A few months before his death, Charles Darwin was visited by the radical journalist Edward Aveling. An enthusiastic Darwinian, Aveling wanted to enlist his hero in a campaign to allow the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh to take his seat in parliament. It was to no avail. Darwin's mind was far from the political fray, being at that moment preoccupied by the behaviour of earthworms. Asked by an irate Aveling how he could stoop to a "subject so insignificant", he replied simply: "I have been studying their habits for forty years." The meeting ended inconclusively. Aveling had assumed the author of Origin of Species to be his natural ally in the campaign for atheism, socialism and birth control. The passion of pure research was beyond his comprehension.
Mary Midgley retells this story towards the end of her elegant and sane little book. It could stand as an emblem of her own philosophical enterprise. Like Darwin, Midgley wants to dissociate science from the various social and political projects - the "myths" of the title - that have marched under its banner. Her targets are the ideologues, the Avelings of the world, for whom science signifies not so much careful empirical research as a dogmatic commitment to "progress" and "enlightenment". This kind of scientific mythology has long been popular in the Anglo-Saxon world. Herbert Spencer was the first and most famous master of the genre. He transformed Darwinism into a social and political doctrine, in the process coining the disastrously ambiguous slogan "survival of the fittest". The influence of such ideas on the Nazis rendered them for a long time unfashionable. Now the stigma is fading. Writers such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are the Spencers de notre jour. Like Spencer, they want to elevate natural selection from a biological hypothesis into a universal principle of explanation. It is against such "magnificent visions" (Dennett's phrase) that Midgley's quiet scepticism is directed.
There is nothing new about attempts to delimit the scope of human reason. Kant proposed "a tribunal to assure to reason its lawful claims and dismiss all groundless pretensions". The logical positivists formulated a general rule - the "verification principle" - for separating science from hot air. In this century, it has often been assumed by professional philosophers (if not the lay public) that any attempt to derive ethical or political values from Darwin's theory must be guilty of something called the "naturalistic fallacy". It must, that is, involve an illegitimate deduction from statements about what is to claims about what ought to be the case. Philosophy, as the study of logical and ethical validity, is indifferent to mere facts. "The Darwinian theory has no more to do with philosophy," wrote Wittgenstein tartly, "than has any other hypothesis of natural science."
Such abrupt dismissals are not in Midgley's style. Although sympathetic to the general aims of positivism, she does not share its belief in a universal criterion of science. Nor does she endorse a rigid separation of the "is" from the "ought". On the contrary, she argues persuasively that the unnaturalness of a practice is often a good prima facie reason for rejecting it. Hers is a relaxed, undogmatic naturalism, not unlike that of Darwin himself. She defends a plurality of scientific approaches, each one appropriate to its own particular sphere of objects. Her objection to Dawkins and his ilk is not that they overstep the boundary of some universal "scientific method", but that they illegitimately extend a method appropriate in one sphere to all others. What is required to combat them is not a catch-all principle, but continual vigilance and critical analysis.
The most successful parts of this book are accordingly devoted to a kind of "deconstruction" of popular scientism, an exposure of its hidden rhetoric. Unusually for a professional philosopher, Midgley has a superb ear for the use and misuse of language. Metaphor, in particular, attracts her attention. Why are certain sciences extolled as "hard" while their less rigorous companions are dismissed as "soft"? What explains the ubiquity of architectural metaphors, of "foundations" and "building blocks"? Why has the study of the stars always been considered "higher" - morally as well as literally - than the study of beetles? The rhetoric of science and philosophy is pervaded by a kind of geeky machismo, an exultation of the will and intellect at the expense of the body. The whole ideal of radical autonomy, so central to modern western philosophy, is implicitly male, cushioned as it is by the alternative "female" virtues of love and sacrifice. Midgley hopes that the increasing articulacy of women will redress the balance in favour of the body and the emotions. Perhaps: although it remains a mystery, on these assumptions, why three of the 20th century's greatest female thinkers - Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch - all held views on the will and intellect that count as decidedly "male".
But whether female or not, feeling clearly has an important and often overlooked role to play in ethical debate. Midgley brings this out admirably in her essay on biotechnology and the "yuk factor". The "yuk factor" refers to that inarticulate feeling of disgust aroused by mice with human ears growing from their backs and that sort of thing. It is often dismissed, in debates over the future of biotechnology, as "merely" emotional. Such feelings might have to be respected for political reasons, but being subjective and imponderable they cannot play any role in serious, rational debate. Reason - meaning here calculating, economic reason - is assumed to lie on the side of the new developments.
Midgley rejects this whole division of the terrain. Feelings are never "just" feelings; they always incorporate thoughts, however confusedly. And thoughts are never "just" thoughts; they are always surrounded by a certain emotional atmosphere. "On both sides, we need to look for the hidden partners. We have to articulate the ideas behind emotional objections and to note the emotional element in claims that are supposed to be purely rational." The idea lying behind the yuk factor is that of the inviolability of species boundaries. Gorgons, minotaurs and other monsters give symbolic expression to a deep-seated conviction that the distinctions of nature are to be respected. Nor is this view merely traditional. It has, as Midgley points out, good scientific credentials. Hybrids are notoriously hard to breed, and most are infertile. Our genetic material is not a "pool" or "soup", as it is often revealingly called; it is structured whole. It cannot be broken down into its component parts and reassembled at will.
On the other side, Midgley uncovers an extraordinary exuberance of imagination behind the supposedly cool and rational claims of biotechnologists. A group of distinguished genetic engineers have renamed their science "algeny", on the model of the discredited medieval science of alchemy. The comparison is not fanciful. Just as the alchemists viewed the chemical elements as mere stages in a continuous process of transmutation, so the algenists view species as stages in the ongoing movement of life. Like the alchemists, they hope to assist this movement, to transform the base metal of human nature into some hitherto undreamt-of gold. The old Trotskyite rhetoric of the "new man" has found a fresh lease of life. "The horizons of the new eugenics are in principle boundless," writes the scientist Robert Sinsheimer. "For the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origins and can undertake to design its future." Is this still science? Is it myth? Is there any way of drawing a clear-cut distinction between the two?
This final question raises a difficulty. If myth is the "matrix of science", as Midgley at one point claims, then its exposure no longer serves any obvious critical function. Defenders of algeny can simply retort that it constitutes the necessary "matrix" of their more strictly scientific work. Midgley herself seems favourably disposed to James Lovelock's concept of Gaia - surely no less mythical than any of the other "magnificent visions" she so meticulously dissects. The contrast, then, is not so much between myth and science as between nice myths and nasty myths. How are we to decide which is which? The question of the objectivity of science gives way, on analysis, to the deeper and less tractable question of the objectivity of ethics.
Edward Skidelsky is an NS lead reviewer
