Politics of the Cell

Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
by Lewis Thomas.
Viking. 168 pp. $12.95.

As a rule, scientists who share the dominant predilections of the literary establishment are lionized regardless of their competence to comment intelligently upon social and political problems. In recent years, one who has benefited particularly from this dispensation has been the biologist-physician Lewis Thomas, whose latest best-selling book, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, has been universally praised by reviewers and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

One of the reasons Thomas has achieved such success as a writer is that his “biology” is itself unthreatening, anthropomorphized to such an extent that it could virtually serve as a script for a Walt Disney children’s film. Instead of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” he offers a benign universe characterized by civility and orderliness. It is no wonder that timid literary critics feel at home in the not-so-wild world depicted in Thomas’s books.

Thomas’s own medical and scientific credentials are sterling. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard, and worked as a research pathologist and medical administrator at the Rockefeller Institute, New York University, Bellevue Hospital, and the Yale School of Medicine. For seven years he was president of the Sloan-Kettering cancer center in New York, and is now its chancellor. He is also the author of three books, The Youngest Science (1983), The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and The Lives of a Cell, which won the National Book Award in 1974. Thus it is as a genuine eminence in the scientific community that Thomas comes before us with his implicit claim that the objective findings of biology justify his political and moral point of view.

Thomas’s political notions inform the whole of his latest collection of delicate, “literary” meditations. Many of the essays are devoted to the “threat of nuclear war” but these are among the least interesting and original; in them, Thomas characteristically decries the general situation while offering absolutely no concrete alternatives. More paradigmatic of the way he insinuates his predilections into purportedly impartial scientific analysis is his essay, “Altruism.”

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As his prime example of altruistic behavior, Thomas cites the honeybee that stings an intruder in defense of its hive even though by that act it will surely die. Thomas then states in passing the standard scientific objection to his characterization of the honeybee’s behavior as altruistic:

It is easy to dismiss the problem by saying that “altruism” is the wrong technical term for behavior of this kind. The word is a human word, pieced together to describe an unusual aspect of human behavior, and we should not be using it for the behavior of mindless automata.

Without bothering to refute this point, Thomas blithely asserts barely a paragraph later:

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

This is not in any sense, however, a factual scientific conclusion. While it is true that there are instances of what appear to be altruistic behavior in nature, close examination of such cases as that of the “self-sacrificing” honeybee reveals that its behavior is actually quite selfish—that is, in the generally accepted Darwinian sense that individual animals always act to maximize their reproductive success. Owing to the haploidy-diploidy of their species, sterile female worker honeybees share with each other a three-quarters genetic relationship, rather than the usual sibling relationship of only one-half. So when a sterile female worker honeybee commits suicide, as in Thomas’s example, she does so selfishly, to perpetuate her genes through her fertile sisters, the queen bees of the future.

Thomas’s other example of so-called altruistic behavior is the warning cry of a bird, which seemingly exposes it to greater danger than other members of the flock it warns. Recent research disputes this interpretation, arguing that such warning cries are attempts to attract another predator to the scene to attack the first predator.

In any case, the whole controversy over altruistic behavior is sufficiently open to render wholly unwarranted Thomas’s bald and scientifically unsupported assertion that animals “have genes for altruism.” Nor is he correct in implying, in the same passage, that “group selection” operates in evolution, i.e., that genes act to assure the survival of a species as a whole. As the anthropologist Melvin Konner points out in The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, it is

the almost universal view among biologists that evolution proceeds primarily through competition among individuals and their kindreds. The selection or elimination of larger population units is, at best, very uncommon. Beyond that, the concept has numerous difficulties, the chief of which is that no one has ever observed an animal group . . . in which the group functioned so much as a unit that individual competition was successfully suppressed.

A species survives to reproduce its genes because members of that species survive—collectivities survive only because the individuals that make it up survive.

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Why does Thomas make two false assertions about the facts of biology when surely a man with his training must know that they are wrong? The answer is to be found in the moral and political lessons he wishes to wrest from nature. Building upon his claim that genetically determined altruism exists in nature, Thomas writes:

If we are to take seriously the notion that the sharing of similar genes imposes a responsibility on the sharers to sustain each other, and if I am right in guessing that even very distant cousins carry at least traces of this responsibility and will act on it whenever they can, then the whole world becomes something to be concerned about on solidly scientific, reductionist, genetic grounds.

Thus by an ill-founded intellectual sleight-of-hand Thomas derives an “ought” from an “is.” If one took Thomas’s perspective to heart, one might logically reach the conclusion that prey sacrifice themselves voluntarily for the good of predators. Unfortunately, his airy castle of speculation collapses when confronted by the facts of biology. There are no scientifically confirmed instances of purely altruistic animal behavior. On the question of how human beings should behave toward one another, nature is totally silent.

In his attempts to lend an air of scientific respectability and objectivity to his own point of view, his willingness to pass over inconvenient biological facts when they conflict with that view, and his general penchant for a priori reasoning, Thomas displays a curious affinity with the proponents of “scientific creationism.” For both he and they distort and ignore biological facts in an effort to mold a world closer to their hearts’ desires. Like the Social Darwinists of the last century, if in a wholly different direction, Thomas seeks to use biology as a justification for his own vision of society. By thus politicizing science, he contributes to undermining the very activity he claims to revere.

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