The problem with Richard Dawkins’ version of biology
Lately, Richard Dawkins has been appearing on some of my favorite podcasts, discussing his latest book on an American book tour. In every interview I’ve heard so far, even the most talented hosts have been missing great opportunities for intellectual discourse. They have missed the entire fascinating scientific controversy that is raging around Richard Dawkins! They just let him lead them by the nose through a fallacious version of biology without due scrutiny. Please, guys, wake up!
Dawkins has made a long career of arguing for a strict genes-first theory of biology. He views individuals as “survival machines” for genes, referring to a section of DNA as The Selfish Gene in his 1976 classic work. In his version, every trait and every behavior an organism exhibits is purely an expression of a mandate written in DNA. It is from this conception that our popular culture adopted the cliché that DNA holds all the “instructions for life.” Serious biologists now know better. There is an unexplained mechanism in the cell that captures the influence of the environment and turns it into traits, not merely genetic programs in DNA. If you put, for example, carp DNA into a goldfish egg, you get an intermediate type of fish.
The problem with Dawkins’ argument is that his explanation relies on a presupposed orderly biological process that it does not explain. His error is philosophical; one has to think very carefully about the consequences of his argument to understand its flaws. It denies agency to individuals; it is incompatible with true intelligence. The nihilistic, anticlerical argument of The Selfish Gene has become so entrenched in our cynical pop culture that seeing its flaws requires imagination.
Dawkins attributes all the causal power for life to genes; that is his mistake. He is missing a very important, though unknown, universal physical process that organizes life at the level of individuals. Scientists have been searching for this principle for decades under the name “self organization,” or “origin of life” studies, but many (Elbert Branscomb, for example, in his recent paper on Boltzmann’s casino) now recognize it is a universal ingredient in all life, not only a precondition at the origin. They are right.
When a fertilized egg cell begins to develop, it splits into multiple cell lines that then begin to interact with one another such that they differentiate into various tissues, forming a spinal column, proto-brain, limbs, etc. This means the cells make choices about what sort of cells to become and how to behave with regard to one another to form an embryo. Natural selection plays absolutely no role in this process; all the cells in all the lines received exactly the same signal from inheritance because they began as the same cell. So why do they make decisions that result in an orderly, viable embryo and not make random mistakes?
If you perturb this process by injuring the developing embryo, it shows remarkable powers of returning to its course of development, even if the injury was something that could never have been experienced by the genes during their evolutionary history. This has led researchers to conceive of development as a goal-oriented process leading to a “target morphology” rather than a set of instructions. A good interview on this subject might be Richard Watson at the University of Southampton. The genes in frog cells are obviously compatible with making any tissue in a frog given the right environmental signals; this is obvious because all these tissues are made in one place or another in the frog. So why do the cells make only the correct tissues in the right places?
The same problem applies to all healing wounds; every wound is unique in what steps are required to repair it. Imagine the “program” you would write to tell a robot how to repair any wound it might suffer. Inevitably the program would contain a map to all the correct placements, and some detection or comparison system communicating from map to body. But cells have nothing like this is their genomes; just a list of templates for making RNAs. There are no “genes for” five fingered hands or two-eyed faces. If there were, we could edit these mapping genes and make adjustments to every trait in a transparent way. Genomes don’t work like this. Dawkins is hiding the failure of this prediction by invoking the word “complexity,” a synonym for “magic.”
If it were true that the genes contained a program that knew how to make a frog embryo, then the program would have to begin at fertilization and could not be altered later. We could disrupt the process of development and that should disrupt the program, but it does not. Genes are necessary to make an embryo; they provide each cell with critical RNAs and proteins without which it could not live, but they must be supplemented with another physical process that makes order out of the environmental signals. Otherwise the disorganizing force of heat energy, cosmic rays, photons, and all sorts of other physical influences would take hold and create disarray.
You can test this idea by imagining two embryos that are identical twins, with the same DNA. Suppose they are brought up respectively in France and Spain. Do we suppose that because they have the same genes, they will speak the same language? Of course not. All people in the vicinity of France tend to learn French regardless of their genetic heritage. Organisms can all learn to some extent. Even single cells must learn something in order to develop and remain alive in stochastic changing conditions. Differentiation, regeneration, and learning all refute a gene’s eye view of biology because they are changes organized not at the level of genes but at the level of individuals.
