Is Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) a determinist?

Note: this article is based on the Channel 4 programme broadcast with Richard Dawkins in August 2008: Darwin and Morality.

Richard Dawkins argues that we are survival mechanisms for our genes.

As a Darwinist, he believes we have evolved through adapting strategies for survival and dominance, from the moment we separated from the apes about one and half million years ago.

But we have not just evolved larger brains.

Part of the difficulty lies with the phrase “selfish genes” which seems to imply we are automatically selfish people.

But though our genes are bent on survival and self-promotion from generation to generation, that doesn’t mean we are necessarily selfish people. In fact the reverse is true. We have an instinct to be altruisitic: to be kind to others even if there is no reciprocal benefit.

In the animal kingdom we see examples of reciprocal altruism where apes groom each other, or animals such as meerkats send warning signals to each other.

But humans have a residual lust to be nice, which has endured even when the kinship bond is broken by our living isolated lives in anonymous communities. It is not uncommon for people to try to save a drowning stranger, or plunge into a burning building, even losing their lives in the hard-wired cause of altruism.

In fact social Darwinism, the view that the weak should be eliminated to strengthen the strong, when applied to the business world for example, leads to some unexpected results.

When the US company Enron had a policy to sack the 15% of its weakest employees every year, they were left with a core who were devoid of morality. A huge corruption case brought the company down, and several senior managers were jailed. The decision to go for Darwinism here brought the opposite result than the survival of the fittest, because Darwinism has an inbuilt rationale for being caring and moral: that in a caring world all of us are more likely to survive, and the group is stronger with altruism.

Dawkins concludes: “we rise above our origins, and extract ourselves from nature and its values. We are the only ones who can escape from our genes, and so we have doctors, social benefits, hospitals….so we can tame and overthrow the tyranny of natural selection” (Channel 4 August 2008).

We might conclude: it is the moral sense which is “determined” or “hard-wired” into our genes, not our moral choices. Indeed the ability to make these choices for good is proof that natural selection can have very good outcomes.