The Genetic Self

Observations on Richard Dawkins's Speculative Fantasy

Richard Dawkins's published and quoted public statements have never impressed me. They certainly don't inspire me to buy his books. He comes across in print like a juvenile who makes provocative statements just to enjoy the anger of those who find him disagreeable. He is probably nothing like that in person. In any case, it is less than credible to make critical remarks about a published author, without actually reading any of his books. So when I saw a copy of The Selfish Gene on sale for 50 cents, about the value of a used-up rapper, I snapped it up.

His Introduction actually suggested some common ground for dialog with Christians, or with Jews or Muslims or any other monotheists. He does not, of course, opine that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Nor does he say that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, or that there is no God but The God, and Mohammed is his prophet. But he does say "Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to." Not exactly Original Sin, but a bit of convergence among different philosophies toward the same limited physical truth.

The weakness of his book is that it is entirely speculative, and not very well informed speculation either. The book's Preface announces that this is "not science fiction," and that is true, because good science fiction, unlike fantasy novels set on another planet, contains some sound application of scientific fact and method to create the story line. Then he announces that his book "is science," and this is pompous nonsense. Science is generally absent from the main theme of the book, although there is some sound science in various sideshows offered as examples or analogies.

The entire story rests on Chapter 2, "The Replicators." Dawkins begins with a fairly well established line of research, that if electricity is sparked through a mix of chemicals likely to have been present in the early eons of our planet, complex amino acids will result. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia are all compounds used in such experiments, and all are present on some of the other planets in our solar system. From this beginning, Dawkins jumps to the idea that free-floating amino acids learned to copy themselves, and filled up the oceans with a soup of mindless strings of complex compounds. New varieties developed due to errors in replication. Then they started eating each other, because there were no more free atoms in the ocean to build copies from.

What led to cells and and complex plant and animal bodies? Oh, these mindless strings of replicating amino acids somehow surrounded themselves with cell walls to protect themselves from each other. They didn't plan to mind you. They had and have no minds. They just did it, blindly and spontaneously. There is, of course, no evidence at all for this vicious amino acid soup, or the spontaneous replication of amino acids floating freely in the ocean. Nor is there any attempt at explanation of how these complex proteins assembled themselves into the much more complex DNA molecule.

Even for nontheistic theories of the origins of matter and of life, this is a very long stretch. Genes do not exist as the code for reproducing life, life exists for the purpose of providing security to our genes... There is a test for this kind of speculation, called Occam's Razor. The test is, the more simply a theory explains the known facts, the more likely it is to be true. Dawkins's speculation on the origin of life fails Occam's Razor miserably.

As it happens, there are other, better supported theories, and not coincidentally, these pose no conflict to the notion that "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," or that "God said, let the waters bring forth the living thing that hath life." No theory proves or depends upon the existence of God. Those who "live by faith and not by sight" would be profoundly disturbed if sight could provide proof positive of an omnipresent, omnipotent God. What experiment could test for whether God is a reasonable hypothesis? That is why "Intelligent Design" borders on blasphemy, and certainly lacks intelligence. Actually, there is no particular reason that God could not have done things the way Dawkins says they happened, but there is no good reason to think he did. "Let the waters bring forth the self-replicating amino acid" is a long way around when a simpler, better understood, more subtle, but more direct sequence of more likely events is clearly available.

A good alternative scenario was presented in American Scientist, Volume 94, page 32, by Michael Russell, a research fellow at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center, and at the time of publication, a visiting scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. No doubt this article only scratches the surface of available research and publication. But for the general reader, trying to keep up with what science has to offer, while lacking time to become an expert, it's a good article to check out.

The author may be personally acquainted with Dawkins, or not, may be his close personal friend, or caustic rival. Russell may be a devout Christian, like Cambridge University biologist Simon Conway Morris, or a convinced atheist, like astronomer Fred Hoyle. That really doesn't matter. Science is not a competition between political orthodoxies, although, unfortunately, scientists do engage in political competition. Russell builds his analysis on the previous work of many others, who each have their own beliefs and disbeliefs. Whatever these are, the truth is the truth, however dimly understood. What matters is that "First Life" offers a simpler and more plausible speculation, a more factually-grounded speculation, about the origin of life, than Dawkins's Selfish Gene.

