The Believer magazine interviews Marjorie Grene, a philosopher of biology and science. The following is an excerpt from the interview.
IV. SOME PHILOSOPHERS ARE STUPID, CRUDE, AWFUL, SIMPLE-MINDED AND TOTALLY UNINTERESTING.
BLVR: Since some of the earliest work in the philosophy of biology came in the later 1960s and into the 1970s, I wonder if that was part of a reaction to the growing prominence of molecular biology, and the developments after Watson and Crick in the 1950s.
MG: Not that I know of; I don’t think so. I wasn’t aware of a relation then.
BLVR: Have you ever studied the philosophical validity of developments coming from the Watson and Crick double-helix stuff? Their arguments for the structure and—
MG: There aren’t any arguments against it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the philosophical problem?
BLVR: What about ideas about replication and transmission? Could they tend towards the reductionism that I’ve seen you argue against in your work, sort of like Dawkins’s selfish gene? That we can explain everything with just a look towards what happens in DNA, without the context in which it happens, or the environment in which it is situated?
MG: That depends on your general attitude. It doesn’t depend on the double helix, though. Well, of course, Crick was a very extreme reductionist, yes. He gave a talk in Washington, I don’t remember when, and he was nothing but reductionist about genes. It was awful. But you can discover the structure of anything, and it doesn’t take it out of its context.
BLVR: It seems to fit with the “knowledge is orientation” slogan in the sense that you are always situating yourself, trying to find your way from some place. Maybe I should ask about those popular ideas, like Richard Dawkins’s and The Selfish Gene.
MG: Oh [laughing], that’s just a gimmick. I don’t take it seriously, though.
BLVR: Seems to be widely known, though. What is the gimmick?
MG: Well, it’s not important with anybody who’s serious. The gimmick is just that everything is genes, and genes are trying to perpetuate themselves and we’re just sort of by-products of that. It’s total reductionism, like we’ve been saying.
BLVR: I should probably ask too about a few other popular figures. Before we started, you said something about Michael Ruse. What’s wrong with him?
MG: What’s wrong with him? He’s totally uninteresting. His earlier book on the Darwinian revolution wasn’t too bad. But ever since he declared—I mean, he’s a follower of that awful E. O. Wilson—ever since he declared “morality is an illusion foisted upon us by our genes,” I haven’t taken him seriously.
BLVR: That reminds me, I forgot to ask about Richard Rorty. You’re friends with him, though you don’t agree with his philosophy?
MG: We are friends, but you can’t agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He’s a wit! He should’ve lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don’t mean anything. The thing about Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is based on a total misinterpretation of Kant. It’s totally wrong about Kant, and I’m sort of a Kant person.
BLVR: OK, sorry, I didn’t mean to lead us astray. So you’re apparently against the later E. O. Wilson—Michael Ruse neo-Darwinism.
MG: That isn’t Darwinian. Well, maybe E. O. Wilson thinks he gets it from Darwin. That sociobiology thing is very one-sided and simple-minded, a sort of derivation of everything from I don’t know what, the brain or something. But there’s none of that in Darwin. I mean, The Descent of Man, maybe you’ll find something. And Ruse, he just tries to copy the master [Wilson]. Oh, but Wilson’s terribly crude. He’s just the farthest thing from a philosopher. He says, [paraphrasing] “Philosophers believe that ethics is based on intuition, but it isn’t, it’s based on some part of the brain,” I don’t know, I’ve forgotten what exactly. But philosophers don’t all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That’s just stupid! It’s ignoramus! I mean, he’s very good apparently, I guess, at ants as social insects, but he’s not very good at anything to do with people.
BLVR: Do you like Darwin?
MG: Like him? What a stupid question. How can anybody say that? How can anybody not like him? What do you mean?
BLVR: Is he interesting to read? Have you read all his work?
MG: Oh, no, certainly not. I haven’t read his orchids book. I must get some more of the Darwin-correspondence-project books too. I’ve only got about the first dozen.
BLVR: How many are there?
MG: Oh, I don’t know, but it won’t be done in my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment