The Selfish Gene-Therapy

There’s been a lot of talk lately, a great deal of it precipitated by Richard Dawkins, about the idea that people are becoming increasingly “anti-science”. This always seems to me to be a decidedly strange thing to be “anti-“. You never hear of people being strongly opposed to any other kind of human endeavour. You never hear of people who are “anti-mathematics”, shouting loudly that geometry is based on unproven assertions from some dead Greek guy. Or quacks preaching “pseudo-geography”, and claiming that all countries are really just one country, surrounded by one sea, and that you can travel between these apparent countries by aligning yourself with their various energies. Science, like maths and geography, is just a way of looking at an aspect of reality in a specific way. Science is just a fancy word for what we know about reality. There’s no way you can be against knowledge, one would think, but the odd thing about these anti-science types is that they appear to think that if they ignore reality pointedly enough then it will go away. They can probably convince themselves of this pretty well, but reality never goes away. It’s still there, in the background, and you can convince yourself all you like that there is no bus hurtling towards you, and perhaps you’ll succeed, but you’ll still die, only now you won’t know why you’re dead. This happens – every so often the media will report a case where someone has taken homeopathic ‘medicine’ instead of, well, medicine, and promptly dropped dead when reality butted in and politely pointed out that in real life you can’t cure serious diseases by having a nice glass of water.

In The Enemies Of Reason, Dawkins seemed oddly reluctant to accept that alternative ‘therapies’ were so much better at placebo effect than conventional medicine. Personally, this does not surprise me at all. By devising medicine that actually works, conventional medicine has allowed itself to be controlled by clinical trials and evidence, and so the placebo effect plays a remote second fiddle to actual physiological effects. Alternative ‘medicine’, on the other hand, is pure placebo (occasionally with the odd bit of active ingredient thrown in: every so often someone will analyse some old Chinese herb and prove that it contains some naturally occurring form of aspirin or whatever). It survives because people think it works. If people don’t think it works, then it won’t work even as well as other placebos, and then it will die out. Every so often someone will realise they can get more money or respect than other practitioners if they change the system a little, or even make up their own system, so they’re offering something unique. If this seems more convincing to the public it will prosper. Otherwise, it will fail. What you have there is like spawning imperfect copies of like and criteria for selection among those copies. That’s all you need for Evolution to happen. Essentially, gullible fools are the environment in which the memes of alternative ‘therapies’ must fight to survive. Alternative therapies are good at placebo for the same reason that fish are good at swimming: they simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. (Although right now I think they’re living in an environment of plenty where they can all survive with very little selection going on.)

You’d think he’d have thought of that.