"First Life" begins with the basic chemistry of respiration, not complex genes seeking a fortress to dwell within. At the bottom of every food chain, hydrogen and carbon dioxide are used to synthesize organic compounds. All more complex life depends on it. Organic molecules require other materials: nitrogen, sulfides, phosphates, metals such as iron, nicket, manganese, cobalt and zinc. Where were these found on the newly formed earth? Around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Deep in the sea was the only place fragile potential for life could have survived in those early times: the oceans were a sterile desert, vaporized frequently by the impact of meteorites, the moon was much closer, causing frequent tides and storms. Dawkins's replicators would have been smashed, physically and chemically, faster than they could form. A warm spring, on the deep ocean floor, protected from raw ultraviolet radiation, never dry, never too hot or too cold, never too acid or too alkaline, was the place for life to survive.

Before life was truly life at all, iron sulfide precipitate naturally formed a gel with pores and bubbles, providing enclosed sites for chemical reactions. This may have been the beginning of the membranes that today surround all living cells. But the first chemical reactions needed a catalyst, and the availability of a mineral called greigite, an iron-nickel sulfide, provided one. There is even a plausible explanation for the emergence of the proteins that contain the genetic codes of all life today, RNA and DNA. The raw materials were freely available in this nurturing environment, but how did molecules so complicated happen to form? What came first? Perhaps adenosine triphosphate, still the engine of every living cell today. It would have played a role in respiration before genetic codes even existed.

For all the details, the article is highly recommended. The plausible scenario of raw materials, sources of energy, increasingly complex chemical reactions started by conveniently available catalysts, could be wrong in one or many details. It probably comes closer to how life began than a soup of selfish genes with no will to be selfish which just happened to surround themselves with living bodies. Either scenario is statistically improbable, but the hydrothermal vent theory corresponds to actual chemistry and real conditions that probably existed. It offers a precise series of chemical reactions. And if a reader happens to have faith that there was a divine purpose, intent, and initative behind it all... it calls to mind the recent worship song "Where would I be, you only know... an empty space, a hopeless place, if not for grace."

Grace is not a necessary hypothesis for this theory to be plausible, but it may be a necessary precondition for all the right materials to be in just the right place, and move through just the right set of opportunities in the face of so many hazards. Perhaps there was a certain grace which provided that a sterile desert of ocean, irradiated by ultraviolet, could bring forth the living thing that has life, from which a God who, as Einstein said, is "subtle, but malicious he is not" could make great fish and every living creature that moves.. .But whether there is a God or no, this is sound science, and Dawkins's fantasy is wishful thinking, conforming a vision of the past to his own didactic polemics in the present.

The Beast of the Mark

Michael Schwartz and the Prejudice of Persistence

Among the books on my shelves are Paul Blanshard's American Democracy and Catholic Power, and Michael Schwartz's The Persistent Prejudice. The subject of the former book is obvious. The prejudice which the latter book denounces is anti-Catholicism, or more accurately, anti-Romanism. (Catholic means universal, which the Roman church is not, and has never been. Many Protestant churches still use the words "holy catholic church," small c, to mean the church universal.) The books are old; I found both at used book sales for bargain prices. The controversy is still very much alive, and worth taking a look at.

I was raised Protestant with a Jewish name in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic neighborhood, believing for many years that the population of the United States was one half Catholic, one third Lutheran, and the rest minor sects such as Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Unitarian. Obviously, I grew up in Wisconsin. In between such embarassments as Joseph McCarthy and Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin has been one of the more progressive states in the nation, with a good number of Catholic working class voters helping send socialists to Congress, and electing socialist mayors in Milwaukee, not to mention the LaFollettes.

Almost all my childhood playmates attended Roman Catholic services with their parents. I heard them from time to time chatting seriously about the Seven Sacraments and the nuns. Some went to public schools, as I did, others went to Roman parochial schools. (Only the elite from the parochial schools got into Xavier High School; in 9th grade, the rest rejoined the public schools. The kids from Xavier tended to be the ones to start anti-Vietnam War protests.) All of the disparaging jokes I have heard about the Roman Catholic faith have come out of the mouths of parochial school students and graduates. Who else knows the church and its rituals well enough to lampoon them? Who else has a motive for doing so? I have attended Roman mass a few times, in California, with elderly Hispanic friends, finding it to be an inspiring and moving worship service. Naturally I did not take communion, since I respect the right of any church to set its own rules.

