Evolutionary Psychology and The Gay Gene

I have just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's brilliant. I could wax lyrical about how wonderful this book is in this post but that wouldn't be very interesting. Instead I am going to critique it a little – it is possible to like a writer without agreeing wholesale with all of his ideas. In particular, I am going to show shortcomings in the particular Darwinian model of evolution he espouses and demonstrate the bogusness of evolutionary psychology. Because I had to leave the book itself in Whanganui (where I spent the last week), this post won't contain quotes and I will be working from memory. Remember, one can like a person or a book without agreeing with all of his, or its, arguments. If this post is a little badly written, I apologise. I might have brain damage.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins is aiming to prove a number of claims. He endeavours to show how all the main arguments normally wheeled out to prove the existence of God are flawed. In particular, he seeks to show that the argument from design, the argument that the complexity and apparent perfect fit between organisms and their ecological niches can only be explained by the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient designer, is unnecessary, that evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain life today in all its forms; he deploys the anthropic principle to explain why Earth has the perfect conditions for both life and intelligent life, and for the origin of life itself. It is possible to argue, and some have, that morality is grounded in religion; Dawkins argues that morality is independent of religion, and, drawing on evolutionary psychology, seeks to show that a moral sense can be viewed as an adaptation beneficial to the survival and propagation of the humans who have it. Dawkins goes on to argue that religion is not just unnecessary, otiose, to the project of explaining 'life, the universe, and everything', it is positively harmful to those who have been infected by this meme. He shows, for instance, that scripture is not only largely invented but presents a Jehovah who is jealous, vindictive, and possibly even sadistic, and cites examples of believers who had their lives ruined by stories of hell-fire and damnation. (Dawkins doesn't mention James Joyce but Joyce is also someone whose childhood was marred by pulpit sermons about eternal perdition – see Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) This summation of the book of course leaves a lot out – for the full picture, I refer the reader to the book itself.

Dawkins is engaged in a kind of war, the same war others such as Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens are fighting and have fought. On the one side, we have atheists who espouse a particular model of evolution (in which natural selection acts upon small chance mutations to gradually modify species), atheists who accept mainstream scientific accounts of the history and prehistory of the world, and, on the other side, Fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible to be literally true, that the world was created in seven days by God some four thousand years ago, and that fossils are the traces left of animals who lived on Earth before the Flood but weren't taken on board the Ark. Dawkins explicitly says that the target of his righteous indignation is the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He only briefly mentions polytheism and never engages with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, or any of the other major or minor religions (although there is a fascinating section on Cargo Cults.) It is a war between science and dogmatic monotheism. Interestingly, all of these militant atheists (to the ranks of which we can add Bill Maher) think that atheists are actively persecuted, and that it takes courage to 'come out' as an atheist. Dawkins, in the introduction to his book, explicitly compares the atheist  social project to the Gay Rights movement. Dennett has performed a similar rhetorical gambit, saying that atheists should identify as 'Brights' in the same way that homosexuals identify as 'Gays'. The world, Dennett is suggesting, is full of closet atheists who should feel proud of their atheism rather than be ashamed of it, should loudly and proudly proclaim their commitment to a Godless materialism to the heavens, and should take the fight for science to the stupid and ignorant who are threatening to remake America and other countries in their perverse image. The analogy between this fledging "Atheist Pride Movement" and the Gay Pride Movement evinces a misunderstanding of homosexuality itself, and of the Gay Pride Movement. Most obviously, gay men and women didn't pick the word 'gay' themselves. In 1900 it meant 'happy, or carefree'. Starting in the 1930s, through semantic drift, it became a derogatory epithet applied by heterosexuals to homosexuals, and then, later, presumably after decriminalisation, it was re-appropriated by the homosexual community, in a similar way that the African-American community has re-appropriated the word 'nigga'.

Of course, Dawkins and Dennett are opposing people who regard the word 'atheist' as a derogatory epithet. But this is something I've never been able to understand. Although I went to Sunday School when a small child, I was raised by atheist parents in a mostly secular country (New Zealand). I never felt ashamed to call myself an atheist, never felt the need to 'come out' as one, and regarded the religious minority as a stupid but harmless cadre who should be humoured rather than battled against. The direction of my life has been in the opposite direction to the people Dawkins describes in his book – from a scientific materialism to the vague sense that the world has a supernatural dimension. I haven't converted to any Abrahamic religion but I have rejected Darwinian evolution as Dawkins and others characterise it. Dawkins is critical of agnosticism and religious moderates (those who see the bible as figurative rather than literal, and cherry-pick the bits they like while disregarding the bits they don't) – I forget his reasons but they are probably similar to the reasons advanced by Sam Harris when he argues that the majority of Muslims, while not being Islamic terrorists, are sympathetic to terrorism. Even a little religion is a bad thing. The truth Dawkins overlooks is that the vast majority of people, particularly here in New Zealand have a sense that the world has a supernatural dimension but don't subscribe to any organised religion. These are the people who put down their religion as "Jedi" in the census, who read the daily horoscope, practice yoga, get their fortune read by tarot readers, are interested in Feng shui and attend talks by the Dalai Lama. New Age Hippies, in other words. I have a friend, very credible, not at all flakey, who as an adult lived in a haunted house and for several nights in a row saw the ghost of a small girl sitting at the foot of his bed crying.  This friend is not religious at all. I have had very many weird experiences myself. Towards the end of The God Delusion, Dawkins describes a women he'd corresponded with who, as a child, had an imaginary friend she called "the purple man". The night before she first went to school, the purple man told her that he was going to stop seeing her because she didn't need him anymore; he vanished from her life for many years, returning, in a dream, when she was an adult, at a pivotal moment in her life. Dawkins reports this story but doesn't seem to register the fact that stories like this suggest that the world is stranger "than is dreamed of in your philosophy", that quasi-religious experiences occur to people all the time. Personally, I don't think Darwin has sewn everything up – this is why I like Rupert Sheldrake as much as Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins seems to suggest that the only alternative to Abrahamic religions is Darwinism, and speaks positively of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is the theory that proposes that behaviours, personality traits, and cultural norms are genetic, and evolved under the influence of natural selection. I don't like evolutionary psychology. I think it is speculative and unfalsifiable. And I can give reasons for this judgement. At one point in The God Delusion, Dawkins discusses romantic love. The explanation for romantic love, the phenomenon of a man and a woman falling passionately for each other to the exclusion of everyone else (with sexual jealousy as a concomitant although Dawkins doesn't mention jealousy), is that it ensures that their progeny will be brought up in a secure, safe, nurturing environment in which their needs will be met. Humans are 'designed' (by natural selection), if this argument is correct, to be monogamous. However, several years ago I read an article in The Listener discussing another theory, also based on evolutionary psychology, which proposes that human beings in our primitive days engaged in group sex. This theory is associated with psychologist Christopher Ryan. The evidence for it includes the fact that women are capable of multiple orgasms, suggesting that, in prehistory, women would have sex with multiple men at the same time. So which is it? Are humans naturally monogamous or promiscuous? To answer the question, we would need to go back in time a hundred thousand years to observe the sexual mores of our ancestors. Which is impossible. All evolutionary psychology is is a set of Just So stories (a reference to Kipling which I hope is not too obscure); it is a set of hypotheses almost unsupported by evidence. We could attempt to reconcile the two hypotheses discussed above by suggesting that primitive humans engaged in group sex in the caves they lived in, and that the impulse to love monogamously appeared later, making the capacity of women to experience multiple orgasms a vestigial trait, a little like the appendix. But this would also be simply another Just So Story.

There is a deeper problem with Dawkins's argument. Dawkins's most important book was his first, The Selfish Gene. In it he proposed (this is not an exact quote) that organisms are effectively vehicles for their genes, robots that are 'designed' to carry and replicate DNA. This view of organic life follows directly from something that a friend of mine, a biologist, calls the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Organisms are born with a set of chromosomes, DNA, that acts as a blue-print for the organism, and which never changes. Yes, mutations can occur (and must occur if we are to accept conventional Darwinism) but these mutations almost always occur in the space between successive generations, in the gonads, so to speak. These mutations are small and random – usually they are detrimental but occasionally they are advantageous, meaning that the organism with the mutation has an improved chance of surviving longer and having more offspring than its rivals, thus passing the mutation on to its own offspring. This is, more or less, the standard picture of Darwinian evolution.

