My friend Anne Barbeau Gardiner writes in the last issue of the New Oxford Review about an article by Richard Dawkins, published in the English newspaper The Guardian in 2009, on the ramifications of creating a human-chimpanzee hybrid. It offers the usual anti-humanist dream. In the article, she writes,
Dawkins speaks disparagingly of the “minds of many confused people” who insist on calling the human zygote “sacred.” He attacks those who “assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and ‘animal’ is absolute.” To show how enlightened he is compared to those “deeply unevolutionary” folks, Dawkins offers the following image of ultimate bliss:
If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could . . . fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case . . . who could interbreed with a chimpanzee. We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution. (ellipses in original)
I’m not sure what he thinks he’s saying here, but . . . gosh. As an image of Heaven . . . as I say, gosh. I’d think even the greatest most avid fornicator would find a vision of Heaven as endless copulation a bit frightening. You think he’d realize that at some point he’d be pleading to have the chance to drink some tea or read a book or just sit on a chair outside and stare at the sky.
Dawkins, interestingly, doesn’t conceive of himself interbreeding with a chimpanzee. That he leaves for someone else several stages down the continuum.
Update: That last paragraph was a cheap shot, thrown off unthinkingly as I was finishing the item, and I apologize for it.
January 31st, 2013 | 1:32 pm
Dawkins doesn’t imagine interbreeding with a chimpanzee because he knows full well that the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans diverged five million years ago, or so. Our two species are too distantly related to be interfertile.
Could there be species between us and the chimps that we might be interfertile with? Maybe, although the sheer depth of time works against it.
January 31st, 2013 | 2:02 pm
At some point I almost wonder if Dawkins is doing a parody and having a laugh at everyone’s expense – but apparently he’s serious.
I guess self-awareness is not one of his strong suits.
January 31st, 2013 | 2:03 pm
Randy McDonald —
uh, OK
January 31st, 2013 | 2:55 pm
I’m not sure what he thinks he’s saying here, but . . . gosh.
What he is saying is totally unremarkable, and has nothing to do with a big orgy in the sky. He is merely saying that evolution produces one big, long chain (or tree), and that there are no discontinuities. Modern humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees, for example, all share a common ancestor (not a single individual, of course, but a species). And, quite obviously, going backward, each successive generation of humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees was the product of the previous generation. If humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees were able to draw up a complete family tree, it would be seen that we were all very distantly related to one another. There is nothing at all about that that conflicts with Catholic teaching. The only thing Catholics believe that Dawkins doesn’t is that God intervened in their somewhere and began infusing spiritual souls into just-almost-humans to make them humans.
Catholics believe there is an abrupt discontinuity between the first “true humans” (with spiritual souls) and their parents.
January 31st, 2013 | 3:13 pm
Ah, yes. Context is important when interpreting the Bible, but not when interpreting anything else. For instance, Dawkins is using ‘heaven’ as a generic term for ‘afterlife’, that’s all. The word “bliss” certainly doesn’t appear in Dawkin’s text. Go check.
And his point is quite valid. Look at ring species today. For example, the Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can’t breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don’t seem to be fertile, like mules.
So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?
Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you’ve got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the ’saltationist’ strawman that many try to imply.
Every species on Earth is linked in such a gradualist way. It’s just that most of the links have perished before now.
January 31st, 2013 | 4:17 pm
David Nickol: Well, yes, but why call it a “heaven”? Even generically used, the word has some sense of a paradise. And how does this image help him make his point, which you’ve put more clearly without it?
January 31st, 2013 | 4:38 pm
Dawkin’s is a distraction from reality.
His pointless thesis is based on fiction, not much different from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, except for one thing, Tolkien believed in the Divine rhapsody of created Excellence and upward growth in the midst of a struggle by the presentation of the “Ring” as a means salvation – not as a symbol of survival.
Dawkins, on the other hand, has no clear objective vision nor understanding of life other than a vision of “fornication” among the species in a viscious circle of “unknown” pointlessness survival.
Spending time of Dawkins wastes energy which could be better spent at prayer and meditation, discovering the Riches and Love of God within the reality of Being and Purpose.
January 31st, 2013 | 4:43 pm
I am surprised that this sentence by Dawkins got no attention: “Chimeras of human and mouse cells are now constructed in the laboratory as a matter of course, but they don’t survive to term.”
January 31st, 2013 | 4:58 pm
Recall that Dawkins’s goal is to convey the idea that humans are only incrementally different than other forms of life.
I don’t think Dawkins refers to heaven to convey the idea of paradise. I think he refers to heaven as a place where creatures from very points in history would all exist simultaneously.
Similarly, I don’t think Dawkins refers to sex in heaven to convey his idea of paradise. I think he refers to sex for two reasons. First, the ability to procreate together conveys the idea of being in the same species. Dawkins suggest that evolution is such a gradual process that we’d be able to procreate with creatures next to us on the evolutionary continuum. And they’d be able to procreate with creatures next to them. And so on. Second, sex conveys intimacy. The idea that I’d have sex with a creature that strikes me as human, but that creature would have sex with another creature that seems less human, and so on, provides a visceral suggestion of how closely related humans are to all other living creatures.