I must admit that I find Blanshard's book more objective. It concerns the official statements and acts of the church, not a dissection of its dogma. Schwarz describes Blanshard's book as "the greatest anti-Catholic polemical tract in U.S. history." Certainly it is one of the most effective criticisms of Roman influence in American politics. Blanshard does not resort to lurid tales about priests raping nuns, or murdered babies and bloody rituals – the sort of tales pagan Romans told about Christians, medieval Roman Christians about Jews, and paranoid Protestants about Roman Catholics. Nor does he indulge in theological speculation that the Roman church is built on a foundation of idolatry. Blanshard quotes extensively from the public pronouncements of bishops, and the honest, uncompromising assertions of such undoubted Catholics as Hillaire Belloc. He cites Monsignor Matthew Smith openly expounding that "where Catholics are in overwhelming majority, it is theoretically better to have an official union of Church and State, with the state participating from time to time in public worship and using the machinery of government, when needed, to help the church." Blanshard, not surprisingly, finds such assertions to be a violation of American constitutional law and sovereignty, because they are.

Schwarz's more passionate protest is obscured by a subjective distaste for any criticism of his beloved church. To be a Roman Catholic, Schwarz admits, is to claim supremacy. It is not enough for prejudice that bars equal participation by members of his church in public life to be swept away. Schwarz will settle for nothing less than the freedom to seek supremacy, because, he maintains, that is the essence of faithful adherence to the Roman faith. He has a right to say that. It is called freedom of speech and of the press, rights firmly established by Protestants and by the traditions of the Enlightenment, with the enthusiastic participation of the small number of Roman Catholics then resident in the United States.

He displays an awfully thin skin when he denounces as "prejudice" the natural doubts of others about the Roman hierarchy's claim to supremacy. Schwarz has a right to submit to the hierarchy of his choice in spiritual matters. The laws of our nation will not interfere, being restrained by the first two clauses of the First Amendment. When he asserts the right of that hierarchy to dominate others, it ill becomes him or anyone to cry "bigotry" because the rest of us raise significant objections. Millions of us adhere to Wycliffe's assertion that man has no earthly spiritual overlord but Jesus, that spiritual Truth is a matter between me and God. Like Lutherans, we believe our own reading of the Bible is not subject to the direction of any hierarchy.

At its best, if such a comparitive term may be applied, American nativist anti-Roman prejudice arises from fear that the Roman Catholic hierarchy desires to subject and subordinate the civil government of every land (including the United States of America) to its own temporal power. Certainly such power has been openly claimed and sought throughout many centuries of the Roman church's existence. The words and deeds of successive bishops of Rome, their cardinals and administrators, have never justified absolute confidence that this goal has been unequivocally abandoned.

John F. Kennedy satisfied American voters that he himself would have no part of advancing such a purpose. For this, he was sharply criticized by conservative Roman Catholics who fully expected that any Roman Catholic elected as president darn well should advance the Vatican's agenda. Even Schwartz, in the midst of a book denouncing prejudice against Roman Catholics, is critical that Kennedy "laid the fears of anti-Catholics to rest by the simple expedient of not taking the Catholic side on sensitive issues." Schwarz, among others, misses the point: IF there is a "Catholic side" to a public issue, and IF any Catholic holding office is expected to take "the Catholic side" on that issue, then the nativist prejudice against Roman Catholics in public office is fully justified!

That would be equally applicable to other faiths if there were a "Baptist side" or a "Methodist side" or a "Pentecostal side" to any given issue. Despite efforts by pollsters, editors, reporters, and campaign managers to stereotype voters and dump us into "niches", despite the strident demands for obedience from the hierarchies of various churches, the truth is that there are members of any religion in America who vote Republican and Democratic, liberal and conservative, this way and that way on any given issue. The USA is far less threatened than are many European nations by the existence of a growing Islamic population within our borders, precisely because our politics and culture do assimilate immigrants into the mainstream of our nation. No immigrant has been asked to give up their faith in order to assimilate, but most who remain and become citizens do embrace our own national traditions. Anti-Roman prejudice is likewise misplaced, because Americans of the Roman Catholic faith do not act monolithically as a voting bloc, however much their more fanatical co-religionists might call upon them to do so. There are as many pro-choice Catholics as there are Catholics with bumper stickers saying you can't be Catholic and pro-choice. Thank God.

Still, Schwarz repeatedly sabotages his own case. Schwarz takes a position of uncompromising principle with regard to abortion, a position firmly in line with that of his faith. So far, so good. But if the Catholic community seeks an accommodation with the prevailing culture on that issue, Schwarz insists, "U.S. Catholicism will have been defeated and denatured by the anti-Catholic host culture." Defeated? Denatured? Host culture? What choice of words could better justify anti-Roman prejudice? Is this a Freudian slip, admitting that the Roman Catholic Church is an invading virus, trying to take over a biological host? Shooting himself in the foot yet again, Schwarz openly calls for Catholics to "take on the task of helping to shape American life from a Catholic perspective."

Religious bigotry tends to run around in circles, taking on a variety of political and economic overtones. When the Bishop of Rome could truly exercise authority across many national borders, having heretics slaughtered, tortured, or burned at the stake, there was no question who was engaged in tyranny. Martin Luther, for one, had to denounce the church as the "Whore of Babylon," not only for its corrupt practices at that time, but because it sought to militarily suppress the Reformation. When England withstood the Spanish Armada, its Protestant faith was the banner of freedom. When English capitalism conquered its first colony in neighboring Ireland, the Roman Catholic church became the faith of the oppressed. On the other hand, many Irish were profoundly anti-clerical, while the priests and bishops often collaborated with British rule.

When a tiny Roman Catholic minority gave substantial support to the American Revolution, an overwhelming Protestant majority gratefully extended full political participation. It wasn't even a question subject to debate, it was simply a done deal. When massive numbers of immigrants, many illiterate, began arriving from predominantly Catholic nations in Europe, to work in the factories of nativist Protestant capitalists, a whole host of different prejudices were unleashed. (It must be noted that the Protestant factory owners were no more interested in stopping the immigration of cheap labor, Roman Catholic or not, than today's industrial employers are interested in "immigration reform.") When Roman Catholic bishops felt sufficiently entrenched to demand the reshaping of American political life to their own satisfaction, the specter of the Inquisition naturally reappeared on the horizon.

To the extent that "Catholic thought" rejects the separation of the authority of church and state into distinct spheres, "Catholic thought" is indeed in direct contradiction to the constitution which brought the United States of America into being. Those Catholics who participated in the American Revolution had no problem with this separation – they helped to enshrine it as fundamental law, and benefitted enormously from it. It is fundamental to our republic both that true religion not be tainted by the corrupting influence of the state (as advocated by both Roger Williams and James Madison), AND that contention between rival denominations for preferment would damage the unity and peace of civil society (as advocated by Thomas Jefferson). Every immigrant of whatever nationality or faith, who became a naturalized American citizen, took a solemn oath to support, among other things, these fundamental principles.

It is of course the right of any citizen to accept the authority of any church with regard to their own spirituality. It is the right of any church to determine what writings properly represent its own dogma. Schwarz therefore not only has the moral right to submit himself to the authority of the Holy See, he has the legal right to do so without government interference. He has a valid point that if the church merely informs a teacher at a Catholic university that their writings are not approved by the church, it has acted within its proper sphere of authority. But the Inquisition was a very real institution, and the behavior of the Roman bureaucracy has never extinguished the thought that, if it had the temporal power and opportunity, the church might resort to such measures again.

Enduring skepticism of Roman intentions derives from the church's historical exercise of power, not from any sense that to be Catholic is to be intellectually or morally inferior. As long as the Roman hierarchy claims the unique and exclusive right to universal spiritual domination, the right to judge worldly affairs from a unique position of spiritual authority, so long as the Roman church claims to be something more than one among many denominations, there will remain a justifiable distrust of the Roman Catholic Church among all who decline to grant that church the authority it claims. While it is true that citizens professing the Roman Catholic faith have demonstrated their willingness to accept the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, the church as an institution has never totally accepted their right to do so.

Roe v. Wade Affirmed Again

The real math in the Supreme Court is still 7-2

I make it a rule never to comment on a Supreme Court decision until I have actually read the court's opinions, or at least the syllabus (that's a sort of final rough draft released before publication). They are easily accessible at www.supremecourtus.gov, by clicking on OPINIONS and then the name of the case.

Now I have read Gonzalez v. Carhart, the decision which upheld the constitutionality of the federal law banning the so-called "partial birth abortion" procedure, better known among physicians as Intact Dilation and Evacuation, or Dilation and Extraction. While the media rushes to extract a sound byte and a quick headline, while advocacy groups rush to celebrate or bewail the decision, it turns out the Supreme Court acted with the deliberation of a court. What has changed? Darn little.

