Professor Richard Dawkins’ attempted explanations of altruism are no less than fascinating and his conclusion is well, all-false-ism. Firstly, he assures us that only now, conveniently within his lifetime and only amongst his own privileged class of scientific cenobites is the truth of the matter understood:
It is important not to mis-state the reach of natural selection. Selection does not favour the evolution of a cognitive awareness of what is good for your genes. That awareness had to wait for the twentieth century to reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to a minority of scientific specialists.1
Elsewhere, we have pointed out that when Prof. Richard Dawkins was asked to provide his “most persuasive” case for Darwinian evolution he made reference to his faith in natural selection. Prof. Richard Dawkins decides to explain altruism by comparing human beings whose brains can compute 20 million billion calculations per second to birdbrains-quite literally, bird’s brains:
What natural selection favours is rules of thumb…Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire. In a bird’s brain, the rule ‘Look after small squawking things in your nest, and drop food into their red gapes’ typically has the effect of preserving the genes that built the rule, because the squawking, gaping objects in an adult bird’s nest are normally its own offspring. The rule misfires if another baby bird somehow gets into the nest, a circumstance that is positively engineered by cuckoos.2
Now he reaches his conclusion regarding the urges toward altruism:
Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo? An even closer analogy is the human urge to adopt a child. 3
At this point Prof. Richard Dawkins appears to have a moment of clarity that is sadly all too quickly dulled again by his commitment to his absolutely materialistic worldview. He has obviously come to a conclusion that is subhuman or inhuman, a conclusion that speaks volumes about the worldview that he has made a career of preaching. According to his worldview, adopting a child or any form of altruism is merely gene or brain damage. Thus, he rushes in with a qualifier that is meant to soften the shocking blow of his amoral conclusion:
I must rush to add that ‘misfiring’ is intended only in a strictly Darwinian sense. It carries no suggestion of the pejorative. The “mistake” or “by-product” idea, which I am espousing, works like this. Natural selection…programmed into our brains altruistic urges, alongside sexual urges, hunger urges, xenophobic urges and so on. 4
Basically, he believes that in the past when “we lived in small and stable bands like baboons” 5 altruism was performed “towards close kin and potential reciprocators.” Natural selection branded this urge into our genes so that by now when we act in an altruistic manner it is counter Darwinian.
Prof. Richard Dawkins is so eager to rescue his conclusion from the arid wasteland of his materialistic worldview that he offers a doxology to natural selection that is just short of a halleluyah chorus as he refers to “misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.”6 In fact, according to the Dawkinsian worldview not only is altruism a mistake but we are accidents. Not just we humans but you as an individual, “We are very lucky accidents or at least each one of us is-if we hadn’t been here, someone else would have been.”7 But he does not stop there. No, he is so keenly aware of the logical conclusion to which he is leading us that he actually requests that his readers cease thinking and allow him to massage and reshape the heartless inhuman conclusion,
Do not, for one moment, think of such Darwinizing as demeaning or reductive of the noble emotions of compassion and generosity.8
This is because such misfiring mistakes, blessed as they may be, have produced, in the guise of sexual desire, “great poetry and drama: John Donne’s love poems, say, or Romeo and Juliet.”9 He discusses sexual desire because while, as he claims, the only Darwinian reason for sex is procreation10, a couple may still feel desire for each other even though they know that they are infertile. Thus, that misfiring mistake is still beneficial at least because it produces things that Prof. Richard Dawkins considers aesthetically pleasing.
Mercy to a debtor,” he continues, “is, when seen out of context, as un-Darwinian as adopting someone else’s child…much of it [sexual lust] constitutes a misfiring. There is no reason why the same should not be true of the lust to be generous and compassionate, if this is the misfired consequence of ancestral village life.11
The bottom line is that the Darwinian/Dawkinsian worldview is pure selfishness: everything that any organism does is done for the benefit of the self (Prof. Richard Dawkins is, after all, the conceiver of “the selfish gene”). This includes human beings and includes altruism in the form of mercy, adoption, etc. Therefore, altruism in its many forms must be, can only be, explained by “blessed, precious mistakes.” Yet, and furthermore, these mistakes are not “Calvinistically deterministic” but are filtered through relative/situational ethics (or, as a cleaver chap would state it-the moral zeitgeist). Prof. Richard Dawkins describes this as the “civilizing influences of literature and custom, law and tradition – and, of course, religion.”12 Simply stated, when evidence is lacking Prof. Richard Dawkins calls upon the mighty powers of the supernatural realm of his worldview: not “God did it” but “Natural selection did it.” How? Why? When? What?
These are fascinating questions and very advantageous for Prof. Richard Dawkins who has built his career answering them. But note very, very carefully that what is meant by “answering them.” Prof. Richard Dawkins sings the praises of Darwinianism since, according to him, they allow one to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. But what this means is that Prof. Richard Dawkins can, in the guise of scientific respectability, invent stories that fill the gaps in our knowledge. His a priori adherence to his absolutely materialistic Darwinian worldview is the basis from which he weaves tall tales. These are woven together with just enough of what one can see through a microscope our out in nature to seem as if pure speculation equals empirical science. Here is one such example “The story as I have told it…may not actually be the right one. But something a bit like it surely did happen.”13 It is simply fascinating to encounter an argument that produces such a subhuman and irrational conclusion. Such that the arguer has to backtrack and ask you to stop thinking that the logical conclusion of the argument is accurate.