘manipulating’ the warblers, getting them to feed cuckoo chicks, only if the cuckoos (or their genes) consciously intend their behaviour to have this effect: ‘The moon causally influences the tides, but it cannot manipulate them…. [C]ausal influence plus resulting advantage are not enough to constitute manipulation. The causal influence must also be purposeful and intended.’
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993
References
1 Stove, David, ‘A New Religion’, Philosophy 67, 1992, 233–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I should note that my differences with Stove are confined to sociobiology; His skewering of nonsense elsewhere, as in Four Irrationalists and The Plato Cult, is brilliant and invaluable.
2 See Wright, Larry, Teleological Explanations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar; ‘Functions’, The Philosophical Review, 82, 1973, 139–168.Google Scholar
3 See Woodfield, Andrew, Teleology (Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
4 Among sociobiologists, Symons, Donald (The Evolution of Human Sexuality [Oxford University Press, 1979], pp. 10ff., 32–38)Google Scholar comes very close to making the right distinctions: ‘function’ he says, ‘must be distinguished from beneficial effect … Ultimately, function refers to the basis of differential reproduction in ancestral populations.’ Functions are those tendencies that evolved because ‘they resulted in adaptive behavior during the evolutionary history of the species’. What is most striking about Symons' book is that it begins with precisely the criticisms of Dawkins' rhetoric, as Symons calls it, that Stove offers. He notes the anthropomorphization of genes, and deploys Stebbing against Dawkins, ' Eddington, (40–41)Google Scholar. Dawkins-Eddington, refers to living organisms as ‘lumbering robot vehicles’Google Scholar; Symons-Stebbing replies sar castically that ‘Genesis at least has the virtue of not claiming that humans are robots or that gazelles lumber’. But having said all this about Dawkins, ' ‘semantics’Google Scholar, Symons goes right ahead and writes a long book about the sociobiology of human sex differences, giving just the sorts of explanations Stove regards as stupid! This fact should certainly give Stove pause. Either Symons is exceptionally obtuse to the implications of his own criticisms of Dawkins, or these criticism do not really imply that genetic explanations of human and animal behaviour are broken-backed from the start.
5 See e.g. Trivers, R. L., ‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism’, Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 1971, 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 See Hamilton, W. D., ‘Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach from Evolution Genetics’, in Fox, R., (ed.), Biosocial Anthropology (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 133–155.Google Scholar
7 On spouse selection, see Caltell, R. B., The Inheritance of Personality and Ability (New York: Academic Press, 1982)Google Scholar; on friendship selection, see Rushton, R. P., Genetic Similarity in Male Friendships’, Ethology and Sociobiology 10, 1979, 985–989Google Scholar; on bereavement, see Littlefield, C. H. and Rushton, R. P., ‘When a Child Dies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 1986, 797–802.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed I thank Professor Rushton for directing me to the Cattell.
8 See Stove, David, ‘Dr. Dawkins' Demons’, The American Scholar, Winter 1992.Google Scholar