The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. During the 'nineties, a shift away from the Central Dogma occurred, a shift christened 'epigenetics.' It has been gaining steam ever since. Epigenetics is the idea that the environment, both within and without a cell, affects DNA, and that these alterations can be passed on to future generations.  In a way, in retrospect, this notion should have been obvious. Liver cells are different from red blood cells and both are different from neurons, yet all three sorts of cell contain exactly the same DNA. Presumably, in different types of cell, different genes are turned on and others are turned off. But how does a cell know which genes to turn on and off? The instructions presumably can't come from the DNA itself but rather from the cell's location with respect to other cells.

But epigenetics does more than suggest that genes can be turned on and off by environmental influences, that environment can affect gene expression. It is possible that the environment can alter DNA itself. I don't have any solid evidence for this hypothesis. When I planned this post, I intended at this point to discuss a newspaper article I read last year I think. This article reported the extraordinary story that one of a set of identical twins who had spent time in space away from his brother, returned to Earth with DNA 7% different from his brother's DNA, presumably as a result of the effects of weightlessness. Unfortunately, when researching this article on the Internet the day before yesterday, I found some evidence that this story, widely reported by world-wide media, was wrong – what changed was not the astronaut's DNA code but gene expression. (See  https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/03/20/space-astronaut-twins-dna-changed-how-some-reports-botched-the-story-and-what-we-really-know/). Nevertheless, I remain committed to the idea that it is possible that environment can alter DNA, not in the sense that random mutations can occur, but rather in the sense that DNA can be altered constructively, that genes can change in order to improve the fitness of an organism with respect to new environments.

There is a third possibility, one I have mentioned in the posts "On Evolution" and "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia". It seems to me that, for evolution to occur, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur in a number of individuals in a population in the same vicinity at the same time. This idea puts me at odds with conventional Darwinism and the neo-Darwinism espoused by Dawkins et al. This is why I am sympathetic to the 'morphic resonance' hypothesis devised by Rupert Sheldrake. Interestingly, Noam Chomsky, who is irreligious but doesn't share the militant atheism of people like Dawkins and Dennett and is sometimes sympathetic to religious people, believes that the language instinct evolved all at once, in one massive step, rather than as a series of incremental chance mutations. So I have good company in rejecting conventional Darwinism.

At this point I want to turn to the hypothesis that homosexuality is genetic, that there is a 'gay gene'. The idea of a 'gay gene' runs completely counter to conventional Darwinism because, if homosexuals don't have children, this particular gene shouldn't be passed on to future generations – this is why it is so odd that Dawkins and Dennett continually compare the atheistical movement to the Gay Rights movement. If traditional Darwinism is correct, the gay gene shouldn't exist or, at least, shouldn't be prevalent as it apparently is. The estimate often trotted out by commentators on sexual politics is that 10% of the world's human population is homosexual. Let us suppose for a moment that the gay gene does exist. I believe all other living creatures are heterosexual so it is reasonable to suppose that a hundred thousand years ago, all humans were heterosexual. Suppose homosexuality is a chance mutation. How could it be passed onto future generations if the individual born with this mutation wasn't sexually attracted to the opposite sex? If 10% of the world's human population is homosexual, this suggests that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men and gay women have been procreating , that the secret history of the world is a history of closet homosexuality. This kind of reasoning, by the way, is what drove me mad back in 2007.

We could turn to evolutionary psychology to help solve this puzzle. One hypothesis I read about a long time ago is that, although gay men don't children, their sisters do, and the gay uncles assist and support in the rearing of their nieces and nephews. This is known as 'kin selection' (look it up). Now, if this hypothesis is correct, it is empirically testable. We could consider the sisters of gay men, today and in the past (assuming we can know for sure who in the past was homosexual when the word 'homosexual' hadn't been coined), and find out if they had more children who survived infancy than women from solidly heterosexual families. I suspect that even if such a research project was undertaken, nothing would be found.

So far I have treated the gay gene as something that people either have or don't have, but this treatment requires finessing. In fact, every human is diploid, like other animals that procreate using sexual reproduction, and inherits two versions of every gene, one from his or her mother and one from his or her father. The technical term for different versions of the same gene is 'alleles'. If we presume, reasonably enough, that the homosexual allele is recessive, it becomes possible to suppose that homosexuals have two gay alleles, are what is technically known as 'homozygous recessive'. A person can only be gay is he or she carries both alleles. The much larger number of people who are 'heterozygous' (who carry only one copy of the gay allele) are heterosexual because the straight allele dominates over the gay allele. According to my calculations, if 10% of humanity is homosexual, homozygous recessive, 60% of the world's population would be heterozygous.

Particularly in Africa, large numbers of people have sickle-cell anaemia. People with this congenital disease are born with blood cells that are defective. The disease is genetic but it is a recessive allele that causes sickle cell anaemia – sufferers are homozygous recessive. They need both alleles to be sick. People with only copy of the allele, however, people who are heterozygous, are more resistant to malaria because of the shape of their red blood cells. There is thus an evolutionary advantage to being heterozygous that balances out the possibility of being born with the congenital disease, meaning that the frequency of this allele occurring in Africa remains constant in the population as a whole. Is the same perhaps true of the gay gene? Perhaps carrying one copy of the gay allele confers some evolutionary advantage? Once again this hypothesis is empirically testable but, to test it, we would need solid statistics about who is gay and who isn't, who is homozygous dominant, who is heterozygous, and who is homozygous recessive.

Up to this point, I have discussed the gay gene as though it were only a postulated entity. But in 2012, New Scientist published an article citing research by a couple of geneticists who claimed to have found the gay genes (there were two of them). One gene is active in foetuses shortly before birth, and the other affects the thyroid gland. (Google "the gay gene" and "New Scientist", and the article should pop up.) Dawkins, in The God Delusion, says that when confronted by Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, one immediately senses it must be false but that it can be difficult to say why it is false. I feel the same way about this New Scientist article. It must be false. Perhaps it is simply bullshit. Although in this post I seem to have tentatively accepted the notion of a 'gay gene', in fact I abandoned this hypothesis many years ago. Either the article is bullshit or there is some other explanation for the geneticists' findings than the conclusion that some people are simply born gay. Perhaps the genes don't directly code for homosexuality but for something associated with homosexuality, like a love of opera, and it is because others think the person gay that he turns gay. (I met a gay man once, by the way, who said that he felt he was letting down the gay community because he didn't like opera.) Or perhaps everyone is born heterosexual and a person's experiences and decisions cause his DNA to change. This is a radical idea but no more radical than the theories proposed by Sheldrake.

I'll finish this post by saying where I am, mentally, since my dosage was increased. I am not at all psychotic. But then I haven't experienced any psychotic symptoms at all since around halfway through the year before last and my dosage was increased only two or three months ago, for very little reason at all. I do feel physically sick a lot. I worry that in this blog I may make mistakes from time to time (I nearly said that I had experienced psychotic symptoms, a typo that could possibly have had very dire consequences.) I wish the arseholes would just allow me to discontinue a medication that does more harm than good.

I went into the Taylor Centre yesterday to receive my Olanzapine injection and, before my injection, the nurse said, "Do you consent to having an Olanzapine injection?" I'd never been asked this before. As the people treating me know, I'm under a fucking Compulsory Treatment Order and have been since around February 2014; I have requested and received multiple Independent Reviews to try to get out of a Mental Health System that is so badly broken there is no way to fix it, and lost every time. I have never had a choice. I asked her, "What would happen if I said 'no'"? but got no real answer. The fact that she even asked me this question reveals how insane the Mental Health System is.