Nonetheless, Weismann 's followers, and especially Sir Ronald Fisher and Hermann Muller, could escape the teleology trap by arguing that evolution, if not preordained, was at least essential.
Asexual species were at a disadvantage and would fail in competition with sexual species. By incorporating the concept of the gene
into Weismann 's argument, Fisher 's book in
In 1965, James Crow and Motoo Kimura modernized the Fisher-Muller logic by demonstrating with mathematical models how rare mutations could come together in sexual species but not in asexual ones. The sexual species does not have to wait for two rare events in the same individual but can combine them from different individuals: This, they said, would grant the sexual species an advantage over the asexual ones as long as there were at least one thousand individuals in the sexual ones. All was hunky-dory. Sex was explained, as an aid to evolution, and modern mathematics was adding new precision. The case could be considered closed.'°
MANKIND'S GREATEST RIVAL IS MANKIND
So it might have remained were it not for a voluminous and influential publication by a Scottish biologist named V. C. Wynne Edwards that had appeared a few years before, in 1962. Wynne Edwards did biology an enormous service by exposing a gigantic fallacy that had systematically infected the very heart of evolutionary theory since Darwin 's day. He exposed the fallacy not to demolish it but because he believed it to be true and important. But in so doing he made it explicit for the first time.'
The fallacy persists in the way many laymen speak of evolution. We talk blithely among ourselves about evolution being a question of the 'survival of the species. ' We imply that species THE ENIGMA
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compete with each other, that Darwin 's 'struggle for existence ' is between dinosaurs and mammals, or between rabbits and foxes, or between men and neanderthals. We borrow the imagery of nation-states and football teams: Germany against France, the home team against its rivals.
Charles Darwin, too, slipped occasionally into this way of thinking: The very subtitle of On
' preservation of favored races.' But his main focus was on the individual, not the species. Every creature differs from every other; some survive or thrive more readily than others and leave more young behind; if those changes are heritable, gradual change is inevitable. Darwin 's ideas were later fused with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who had proved that heritable features came in dis-crete packages, which became known as genes, forming a theory that was able to explain how new mutations in genes spread through a whole species.
But there lay buried beneath this theory an unexamined dichotomy. When the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species or with members of other species?
A gazelle on the African savanna is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying to outrun other gazelles when a cheetah attacks. What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. (There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend: 'It's no good, you 'll never outrun a bear, ' says the logical friend: 'I don't have to, ' replies the philosopher: ' I only have to outrun you. ') In the same way, psychologists sometimes wonder why people are endowed with the ability to learn the part of Ham-let or understand calculus when neither skill was of much use to mankind in the primitive conditions where his intellect was shaped.
Einstein would probably
standing people 's motives, manipulating people—these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are but how much more clever and craftier you are than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species.'
Now this may seem a false dichotomy. After all, the best thing an individual animal can do for its species is to survive and breed. Often, however, the two imperatives will be in conflict. Suppose the individual is a tigress whose territory has recently been invaded by another tigress. Does she welcome the intruder and discuss how best they can cohabit the territory, sharing prey? No, she fights her to the death, which from the point of view of the species is unhelpful. Or suppose the individual is an eaglet of a rare species anxiously watched by conservationists in its nest. Eaglets often kill their younger brothers and sisters in the nest. Good for the individual, bad for the species.
Throughout the world of animals, individuals are fighting individuals, whether of the same species or of another. And indeed, the closest competitor a creature is ever likely to meet is a member of its own species. Natural selection is not going to pick genes that help gazelles survive as a species but hurt the chances of individuals— because such genes will be wiped out long before they can show their benefits. Species are not fighting species as nations battle other nations.
Wynne Edwards believed fervently that animals often did things for the species, or at least for the group in which they lived.
For example, he thought that seabirds chose not to breed when their numbers were high in order to prevent too much pressure on the food supply. The result of Wynne Edwards 's book was that two factions formed: the group selectionists, who argued that much of animal behavior was informed by the interests of the group, not the individual, and the individual selectionists, who argued that individual interests always triumphed. The group selectionist argument is inherently appealing—we are immersed in the ethic of team spir-it and charity. It also seemed to explain animal altruism. Bees die as THE ENIGMA
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