Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009
THE GENIAL GENE: DECONSTRUCTING DARWINIAN SELFISHNESS
by Joan Roughgarden
University of California Press, 2009
Review by David Belden
I still have my 1978 paperback edition of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. Its browning pages survived three major cross-ocean or -continent home moves, when most of my books got dumped. Two of my best friends, animal behaviorists, gave it to me to explain their world. It read like a fine mystery novel, full of clues that spelled out an unexpected truth: that the unit that natural selection selects is not the animal, still less the group or species, but is instead the gene.
We may think we are altruists, Dawkins taught me, but our genes have no such ethical scruples. They have no intentions either, it's just that genes are selected for by two forces: natural and sexual selection. The latter usually means female choice of mate (more important than male choice, which seemed a nice feminist point). Genes for altruism can and do get passed down to the next generation when they prompt an animal to sacrifice its own interests to help relatives with the same genes, or when the self-benefit of altruistic behavior actually outweighs the cost.
Altruism is just a variety of selfishness.
I was persuaded by my expert friends' certainty as well as by Dawkins's logic. As the holder of a recent sociology doctorate, I was aware that sociologists hated the entry of genetic arguments into explanations for behavior. Committed to feminism, I knew my feminist friends did too. They saw any kind of sociobiology as an oppressive "biology is destiny" theory. But they didn't seem to understand that, whatever some of its proponents might say, sociobiology itself does not negate culture or legitimate selfish behavior. It definitely doesn't prescribe selfish behavior. How could it? Human genes provide for a rather flexible animal, demonstrably able to create different cultures, some kinder than others, some more feminist than others.
But to build a culture based on unselfish values, we have to be aware of our selfish genes and deal with them. This is the conclusion I drew after reading Dawkins. The carpenter cannot create a functional and beautiful staircase if she doesn't know the wood: working against the grain just creates a mess.
Over the years the vehemence of feminist and Left opposition to sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology as it has been rebranded, has become less fervent, partly as a result of women pursuing the field and mitigating male biases within it (e.g., see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature). But it has been slow, and I had concluded my baby boom generation would have to pass away before most sociologists would accept evolutionary psychology.
But now something new has happened. Browsing the Tikkun book review shelf, I find another slim book: The Genial Gene, by Stanford biology professor Joan Roughgarden. It too reads like a mystery novel. It too presents facts that are new to me and offers a completely surprising broad theory: that sexual selection cannot explain the facts, and has actually become an ideology that demands the facts be explained in increasingly contortionist ways to fit its orthodoxy. Roughgarden sets out to comprehensively demolish sexual selection and the selfish gene worldview, while leaving natural selection and Mendelian genetics intact.
Roughgarden proposes that far from engaging in constant fierce conflict, the genes of different sexes and genders are selected for their ability to work together to produce the maximum number of offspring in changing environments. Her logic hits me with the same astonished sense that I am indeed reading the truth as I had thirty years ago reading Dawkins. This is a more politically and spiritually congenial truth to me, but for that very reason I read skeptically. Nonetheless I am overwhelmed. I am a layman, of course, no biologist, and parts of the book are hard for me to grasp, but most of it is beautifully written and extremely clear ... and convincing.
Darwinian natural selection explains how species change in response to changing environments: lucky genetic mutations can help individuals survive and reproduce better in new circumstances, and if they do, then those mutations spread widely through the species. Darwin sought another explanation for traits some animals possess that apparently hinder their survival, like the peacock's tail, which must weigh the poor old peacock down and make it harder to do everything. Darwin hypothesized that they have splendid tails to sell themselves to peahens, as mates strong enough to survive despite the handicap. The theory would explain other protein-expensive or flashy male characteristics. He called the theory "sexual selection" and it did not at first cover that many cases.
But allied to the selfish gene concept, sexual selection became the basis of all modern theories about reproduction, and it became foundational that males and females have conflicting interests. The idea developed that the big egg and tiny sperm themselves developed as competing methods for genes to reproduce themselves. Then because there are few, relatively immobile eggs and many mobile sperm, the egg-makers, or females, become the choosy ones. In mammals, due to females' extra investment in pregnancy and lactation, they can be even choosier.
But there are awkward facts. It turns out peacocks with the biggest tails don't actually survive better than ones with smaller tails. If it's advertising for better genes, it's false advertising. Field research proves that the same is true of various other bird species. Perhaps, Roughgarden suggests, what needs explaining is females' drabness, not male splendor. Do females need the camouflage more than males do? That suggests an explanation concerning natural, not sexual, selection.
And if genetic fitness is usually a matter of only a 1 percent difference in genes between fitter and less fit males, and if there isn't a correlation with display features such as colored feathers, then how exactly is it that females discern that minute difference in order to make their choice? Could there be another explanation? What if females and males are both choosing, and for things like pheromonal compatability or even emotional congeniality to enable them to cooperate? What if reproductive choices involve not just the pair of birds in the nest, for example, but the wider social network of birds? What if female birds who have sex with males outside their pair bond are not "cheating" and their mate is not "cuckolded" as the literature has it, but instead they are maximizing their own, their mate's, and others' chances of rearing viable offspring? Has an ideological expectation of male-female conflict informed the research to such an extent that the research itself is being skewed and the wrong questions are being asked?
Roughgarden presents numerous examples of research papers couched in the language and expectation of selfish gene competitiveness that present facts that nonetheless contradict that frame, or can be equally well or better understood within a cooperative frame. For example, she finds that basic research on egg and sperm size actually shows that the size differential arises because it enables the maximum number of contacts between gametes (egg and sperm are both gametes) that result in viable fertilizations. It's a win-win scenario, not a vicious struggle. But even the papers presenting these statistics are couched in terms of such a struggle.
Other awkward facts concern the existence of multiple genders in various species (such as three distinct body types and behaviors for males in one fish species), and various kinds of hermaphrodism. When the same individual produces both egg and sperm, current theory can get highly convoluted. Sexual selection theory sees hermaphrodites as aberrations from a male/female binary norm. Roughgarden posits that hermaphrodism is the starting point, and other sexual arrangements including binary male/female ones arise to more efficiently deliver sperm in particular environments. At every point she posits a cooperative explanatory framework. In this view the various genders and sexes in a species work together to maximize genetic variability in their offspring, as a hedge against environmental change, and to raise the maximum number of offspring that they collectively can. She calls this theory "social selection."
At the end of the book she presents a table of twenty-six assumptions or hypotheses in sexual selection theory that are contradicted by equivalents in social selection theory. All of these can potentially be resolved, as to their truth or falsity, by field and experimental research. Roughgarden already presents enough data to show that social selection must be taken very seriously, and will likely prevail. This would be a huge paradigm shift. She finds widespread and deep resistance even to testing the theories.
Let me be clear. Roughgarden's is not an argument against sociobiology, and whatever explanations and descriptions of a universal human nature it can establish. Her beef is only with a vision of sexual and social relations based in selfish, as opposed to genial, genes.
Other books have objected to selfish gene theory because it appears to be an ideology, and one fully in line with modern capitalism and competitive individualism. But this is the first book I have read that attacks the whole ideology of selfish Darwinism on a broad scale from the perspective of purely biological research. As a Christian and transgender woman, Roughgarden has plenty of ideological reasons to oppose selfish gene theory and a worldview based on binary male/female conflict and traditional sex roles. But the beauty of this book is that she has pursued in a strictly scientific manner whatever skepticism her own life experience has taught her to hold about mainstream scientific ideologies. Here she is concerned solely with what is scientifically testable and true.
The very idea that there is truth in these postmodern times, when even physicists seem to have got beyond the hope of it, is a breath of intellectual oxygen. Roughgarden writes:
As often stated in this book the issue before us is not whether a biological nature predicated on selfishness, deception, and genetic hierarchy is appealing or repugnant compared with a biological nature predicated on teamwork, honesty, and generic equality. The issue is which of these views of biological nature is true.
And when she adds, "I believe I have shown that the overwhelming weight of data and theory reveal that the selfish-gene picture does not truly and accurately describe biological nature," I applaud both her conclusion and her courage in saying it so forcefully, for she is stirring up a storm that will rage for at least a generation.
My reaction on reading the book was, "this is a civilization-changer." Roughgarden is a powerful thinker and writer. I have rarely been as energized and delighted by a book as I was by this one. You could say it's no big deal: our capacity to choose to love each other is experientially real, however biologists choose to explain it. But to the contrary, I think we are in desperate need of significant intellectual support for a post-capitalist, post-patriarchal, post-individualistic social order that prioritizes community, caring, and interdependence. What a gas, what an unexpected bonanza, what a grace, if it turned out that's what biology supports at a genetic level anyway.
David Belden, D. Phil, is the managing editor of Tikkun.