In Dawkins’ theory, an individual is only a collection of the causal influences of myriad genes, not an individual pursuing its own purposes. Claiming that genes can make a “survival vehicle” with goals of its own doesn’t follow from the terms of the theory. Genes are supposed to be acting on their own behalf, not on the behalf of the individual they find themselves trapped inside. This inconsistency has been pointed out in public, for example by Denis Noble in a recent debate with Dawkins at the Institute of Arts and Ideas. The gene is supposed to be the unit of selection, therefore the primary causal unit, but Peter Godfrey-Smith, another prominent evolutionary biologist, has pointed out that during meiosis, crossing-over between sister chromatids does not respect any particular boundary within the DNA strand. This means that in organisms like humans the gene is not even a unit of Darwinian selection.
Dawkins has so far waved this fatal contradiction away. He might also reply that genes contain programs for learning. This is akin to the claim that the steering wheel of a car contains a program that determines where the car goes. Imagine two large alien scientists, Zeep and Zorp, were studying Earth the way we study cells. Let’s say on their planet, all intelligence involves a lot of aluminum, so they first assume that the units of intelligent agency on Earth are obviously the cars, not the watery carbon-filled crap around them. Zeep claims that the steering wheel has a program in it that tells the car where to go, but Zorp thinks there is another, unknown physical process at work, and they make a bet. Zorp challenges Zeep to prove his theory so he does three experiments. Zeep removes a steering wheel while a car is moving, and the car goes for a while, stops and never moves again (like an enucleated red blood cell.) Then he alters a steering wheel so that it only turns left, and strangely, the car still arrives at its commuter destination but it takes a more circuitous route to get there (like nearly any cell in the body that undergoes a single point mutation.) Then he clones one steering wheel and puts it in all the cars in the neighborhood, and they still go to different destinations (this is how multicellular development normally occurs.) Zorp wins the bet with this last experiment because it proves that it is actually something unknown related to the location of the car determines the destination. They agree they must investigate this unknown factor, and soon they discover humans.
This story represents what happens when genes are artificially manipulated. In most cases, organisms buffer changes to their DNA by compensating, using alternative pathways to achieve similar ends. In a landmark experiment, Hillenmeyer et al knocked out each of nearly 5000 genes in a yeast line; around 80% of the mutants were totally unaffected. This type of adaptive response would be fundamentally disallowed by Dawkins’ theory if he were to put it into an empirically falsifiable form. Dawkins does not take his own theory seriously by earnestly following its consequences. He insists that Neo-Darwinism explains adaptive plasticity on the level of the individual when it does not. It only explains heritable genetic change on the level of the population. This pretense, whether intended or not, is demonstrably wrong.
This blind spot in biological thinking is also why the Human Genome Project is largely now regarded as a scientific failure. The Dawkins-style Neo-Darwinists assumed that knowing genetic codes would give us causal control over all traits, but this has been refuted. Except in rare cases like sickle cell disease and other rare maladies, traits are only marginally affected by specific genetic sequences. A good interview on this subject might be Philip Ball, former editor at Nature.
I have wondered if we could even refute Dawkins’ genes-first paradigm in biology; if not it is truly a religious idea. Neo-Darwinism imagines that individuals are not real causal entities; they are only the visible effects of the causal action of genes. If you scratch for the fundamental Neo-Darwinist statement, it reads something like: 1. coding regions of the DNA specify the RNA configurations, 2. both coding and non-coding regions specify how many RNAs to make of each kind in all possible survivable conditions, and 3. control over the supply of particular RNAs is sufficient to regulate all the functions of life.
The first statement stands up; it is observable and has no alternatives that have been supported by empirical evidence. But the second is an assumption to which I can imagine an alternative. It is also possible that another physical process exists in every living cell, and it is that algorithm that selects which RNAs to transcribe from the genome at which times. In this case, the third statement would also be falsified. This alternative would not replace evolution by natural selection, but would bolster it by showing that heritable changes are not blind but rather the result of cognitive intelligence.
I am not the only researcher to feel that current biology has already falsified this second Neo-Darwinist statement. There are nine or so types of result that have shown that the motivations of cells are not tied to their heritable material but rather use that material for cognitive ends. I suppose that if the theory is in a form that can be falsified, any behavior that shows individuals working on their own behalf beyond the narrow interest of their genes is such a refutation. This is a very tricky proof because of course any such examples must still be consistent with the existence of the genome or the lineage would go extinct. In other words, the very strongest refuting examples (like celibate monks) may leave no descendants, but that does not prove they didn’t exist.
1. During meiosis in sexual species there is a stage called crossing-over, when sister chromatids exchange segments. The division of these segments respects no boundaries between regions of the DNA, meaning that no particular gene can be a unit of Darwinian selection. Instead the fundamental unit of selection must (usually) be the individual organism.
2. Barbara McClintock, working in the 1950s, discovered that under stressful conditions, some organisms (her model was maize) can rearrange or duplicate their genomes to better cope with their environmental challenges. This became known as transposons or “jumping genes.”
3. Many prokaryotes exchange DNA promiscuously with unrelated lineages, a phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer. This has the result that, for example, it is estimated that nearly 8% of the human genome is originally of viral origin.
4. Mutation rates are not intrinsic to DNA, but the result of cellular processes that reduce errors in replication by three orders of magnitude. As a result, how many errors are allowed to persist and where is a function of cell-level, not gene-level processes. This also means that mutation rates are nonrandom with respect to environmental conditions and (therefore presumably) nonrandom with respect to function.
5. Prokaryotes have various mechanisms for writing and editing DNA, as well as reading it. This has been called natural genetic engineering and was described by James Shapiro in his famous book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Crisper CAS-9 was developed from one of these mechanisms.
6. Inheritance of acquired characters, long assumed impossible, has proved to be quite common. Many examples have now been found in all sorts of lineages. This has led to the resurgence of interest in epigenetics as a source of therapeutic innovation. Lamarckism is not a replacement for Darwinism but an inescapable supplement to it. Darwin himself presupposed in the Origin of Species, as did all biologists in his day, that “use and disuse” caused heritable changes. He even proposed a mechanism for this influence which he called “gemmules.” In the present day, extracellular vesicles have been discovered that function just like Darwin’s gemmules, carrying information from the soma to the germline.
7. Targeted experiments have shown that regeneration and recovery can happen from injuries that cannot conceivably resemble those in an organism’s past lineage. In two good examples, Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts has melted the heads of planaria with barium, an injury from which the planaria recover and develop a resistance to barium (a substance that they cannot have encountered in nature.) They have also surgically rearranged the faces of tadpoles and shown that the faces reorder themselves, even overcorrecting and rebounding as the eyes and mouths reach the correct configuration.
8. Many multicellular organisms, including humans, have been shown to be intimately dependent on their associated microbiota for cognitive, immune, and metabolic function. The microbiome is primarily acquired from the environment, not inherited, and forms a unique community which is largely stable against perturbations. It is hard to argue that specially-formed commensal behavior in holobiont individuals has been reliably scripted by natural selection.
9. Organisms have not only evolved through independent competition but also through symbiotic fusions, called symbiogenesis. This theory was rediscovered by Lynn Margulis, who applied it to explain the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, and now has been widely accepted. Margulis pointed to some lineages that she claimed demonstrated fusions of up to seven different simple life forms into one. Margulis confronted Dawkins with her theory at Oxford in 2009.
We are not claiming to falsify natural selection here, but simply explore the possibility that there is an additional algorithm in all life that produces cellular learning. This learning-first alternative reinvents the teleology of life; it makes life about finding explanatory knowledge, with survival and reproduction as a side effect. Along with a small group of colleagues, I am currently doing empirical research to try to identify this algorithm.
If this algorithm exists in all cells, it narrows the range of possibilities considerably. It has to be something that is widespread in the universe, perhaps present in non-life but specially modified in life. It seems to me and to my colleagues Richard Watson and Steven Lehar that a form of harmonic resonance is the answer. All matter resonates, often forming stable patterns of oscillations we call atoms, molecules, or objects. Resonance is the only other physical process that we know of that makes order out of physical disorder, and it is formalizable. There appears to be a special form of resonance in life that not only finds new oscillations but retains a trace of the previous, older patterns. Imagine a trumpet that retains an oscillating influence from previous tunes. This is memory. An organism, in this concept, would be a memorizing resonator, a configuration of matter that can accept new forms of order it finds through its senses without entirely losing the traces of the previous forms of order it has found.
