Tuesday, 15th of January, 2002

Here is a fantastic interview with Richard Dawkins, initiated as a response to September 11, but covering much more ground. It’s annoyingly formatted, from a Japanese site, but the interviewer asks good questions (it just doesn’t differentiate between the interviewer’s voice and Dawkins’).
Dawkins discusses his anti-religious outlook, and how it’s been confirmed by the events on September 11. Later he discusses the fact that his gene-centric neo-Darwinism (see The Selfish Gene etc) doesn’t imply a dark social Darwinist picure, doesn’t preclude morality, doesn’t negate free will etc. He talks about how the human brain, because of its immense capacities (and see many of the writings of Daniel Dennett for much more on this), can cause us to behave in pretty anti-Darwinian ways; about how the welfare state is anti-Darwinian (and something he supports) and so on. In case you thought neo-Darwinist equals right-wing and Stephen J Gould et al equals left-wing, you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest (which would equate to the extreme laissez-faire capitalist position). A quote:

Darwinism shouldn’t be used as a justification for anything. Darwinism is just the explanation of how life came to be the way it is. That doesn’t mean we have to follow it.

This is just the sort of thing I’d like to hear more from left-wing scientific thinkers. You don’t need to water down your thinking on genetics and evolution or anything else, because you’re scared that the way things are implies the way things should be… It should be made clear that ethics is separate from the brute facts of how things are; and that in a complex yet deterministic universe, our wondrous distinguishing feature is that we can exercise so much independent control over ourselves and our environment, and with this great power comes, of course, a responsibility to behave ethically (and to work out what ethical behaviour should be).

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