Excerpt #99 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
“There is something profoundly anti-Darwinian about the very idea
of sustainability. But this is not as pessimistic as it sounds. Although
we are products of Darwinism, we are not slaves to it. Using the large
brains that Darwinian natural selection has given us, it is possible to
fashion new values that contradict Darwinian values.
“From a Darwinian point of view, the problem is that sustainability
is about long-term benefits at the expense of short-term benefits.
Darwinism encourages precisely the opposite values. Short-term
genetic benefit is all that matters in a Darwinian world. Superficially,
the values that will have been built into us will have been short-term
values, not long-term ones.
“What this means is that we must work all the harder for the longterm
future, in spite of getting no help from nature, precisely because
nature is not on our side.
“Humans are no worse than the rest of the animal kingdom. We
are no more selfish than any other animals, just more effective in
our selfishness and therefore more devastating. Animals (including
humans) do what natural selection programmed their ancestors to
do, which is to look after the short-term interest of themselves and
their close family, cronies, and allies.
“If any species in the history of life has the possibility of breaking
away from short-term Darwinian selfishness and of planning for
the distant future, it is our species. We are earth’s last best hope,
even if we are simultaneously the species most capable in practice
of destroying life on the planet. When it comes to the long view, we
are literally unique. No other species is remotely capable of it. If we
do not plan for the future, no other species will.
“There is a tension between short-term individual welfare and longterm
group welfare or world welfare. If it were left to Darwinism
alone, there would be no hope. Short-term greed is bound to win.
The only hope lies in the unique human capacity to use our big
brains with our massive communal database and our forward simulating
imaginations.
“Brains, although they are the products of natural selection, follow
their own rules, which are different from the rules of natural
selection. The brain exists originally as a device to aid gene survival.
The ultimate rationale for the brain’s existence, and for its large size
in our own species, is like everything else in the natural world — gene
survival. As part of this, the brain has been equipped by the natural
selection of genes with the power to make its own decisions —
decisions based not directly upon the ultimate Darwinian value
of gene survival, but upon other more proximal values, such as
hedonistic pleasure or something more noble.
“It is a manifest fact that the brain — especially the human brain — is
well able to override its ultimate programming; well able to dispense
with the ultimate value of gene survival and substitute other more
noble values, like a love of poetry or music, and, of course, the longterm
survival of the planet — and sustainability.”
Excerpted from a lecture by Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University
THOSE WHO ARGUE FOR THEIR LIMITATIONS WILL BE LIMITED.