Finally, I don’t think Dawkins was putting on airs when he refrained from depicting himself as having sex with a chimp. He depicts himself in the role of a contemporary human, mating with someone who is evolutionarily one step short of being a contemporary human.
January 31st, 2013 | 10:15 pm
I am happy that several readers were on their toes and noticed that Dawkins was not talking about celestial orgies. He was making the correct point that the appearance of discontinuity between species now extant is an illusion caused by the fact that intermediate species have gone extinct. While Dawkins has said many outrageous things, this is not one of them.
February 1st, 2013 | 12:25 am
David Nickol: Well, yes, but why call it a “heaven”? Even generically used, the word has some sense of a paradise.
If you think of it as just a place where the people who died in the past go to be young again what would you find? Well your parents would be there….no doubt enjoying being young together. Their parents would too. And so would theirs etc etc. If you’re of the opinion that a line should be drawn at some point between one group or person who was human and a person who wasn’t, then you’ve landed at a ‘species interbreeding’ couple.
If you say heaven is only for humans….well at some point you get to a person who discovers his parents aren’t there. Why? “Sorry Mr. Adam, you’re parents didn’t make the cut…too much ape not enough human”. Or perhaps even more oddly “You mom made it, dad didn’t”. No doubt this person would probably feel like his parents deserved a place in the family just like everyone else.
But if you’re not going to draw a sharp and somewhat arbitrary line then you’re going to be left with a continuum that extends not just to living things that seem close to humans but also things that seem nothing like them (i.e. warthogs)
February 1st, 2013 | 6:55 am
I could be wrong, but I suspect that Dawkins is wishing to shock those with religious sensibilities. But when religious people agree with his point, (e.g., Dr. Stephen Barr’s excellent comments above), I’m guessing that it deflates the shock bubble that Dawkins may be intending to have expanded. (as an analogy, if you tell people they can’t watch something, they’ll try with all their might to see it, but tell them they can see something, and they lose interst!)
Dawkins is also a true believer in evolution. He has every rational right to be, since the empirical evidence, and deductive arguments show that it’s the best theory that currently exists to explain the diversity of life, on our blue little round rock. But he also is a true believer in the notion that religion is an enemy of rational thinking. He seems to think that by showing the legitimacy of evolution, people can see that that any belief in God is false. But when religious people show that belief in God/religion is wholly consistent with believing in the theory of evolution, this ballon is deflated as well.
February 1st, 2013 | 1:23 pm
It’s amusing so many here are trying to guess “What did Dawkins mean”. All you have to do is actually click the link and read the article.
In a late response to Edge.org’s annual New Year challenge to the world’s leading thinkers, Prof Richard Dawkins has submitted his entry. Edge.org asked scientists, philosophers, artists and journalists “What will change everything?”
Dawkins – author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion – muses on the effect of breaking down the barrier between humans and animals, perhaps by the creation of a chimera in a lab or a “successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee”.
His first example makes it clear what he is talking about:
The discovery of relict populations of extinct hominins such Homo erectus and Australopithecus.
It would be interesting to speculate how various religions would deal with such an event. Would they equate them to human? Deem them to be animals? In between? Would it matter if they had the ability to speak?
February 2nd, 2013 | 7:40 pm
Boonton, you make a good point. Even though I disagree with Dawkins concerning religion, and I think that, although he’s entirely justified, as I mentioned above, in accepting evolution (I do too), he seems a little too over enthusiastic about it. He often calls it a “fact”, but, as with any scientific theory, it could be rendered false on the basis of subsequent empirical evidence. While he acknowledges this in principle, he often seems to give the impression (at least to my mind) that evolution is so widely supported that it cannot be questioned.
Clearly there’s a number of intermediary species between humans and chimps, that have gone extinct, that the cemetary of our natural world has rendered to us, to make their existence beyond rational dispute. These creatures not fully human should be described on the basis of their morphological/genetic characteristics. All animals are God’s creatures, and it wouldn’t really matter, (to my mind) how we define them.
February 2nd, 2013 | 9:02 pm
Bret,
True but unlikely. It’s a bit too cut and dried to declare that theories are true one day and false the next. It’s better to think of them as more or less true. Einstein didn’t show Newton was false, he demonstrated why Newton made sense in a limited area of observation (objects with a ‘normal mass’, not moving too quickly). If evolution is untrue, the truth will almost certainly have to demonstrate why evolution seems true.
But I think you’re gliding over the point of the article. What exactly makes the extinct ancestors of humans ‘not fully human’? If it was discovered some of them are still living today in some remote region or if they are brought back to life what would our responsibilities to them be? Traditional Christian thinking does assert all animals are God’s creatures but has a pretty clear dividing line between humans and animals, and it’s quite clear whose on the top side of tha tline and whose on the bottom.
February 3rd, 2013 | 8:36 am
A close reading of the passage shows that Dawkins is speaking of Heaven, not Evolution. He imagines a situatiom outside of time. Hence, the begetting offspring for evolutionary purposes is out of the question. It’s not interbreeding taking place, but intercopulation. Like Darwin, Dawkins is shwoing that species barriers are permeable, illusory, we are all one one material continuum. That’s the point.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact