The Selfless Gene

Thomas Nelson

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................xiPreface.............................................................................................xiiiChapter 1: The Tangled Bank.........................................................................1Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Cities and Two Bigotries...................................................15Chapter 3: Who's Right? Evidence and the Lack of It.................................................31Chapter 4: Caring and Sharing: The Evolution of Altruism and Community..............................97Chapter 5: The Biology of Awe: The Evolution of Religion............................................117Chapter 6: The Tangled Book: The Creation Accounts in Genesis.......................................124Chapter 7: The Ethical Problem: "... And It Was Very Good"..........................................148Chapter 8: Vegetarian Lions and Fallen Angels: Solutions to the Ethical Problem.....................166Chapter 9: The Ape in the Image: Human Evolution and the Book of Genesis............................201Chapter 10: Living with God and Darwin..............................................................233Notes...............................................................................................239Select Bibliography.................................................................................269Index...............................................................................................275

Chapter One

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, chapter 14

Imagine, as Darwin did, a tangled bank. To magnify its beauty, brutality, and complexity, imagine that it is in the tropics.

It is covered in writhing plants. They wrestle and barge each other. Their roots probe the earth, seeking to take water and nutrients from their neighbors. They do not steal, because nothing holds any title that can be violated. Each organism has what it possesses for the moment. Generally things are taken, not given. There are no rights.

The plants trap sunlight in sugar, and that makes them prey. They are crushed and ground between the teeth of herbivores, and their cells are smashed up by enzymes and bacteria in big fermenting tanks. The sunlight therefore flows for a while into the bodies of the herbivores. How long it stays there depends on many things. It depends on the acuity of the herbivore's eyes; on the efficiency with which sodium and potassium gates open and shut in the membranes of its nose nerves; on the integrity of the wiring linking its ears to its legs; on the strength of the tendons; on how fearful it is; on how fearful its parents were; on whether or not the night wind has caused a branch to fall in the path along which it bolts.

If it is caught, it may die quickly, or it may die very slowly. If it is a mammal, its nervous system will go on screaming in (so far as we know) very much the way that ours does until the thing (whatever it is) that made it a live rather than a dead mammal has fled or been extinguished. Probably, if it is a mammal being eaten by another mammal, the death will be relatively quick, because the continued life of a victim is an inconvenience for a predator. It makes the victim flounder around, which gets in the way of the feed. But on the way to the death there are dislocations, breaks, and rips. The eyes roll. Death does not seem to be welcomed.

Sometimes the death is prolonged. In the stream running by the side of the tangled bank, a fish has been caught by a lamprey. Two weeks ago the lamprey attached itself to the side of the fish, like a large leech. Its grinding jaws eroded the fish's body wall, and the head of the lamprey, and most of its body, is now inside the body cavity, still grinding away, but destroying nothing vital. To kill would be to change desirably fresh fish to carrion. Only the lamprey's tail now waves in the water. The waving tail attracts a larger predatory fish. Both the lamprey and its victim are swallowed whole. They will be marinated in digestive enzymes and dissolved into the body of the larger fish.

Back on the bank, a vole is eating seeds made partly from the body of a weasel which had thrived five years ago on the vole's great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. The bank is a graveyard, seething with life. Everything is a cannibal. The whole place is profoundly and vitally septic. Take away the bacteria that coat everything, and the bank would weigh a lot less and would soon be a desert.

The bank is a culture of intimate interdependence. The vole needs the owl that kills it no less than the owl needs the vole. One of the hawk moth species on the bank has acquired transparent wings to pretend to be a bumblebee and, unlike most moths, has changed its schedule to fly alongside the bees during the day. Some of the orchids have fashioned cups that fill with nectar to entice insects. When an insect lands, it depresses the landing stage. As the insect crawls towards the cup, the stage springs back up, trapping the insect. The only way out is past hanging baskets of pollen. The insect flies away full of sugar and dusty with sperm.

There is someone watching all this, and describing it. He is a man. What he makes of it all will depend on what he believes about himself. But whatever he makes of it, he thinks that it is interesting and terrible. And something in him dislikes the idea of being eaten by worms.

If he is a typical creationist, he believes that the species on the tangled bank are broadly as they were when they were created by God six to ten thousand years ago (depending on how you read the biblical chronologies). There has been some speciation since, but only in the direction of degeneration-as the genome sheds information like confetti. Man himself has no familial relationship with any of the creatures on the bank, and the different species on the bank are themselves related only by the fact that they spill, rather...