The times (UK), June 22, 2001

Richard Dawkins

The stamp of one prodigiously successful male dominates the entire area covered by the Mongol Empire

I have been commuting to London this week for a conference. Happily, there was only one major delay — waiting at Paddington for a train’s “manager”. You’d think a driver and guard would be enough. Perhaps the title was dreamt up by the same busybody who decreed that passengers must become “customers”, trains “services” and Didcot “Parkway”.

My conference was the annual meeting of HBES, the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society. This was the first year since its foundation that this admirable association had met off American soil, and University College London had the honour to play host.

HBES brings together anthropologists, psychologists, zoologists, sociologists, geneticists, memeticists, economists, philosophers, littérateurs, management consultants and even lawyers, united by one thing only — Darwinism. You might think this would go without saying. Not so. In many social studies departments, Darwin’s standing lies somewhere between “Charles who?” and the Antichrist.

All would accept, of course, that our bodies are evolved ape bodies. But when it comes to the human mind or society, all Darwinian bets are off.

To put it mildly, many HBES members feel beleaguered in their home departments of social studies. The annual conference is a haven where they can talk Darwinism in blessed, if temporary, freedom from the time-wasting necessity to defend it against ignorant hostility and fashionable nihilism.

In the social sciences of future years, early HBES conferences may assume a certain Crispin’s Day glow of retrospection. We few, we happy few . . .

The London conference had parallel sessions, which I sampled to find where the current buzzes are. Computer-modelling techniques are updating research on what we find attractive in the faces and bodies of the opposite sex. Symmetrical features are measurably preferred by both sexes, and males statistically prefer a certain female waist-to-hip ratio. Does this ideal figure reflect child-bearing potential, as a Darwinian might predict? The answer is complicated and the Darwinian interpretation more so. Don’t expect our behaviour or tastes to benefit our selfish genes today. Ask instead how the genes we now possess might have predisposed ancestral psychologies that assisted their procreation in an African world long gone.

Hugely controversial, for instance, is the theory that rape is a Darwinian adaptation. But this only means that genes predisposing males to rape may, in the distant past, have spread through the population via conceptions that resulted. Compatibly, the conference heard new statistical evidence that rapes are more likely to end in conception than are acts of consensual intercourse without contraception.

Nevertheless, such data are notoriously hard to interpret, and I remain sceptical. Some people object to the theory on the ground that rape victims are often of the wrong age or sex to conceive. You might as well say that sexual desire itself is not a Darwinian adaptation on the ground that people often use contraceptives! More hysterical antipathy stems from the ludicrous fallacy that to explain is to condone. Then too, there is that milder hostility often visited on the very idea of explanation. As Peter and Jean Medawar memorably put it in Aristotle to Zoos: “Indeed, some resent the whole idea of elucidating any entity or state of affairs which would otherwise have continued to languish in a familiar and non-threatening squalor of incomprehension.”

Across in another lecture hall, genetic historians traced the geographic distribution of DNA. Y-chromosomal DNA (which passes down the male line like a surname) marks the progress of marching armies and Viking longships. Mitochondrial DNA (which passes down the female line like Jewish identity) shows a predictably different distribution. England is awash with Anglo-Saxon Y-chromosomes, Wales with British ones. Mitochondrial DNA spread east across Polynesia from Asia, contrary to Thor Heyerdahl’s heroically westering Kon-Tiki.

A single Y-chromosome dominates the entire area covered by the Mongol Empire, the stamp of one prodigiously successful (in Darwinian terms) male. The timing is right for this individual to have been Genghis Khan himself. Believe it or not, I guarantee you somebody will interpret my recounting of this theory as evidence that I approve of Genghis Khan.

Never forget the elephants

Juliet, my 16-year-old daughter, has just finished her AS levels and we celebrate by booking her a trip to Kenya. She wants to visit the legendary Iain and Oria DouglasHamilton, to gain work experience in Oria’s clinic near Lake Naivasha. And what an experience it will be for a young aspiring doctor. You can be sure there’ll be no “health and safety” nonsense, or medical personnel so cowed by lawyers, hospital administrators and social workers that they daren’t lift a thermometer without a licence in triplicate. No doubt Juliet will also see something of Iain’s fascinating research, radiotracking wild elephants, and the work of his splendid charity, Save the Elephants. He is the world’s leading authority on the African elephant, and he and Oria have devoted much of their life to fighting poachers and the ivory trade.

It was for this work that Iain is the first winner of a prize — endowed by my father and awarded by Balliol College, Oxford, last month — for work in animal welfare and conservation. Half of the prize is given in money. The other half, more interestingly, comes in the form of a young apprentice, paid to go out and assist the prizewinner. Work experience again.

Peril of a population implosion

A deputation from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. They want me to step into Douglas Adams’s shoes as patron, and of course I am honoured to accept. I give them a Macintosh computer for use in the field (there could be no more appropriate gift in Douglas’s memory).

But it’s a sad day for them. The Gates Foundation has just turned down their appeal for money. They wouldn’t wish me to say it, but billions of dollars are flooding into medical research which will increase the six billion population of Homo sapiens. Couldn’t a small ripple of money be diverted for Gorilla gorilla, whose population is now only a few thousand and dwindling catastrophically? Perhaps the thinking is that the gorilla is already a lost cause. But suppose a relict population of Australopithecus were discovered in the Ethiopian highlands. Wouldn’t the Gates Foundation move heaven and earth to save these priceless walking archives of hominid history? Right then. Gorillas are your walking archives.

The only difference is that the ancestor we share with them is a little older, and we haven’t only just discovered them, we’ve known about them all along. Yes, human beings are very special, but they aren’t exactly in short supply. Maybe we shall realise how special gorillas were only when the last one has gone.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), June 23, 2001

Answers

"Maybe we shall realise how special gorillas were only when the last one has gone."

Hear! Hear! "Save the gorillas" is more important than "save the whales" ever was - the implications for the human race are far more important...

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 24, 2001.

When Nibiriu and the Annunaki return, these characters will certainly get a surprise.

-- (ZS@is.right), June 24, 2001.