This conjecture deserves to be tested in a rigorous way. At the moment, only a small handful of thinkers are even following the problem here. As I’m sure you have noticed, the public is currently on fire with the idea that intelligence is a Bayesian inductivist phenomenon due to the commercial success of LLMs like ChatGPT. This is a hype that should frustrate anyone who cares deeply about explaining intelligence, and life. I hope that by testing ideas like harmonic resonance as a cognitive process we can raise awareness that the problem of biological intelligence is not already solved.
Dawkins performs an old, discredited trick when he argues against a Neo-Lamarckist explanation of life. He pretends that Lamarckism is a shabby alternative to Darwinism. It is not, in fact it was a critical assumption of Darwin himself when he built his theory; he referred to “use and disuse” eight times in the Origin of Species, and he assumed it was heritable. Now that this aspect of Lamarckism has been demonstrated, it is a necessary component of biology. Yet Dawkins has encouraged biology to entirely discard it so as not to acknowledge that it disproves his logic. Why fear acknowledging contradiction? It must be because he fears that some will suppose this means that God is a viable alternative. As far as I can tell this subterfuge is perpetrated purely out of anticlerical prejudice. Atheisim is a religious claim as much as theism, after all.
This kind of trick suppresses legitimate scientific inquiry. Dawkins has made the natural-selection-only “Mt. Improbable” argument so forcefully that scientists have been scared to imagine a new alternative for fear of being painted as theists. Discouraged from imagining alternatives, many evolutionary biologists currently accept an incoherent mix of Neo-Lamarckism and Neo-Darwinism. In their view complex life, after undergoing natural selection for billions of years, eventually evolved cognitive agency as a tool for individuals to accomplish the goal of survival and reproduction. If all life were single-celled, this might make sense, but once a multicellular organism exists, it logically refutes this story. There is no signal from natural selection during differentiation, therefore no way that the cells involved can be pursuing their behaviors because they care about survival and reproduction. Only genes can care about that.
Multicellularity proves that cells are using their genes as tools in another game, a cognitive game. Organisms only die once; it’s impossible to learn from one’s own death. Many organisms, even if successfully reproductive, never witness any descendents, or understand the meaning of inheritance. Neither survival nor reproduction is a problem within the cognitive domain of an individual; it’s a problem in the domain of the population at the level of the gene. A multicellular organism can’t possibly care directly about its genes. It has to care about something it can learn about. Genes must come along for the ride.
This alternative way of thinking about cognition would overturn our preconceptions about biology entirely. It shows that organisms learn because they are learners first, using an unknown physical process to learn, and then they have evolved genetic libraries that tune them toward survival and reproduction as a side-effect. This view is much closer to how David Deutsch thinks of general intelligence, only expanding his view of intelligence to all life. Genes only work by restricting the learning potential of cells such that the lessons they learn result in survival and reproduction by individuals. Multicellularity proves that they cannot control the learning process itself, even in single cells. You may be wondering…if not for survival and reproduction, what is the aim of learning? The aim of learning is to understand the world. This learning-first alternative imagines that life is fundamentally about gaining knowledge, not survival.
The fact that the physics of the universal learning process is still unknown is not a reason to reject a learning-first theory. The physics of the Neo-Darwinist theory are also unknown; if we knew them we could build Von Neumann machines. This is why knowing your genetic code does not normally give you any real usable medical information, and why genetic engineering has not given us miracle crops, miracle drugs, or talking cats. Manipulating genes gives us no direct control over traits, and it never will, because genes don’t encode traits at all. Traits are built from an unknown physical process (probably a species of harmonic resonance) that makes the stochastic environmental signals orderly, so that genes can be reliably controlled by the cell. Without this new acknowledgement we are now fundamentally blocked; there is no intellectual route out of this problem because the basic premises of the selfish gene theory are self-contradictory. Theorists like Dawkins have explained away life by presupposing the most important ingredient in the explanation.
This kind of infectious dogmatism is actually a larger obstacle to scientific inquiry than the ineffective ravings of Christian fundamentalists, who are not giving away science grants anyway. The attention and funding needed to investigate the unknown Lamarckian process (which is probably a species of memory-forming harmonic resonance) has not been provided because of the unhelpful public scorn Dawkins has heaped on his critics. Even scientific critics like Denis Noble or the prominent authors of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis who have proposed Neo-Lamarckist perspectives have had a hard time getting their views heard. Science is about finding the problems with our current worldview. Despite his strident defenses of science over faith, Dawkins is himself the strongest anti-science force in the field of biology at the moment.
Charlie Munford
