Sociobiology and Metaphor

Posted on March 30, 2004 in Anthropology Evolution & Creation Thinking

Sociobiology isn’t Science: it’s Poetry.

A sociobiologist wants you to believe that you can quantify a statement like “My Love is like a red, red rose.”

He’ll perform a few DNA tests and say “See. I’ve proved the poem.”

Tonight in the philosophy group, we discussed a book which promoted the idea that determinism and free will were not mutually exclusive concepts — provided that you redefined them so that determinism wasn’t determinism and free will wasn’t free will anymore.

Sociobiology came up as a classic example of this kind of rubber thinking. I questioned the idea of “the selfish gene”. The moderator said that the gene really wasn’t selfish, it just acted like it was selfish. I asked him to quantify “meme” and his response was that although they hadn’t figured out how to measure it, he felt it was a real concept. Just like ghosts are real, I muttered under my breath.

The term “meme” came into being because Richard Dawkins liked slant rhyme. It almost sounds like “gene”. Never mind that there was already a word for the phenomenon of ideas that replicate (by themselves? hardly — the analogy to a gene doesn’t work here) and that word is “culture”. Meme as used by Dawkins amounts to little more than a power grab: he wants to control the dialogue about the origins of human behavior. By rejecting the anthropologists’ and sociologists’ language, he baldly attempts to undercut their authority and ability to rebut him. Foucault comes to mind here. “Knowledge is power and I seize it by promoting my word over their word.”

The moderator also routed us away from discussing the emotional implications of holding the sociobiologist position. Yet I think emotion plays a major role. The book at hand revealed that: the author wanted to reap the benefits of both Free Will and Determinism. He had to reinvent the language so he could have both the comfort of Choice and Predictability. Like many thinkers, he became lost on a track that really didn’t make much of a difference — unless Free Will was the state of affairs and you wanted to brainwash people into believing that it didn’t exist or leave them confused.

I remain suspicious of sociobiology because I am a poet and I know metaphor. I know that metaphor can be used as a tool for power, for manipulating thought. I know that people do stake their emotions on their positions. Many “bright” white boys and girls love sociobiology. It gives them a sense of power, participation in a priesthood. It is not science because science is objective and science does not — in its pure and honest forms — fudge and attempt to pass off metaphor as objective presentation of the facts. Science does not allow the “it exists but we don’t know how to measure it yet” argument. Science can live with a little fuzziness.

Genes are not selfish because they lack consciousness. Memes cannot be quantified as units of measurement any more than John Stuart Mill’s utils. The defense of these metaphors as Science is nothing more than grasping. Dawkins and others simply want to will them into being. They speak to what is observed, I grant you, but the issue isn’t determinism vs. free will as I see it. Much more important is the issue of what is real and isn’t real, what works as a life and what doesn’t, what produces the greatest good for the greatest possible number and what doesn’t.