The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [5]
I am not saying, like those who cry, ‘You can’t change human nature, you know’, that it is futile to attempt to outlaw, say, racial persecution because it is in human nature. Laws against racism do have an effect, because one of the more appealing aspects of human nature is that people calculate the consequences of their actions. But I am saying that even after a thousand years of strictly enforced laws against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure in the knowledge that racial prejudice is a thing of the past. We assume, and rightly, that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before it. But why then does social science proceed as if it were not the case: as if people’s natures are the products of their societies?
It is a mistake that biologists used to make, too. They believed that evolution proceeded by accumulating the changes that individuals gathered during their lives. The idea was most clearly formulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but Charles Darwin sometimes used it, too. The classic example is a blacksmith’s son supposedly inheriting his father’s acquired muscles at birth. We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cake-like recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.1 But the first coherent challenge to Lamarckism was the work of a German follower of Darwin named August Weismann, who began to publish his ideas in the 1880s.2 Weismann noticed something peculiar about most sexual creatures: their sex cells – eggs and sperm – remained segregated from the rest of the body from the moment of their birth. He wrote:
I believe that heredity depends upon the fact that a small portion of the effective substance of the germ, the germ-plasm, remains unchanged during the development of the ovum into an organism, and that this part of the germ-plasm serves as a foundation from which germ-cells of the new organism are produced. There is, therefore, continuity of the germ-plasm from one generation to another.3
In other words, you are descended not from your mother, but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature (though it could affect your nurture, of course – an extreme example being that her addiction to drugs or alcohol might leave you damaged in some non-genetic way at birth). You are born free of sin. Weismann was much ridiculed for this in his lifetime and little believed. But the discovery of the gene, and of the DNA from which it is made, and of the cipher in which DNA’s message is written, have absolutely confirmed his suspicion. The germ-plasm is kept separate from the body.
Not until the 1970s were the full implications of this realized. Then Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University, effectively coined the notion that, because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa. If genes make their bodies do things that perpetuate the genes (like eat, survive, have sex and help rear children) then the genes themselves will be perpetuated. So other kinds of bodies will disappear. Only bodies that suit the survival and perpetuation of genes will remain.
Since then, the ideas of which Dawkins was an early champion have changed biology beyond recognition. What was still – despite Darwin – essentially a descriptive science has become a study of function. The difference is crucial. Just as no engineer would dream of describing a car engine without reference to its function (to turn wheels), so no physiologist would dream of describing a stomach without reference to its function (to digest food). But before, say, 1970, most students