Does your end justify your genes?
Andrew Brown
LIFELINES by Steven Rose Allen Lane, £20, pp. 335 Where once people believed in Destiny or a God that shaped their ends, they now believe in genes. In Penelope Lively's recent novel City of the Mind, the hero reflects: There was the genetic drive, boiling away unsuspected while you got on with the rest of life, or at least you thought that that was what you were doing. The genes lurked there in the body, determining everything whether you were six feet tall or prone to sunburn or liable to develop a particular dis- ease — and quite possibly directing your actions as well.
This is clearly descended from Dawkin- sian ultra-Darwinism, but it is a long descent, with considerable modifications, as is shown by the reflection that genes `determine . . . whether you were six feet tall'. There is hardly any human trait that genes determine less. Height is the classic example of a character far more influenced by nourishment than genetics; we are not genetically different from the people who lived in cramped mediaeval cottages, or who formed the bantam battalions in the first world war. We are just better fed in childhood.
One curious thing about this faith is that it is strongest among those who know least about genes, like novelists. Where genes are concerned the popular understanding of their power far exceeds anything claimed by serious scientists; and nowhere is faith in genes weaker than among professional biologists. Even Richard Dawkins denies that he is a genetic determinist. There's no doubting his sincerity; but a man who is really eager to avoid suspicions of genetic determinism would not have written that `we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes' — a statement too easily misunderstood as meaning exact- ly what it says.
Steven Rose is professor of biology at the Open University and one of the most determined opponents of genetic determin- ism in the business. One of his earlier books, Not in our Genes, was a tremendous counterblast to the notion that we can sim- ply or reliably measure the genetic compo- nents of human behaviour. Now he has written Lifelines, a further attack on the primacy of DNA and on what he calls the ultra-Darwinian ideas of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Where they try to look at the world from the gene's-eye view, and discover that from the gene's perspec- tive individuals simply don't exist, Rose examines the world from a biologist's point of view, and discovers when he does so that genes disappear. There is still DNA, and there are still units of heredity, but these are no longer identical.
This is not revolutionary doctrine, or even a very contentious one; you will find it in the small print of Dawkins' books. Nor is Rose arguing against natural selection or materialism. His point, and that of other opponents of Dawkins, is that the complexities of biology cannot be reduced to a simple show of mortal puppets being jerked around by their immortal DNA. The suspicion that haunts Penelope Lively's character, that we are helpless prisoners of a nature fixed from conception by unmoved, omnipotent deities concealed in our DNA, simply could not be true in the picture of the world revealed by modem biology.
I am simplifying his argument a little, but this is not a technical book. It is written with admirable clarity and force, and I can't imagine anyone who wanted enlightenment coming away from it empty- handed. But it does not entirely successful- ly integrate the two main strands of argu- ment it contains. It is both a polemic against genetic determinism, and one against reductionism in science in general. The two concerns are linked ideologically: vulgar genetic determinism is the most egregious form of reductionism around at the moment. But perhaps the most inter- esting link is personal: the strongest resis- tance to both has come from scientists who are or have been Marxists. It is bizarre that the century should end with Marxists defending the idea of human freedom and autonomy against the scientific capitalists, but it just goes to show that history is too contingent to be captured by any single theory, even one as beautiful and true as Darwinism.
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