The court has no jurisdiction to determine whether abortion is a morally good thing, a morally bad thing, or a morally ambiguous thing. With the possible exception of a catatonic note from Justice Thomas, the court stayed within its proper jurisdiction as a court. It examined whether this particular challenge to this particular law was legally sound. Federal courts have a guiding principal that if there is any reasonable interpretation of a law that would make it constitutionally acceptable, courts will adopt that interpretation. The court did so, and in doing so it has ruled out most of the dangers feared by the original plaintiffs who asked for injunctions against the law's enforcement.

The court didn't even say that Congress used good judgment in passing the law, only that, good law or bad law, it was within the discretion of Congress to adopt it. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both wrote in The Federalist Papers that if the legislature exceeds the powers granted to it by a constitution, it is the duty of the judiciary to declare such law null and void. The Supreme Court carefully considered whether this was such a law. By prudently trimming the possible applications of the law, a majority of five justices found that it was not.

There can be little doubt that the authors of this law hoped to open the door to a series of chilling prosecutions of doctors who perform abortion, stretching the law to leave physicians in genuine doubt about what they would or would not be arrested for. There is no doubt that there are a certain number of U.S. attorneys and state prosecutors who were slobbering to do exactly that. In order to find the law constitutional, the court had to slam that door shut. They did. Any doctor who is prosecuted for anything but an overt and deliberate violation of very specific rules has only to cite the court's ruling and majority opinion to get the charges dismissed.

It is important to keep in mind that by the explicit terms of Roe v. Wade, any state may prohibit abortions during the third trimester, unless the life or health of the pregnant woman concerned are in danger. I can't think of any state that has not done so. As the court majority noted, between 85 and 90% of abortions performed each year in the United States occur during the first trimester, and most of the rest during the second trimester. Abortions in the third trimester are almost always performed precisely because the mother's life is in danger. In effect, her baby is killing her. Orthodox Jewish law, for one, absolutely mandates abortion in this circumstance. (There have been times and places where Roman Catholic priests have openly demanded that the mother must die in order to save her baby.) It comes down to a choice between the mother's life or the baby's. To save the mother the baby will be destroyed.

Whether it is called partial birth abortion or dilation and extraction, if the mother's life is in danger, the law explicitly allows this procedure to be used. As narrowly interpreted by the court majority, as long as the head of the fetus is not actually outside of the birth canal, the procedure is perfectly legal to protect the mother's health also. Just don't let the head get out of the mother's body. The difference between a Nebraska law overturned in Stenberg v. Carhart and the current federal law is that the current law provides very specific benchmarks. The Nebraska law referred only to whether "a substantial part" of the fetus was delivered out of the uterus, not even out of the mother's body.

The real math on this ruling is unchanged since Roe v. Wade. Two justices favor overturning Roe, the perennial Thomas and Scalia. Seven justices rely on Roe and the cases that rest on Roe as decided law. They just disagreed on the details. Congress said that in passing the law, it was attempting to "draw a bright line that clearly distinguishes between abortion and infanticide." Those who call themselves "pro-life" have claimed that there is NO line that distinguishes between abortion and infanticide, but Congress said with a straight face that it was drawing one, and the Supreme Court took them at their word.

In that light, Justice Ginsburg's dissent waxes a bit hysterical at times. There is nothing particularly alarming about the net impact of the majority ruling. The full and independent legal status of women under the constitution is not threatened. But she makes some good points. The factual findings on which Congress based the law indeed "do not withstand inspection" and "many of the Act's recitations are incorrect." That is a polite way of saying that the congressional authors either lied to the American people, or were ignorant to the point of gross incompetence. Or perhaps they were just "factually challenged." In specific, there is no medical consensus that the procedure is never necessary, and there are in fact many medical schools which provide training in how to perform it.

It is probably true that if Justice O'Connor were still on the court, instead of Justice Alito, the 5-4 decision would have tipped the other way. But in practical terms, it wouldn't have made much difference. Otto von Bismarck once remarked that no one should see how laws or sausages are made. Here we have a good example of how laws are made. Everyone is tip-toeing around what they really want to accomplish. Everyone is using bland language and logic that may be quite different than what each justice would really like to say or to accomplish. But the result is not at all bad. A court can't make law, it can only interpret law. Five justices wanted to save this law from being overturned, and they did so in a proper legal manner. By the time they were done, there wasn't much impact left to the law they upheld. They even, quite properly, left the door open that a woman with a specific set of facts could go to court and seek an injunction against the law as it applied to her individual situation.

It was a good conservative decision, by justices determined not to be judicial activists. There are only two judicial activists on the court right now, Scalia and Thomas. But the most they could get was to go along with this ruling. It was a good day for the majesty of the law.