The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind
Richard Dawkins
What percentage of the British population lives below the poverty line?
When I call that a silly question, a question that doesn’t deserve an
answer, I’m not being callous or unfeeling about poverty. I care very
much if children starve or pensioners shiver with cold. My objection –
and this is just one of many examples – is to the very idea of a line: a
gratuitously manufactured discontinuity in a continuous reality. Who
decides how poor is poor enough to qualify as below the ‘poverty line’?
What is to stop us moving the line and thereby changing the score?
Poverty/wealth is a continuously distributed quantity, which might be
measured as, say, income per week. Why throw away most of the
information by splitting a continuous variable into two discontinuous
categories: above and below the ‘line’? How many of us lie below the
stupidity line? How many runners exceed the fast line? How many
Oxford undergraduates lie above the first class line?
Yes, we in universities do it too. Examination performance, like most
measures of human ability or achievement, is a continuous variable,
whose frequency distribution is bell-shaped. Yet British universities insist
on publishing a class list, in which a minority of students receive first
class degrees, rather a lot obtain seconds (sometimes subdivided into
upper and lower seconds), and a few get thirds. That might make sense if
the distribution had three or four peaks with deep valleys in between, but
it doesn’t. Anybody who has ever marked an exam knows that the bottom
of one class is separated from the top of the class below by a small
fraction of the distance that separates it from the top of its own class. This
fact alone points to a deep unfairness in the system of discontinuous
classification.
Examiners go to great trouble to assign a score, perhaps out of 100, to
each exam script. Scripts are double or even triple marked by different
examiners, who may then argue the nuances of whether an answer
deserves 55 or 52 marks. Marks are scrupulously added up, normalised,
transformed, juggled and fought over. The final marks that emerge, and
the rank orders of students, are as richly informative as conscientious
examiners can achieve. But then what happens to all that richness of
information? Most of it is thrown away, in reckless disregard for all the
labour and nuanced deliberation and adjusting that went into the great
addition sum. The students are bundled into three or four discrete classes,
and that is all the information that penetrates outside the examiners’
room.
Cambridge mathematicians, as one might expect, finesse the
discontinuity and leak the rank order. It became informally known that
Jacob Bronowski was the “Senior Wrangler” of his year, Bertrand Russell
the Seventh Wrangler of his year and so on. At other universities, too,
tutors’ testimonials may say things like, “Not only did she get a first: I
can tell you in confidence that the examiners ranked her number 3 of her
entire class of 106 in the university.” That is the kind of information that
really counts in a letter of recommendation. And it is that very
information that is wantonly thrown away in the officially published class
list.
Perhaps such wastage of information is inevitable: a necessary evil. I
don’t want to make too much of it. What is more serious is that there are
some educators – dare I say especially in non-scientific subjects – who
fool themselves into believing that there is a kind of Platonic ideal called
the ‘First Class Mind’ or ‘Alpha Mind’: a qualitatively distinct category,
as distinct as female is from male, or sheep from goat. This is an extreme
form of what I am calling the discontinuous mind. It can probably be
traced to the ‘essentialism’ of Plato – one of the most pernicious ideas in
all history.
For legal purposes, say in deciding who can vote in elections, we need to
draw a line between adult and non-adult. We may dispute the rival merits
of eighteen versus twenty-one or sixteen, but everybody accepts that there
has to be a line, and the line must be a birthday. Few would deny that
some 15-year-olds are better qualified to vote than some 40-year-olds.
But we recoil from the voting equivalent of a driving test, so we accept
the age line as a necessary evil. But perhaps there are other examples
where we should be less willing to do so. Are there cases where the
tyranny of the discontinuous mind leads to real harm: cases where we
should actively rebel against it? Yes.
There are those who cannot distinguish a 16-cell embryo from a baby.
They call abortion murder, and feel righteously justified in committing
real murder against a doctor – a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a
loving family to mourn him. The discontinuous mind is blind to
intermediates. An embryo is either human or it isn’t. Everything is this or
that, yes or no, black or white. But reality isn’t like that.
For purposes of legal clarity, just as the eighteenth birthday is defined as
the moment of getting the vote, it may be necessary to draw a line at
some arbitrary moment in embryonic development after which abortion is
prohibited. But personhood doesn’t spring into existence at any one
moment: it matures gradually, and it goes on maturing through childhood
and beyond.
To the discontinuous mind, an entity either is a person or is not. The
discontinuous mind cannot grasp the idea of half a person, or three
quarters of a person. Some absolutists go right back to conception as the
moment when the person comes into existence – the instant the soul is
injected – so all abortion is murder by definition. The Catholic Doctrine
of the Faith entitled Donum
Vitae says
“From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that
of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his
own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. To this
perpetual evidence . . . modern genetic science brings valuable confirmation. It has
demonstrated that, from the first instant, the program is fixed as to what this living
being will be: a man, this individual-man with his characteristic aspects already
well determined. Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life . . .”
http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/donumvitae.htm
It is amusing to tease such absolutists by confronting them with a pair of
identical twins (they split after fertilisation, of course) and asking which
twin got the soul, which twin is the non-person: the zombie. A puerile
taunt? Maybe. But it hits home because the belief that it destroys is
puerile, and ignorant.
“It would never be made human if it were not human already.” Really?
Are you serious? Nothing can become something if it is not that
something already? Is an acorn an oak tree? Is a hurricane the barely
perceptible zephyr that seeds it? Would you apply your doctrine to
evolution too? Do you suppose there was a moment in evolutionary
history when a non-person gave birth to the first person?
If a time machine could serve up to you your 200 million greats
grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon.
He was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of
intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species
as its parents and its children.
“I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the
Prince of Wales”, as the song goes. I could mate with a woman, who
could mate with a man, who could mate with a woman who . . . after a
sufficient number of steps into the past . . . could mate with ancestral fish,
and produce fertile offspring. To invoke our time machine again, you
probably could not mate with Australopithecus
(at least not produce
fertile offspring) but you are connected to Australopithecus by an
unbroken chain of intermediates who could interbreed with their
neighbours in the chain every step of the way. And the chain goes on
backwards, unbroken, to that Devonian fish and beyond. On the way,
about six million years into the past, we would encounter the ancestor we
share with modern chimpanzees. It so happens that the intermediates, like
the common ancestor itself, are all extinct. But for that (perhaps
fortunate) fact, we would be connected to modern chimpanzees by an
unbroken chain of intermarrying links. Not just intermarrying but
interbreeding – producing fertile offspring. There would be no clear
separation between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. The only way to
maintain our human-privileging laws and morals would be to set up
courts to decide whether particular individuals could ‘pass for human’,
like the ludicrous courts with which apartheid South Africa decided who
could ‘pass for white’.
And of course the argument extends to any pair of species you care to
name. But for the extinction of the intermediates which connect humans
to the ancestor we share with pigs (it pursued its shrew-like existence 85
million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs), and but for the
extinction of the intermediates that connect the same ancestor to modern
pigs, there would be no clear separation between Homo sapiens and Sus
scrofa. You could breed with X who could breed with Y who could breed
with ( . . . fill in several thousand intermediates . . .) who could produce
fertile offspring by mating with a sow.
Humans are clearly separable from chimpanzees and pigs and fish and
lemons only because the intermediates that would otherwise link them in
interbreeding chains happen to be extinct. This is not to deny that we are
different from other species. We certainly are different and the
differences are important – important enough to justify eating them
(vegetables are our cousins too). But it is a reason for scepticism of any
philosophy or theology (or morality or jurisprudence or politics) that
treats humanness, or personhood, as some kind of essentialist absolute,
which you either definitely have or definitely don’t have. If your theology
tells you that humans should receive special respect and moral privilege
as the only species that possesses a soul, you have to face up to the
awkward question of when, in human evolution, the first ensouled baby
was born. Was it when the first Homo
sapiens baby was born to parents
belonging to whatever species is considered to be our immediate
predecessor (erectus,
ergaster, heidelbergensis, rhodesiensis, no matter,
the argument stands regardless)? There was no such baby! There never
was a ‘first’ Homo sapiens. It is only the discontinuous mind that insists
on drawing a hard and fast line between a species and the ancestral
species that birthed it. Evolutionary change is gradual: there never was a
line, never a line between any species and its evolutionary precursor.
In a few cases the intermediates have failed to go extinct, and the
discontinuous mind really is faced with the problem in stark reality.
Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) and lesser black-backed gulls (Larus
fuscus) breed in mixed colonies in Western Europe and don’t interbreed.
This defines them as good, separate species. But if you travel in a
westerly direction around the northern hemisphere and sample the gulls
as you go, you find that the local gulls vary from the light grey of the
herring gull, getting gradually darker as you progress around the north
pole, until eventually, when you go all the way round to Western Europe
again, they have darkened so far that they ‘become’ lesser black-backed
gulls. What’s more, the neighbouring populations interbreed with each
other all the way around the ring, even though the ends of the ring, the
two species we see in Britain, don’t interbreed. Are they distinct species
or not? Only those tyrannised by the discontinuous mind feel obliged to
answer that question. If it were not for the accidental extinction of
evolutionary intermediates, every species would be linked to every other
by interbreeding chains.
Where else do we see the tyranny of the discontinuous mind? Colin
Powell and Barack Obama are described as black. They do have black
ancestors, but they also have white ancestors, so why don’t we call them
white? The complication in this case is the weird convention that the
descriptor ‘black’ behaves as the cultural equivalent of a genetic
dominant. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, crossed wrinkled and
smooth peas and the offspring were all smooth: smoothness is
‘dominant’. When a white person breeds with a black person the child is
of intermediate colour but is labelled ‘black’: the cultural label is
transmitted down the generations like a dominant gene, and this persists
even to cases where, say, only one out of eight great grandparents was
black and it may not show in skin colour at all. It is the racist
‘contamination metaphor’ of the ‘touch of the tarbrush’. Our language is
ill-equipped to deal with a continuum of intermediates. Just as people
must lie below or above the poverty ‘line’, so we classify people as
‘black’ even if they are in fact intermediate. When an official form invites
us to tick a ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ box I recommend crossing it out and
writing ‘human’.
In US presidential elections every state (except New Mexico) has to end
up labelled either Democrat or Republican, no matter how evenly divided
the voters in that state might be. Each state sends to the Electoral College
a number of delegates which is proportional to the population of the state.
So far so good. But the discontinuous mind insists that all the delegates
from a given state have to vote the same way. This ‘winner take all’
system was shown up in all its fatuousness in the 2000 election when
there was a dead heat in Florida. Al Gore and George Bush received the
same number of votes as each other, the tiny, disputed difference being
well within the margin of error. Florida sends 25 delegates to the
Electoral College. The Supreme Court was asked to decide which
candidate should receive all 25 votes (and therefore the presidency).
Since it was a dead heat, it might have seemed reasonable to allot 13
votes to one candidate and 12 to the other. It would have made no
difference whether Bush or Gore received the 13 votes: either way Gore
would have been president.
I am not saying the Supreme Court should actually have split the Florida
delegates. They had to abide by the rules, no matter how idiotic. I would
say that, given the lamentable constitutional rule that the 25 votes had to
be bound together as a one-party block, natural justice should have led
the court to allocate the 25 votes to the candidate who would have won
the election if the Florida delegates had been divided pro rata, namely
Gore. But that is not the point I am making here. My point here is that the
winner-take-all idea of an electoral college in which each state has an
indivisible block of members, either all Democrat or all Republican no
matter how close the vote, is a shockingly undemocratic manifestation of
the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. Why is it so hard to admit that
there are intermediates, as New Mexico uniquely does? Most states are
not ‘red’ or ‘blue’ but a complex mixture.
Scientists are called upon by governments, by courts of law, and by the
public at large, to give a definite, absolute, yes-or-no answer to important
questions, for example questions of risk. Whether it’s a new medicine, a
new weedkiller, a new power station or a new airliner, the scientific
‘expert’ is peremptorily asked: Is it safe? Answer the question! Yes or
no? Vainly the scientist tries to explain that safety and risk are not
absolutes. Some things are safer than others, and nothing is perfectly safe.
There is a sliding scale of intermediates and probabilities, not hard-and-
fast discontinuities between safe and unsafe. That is another story and I
have run out of space.
But I hope I have said enough to suggest that the summary demand for an
absolute yes-or-no answer, so beloved of journalists, politicians and
finger-wagging, hectoring lawyers, is yet another unreasonable
expression of a kind of tyranny, the tyranny of the discontinuous mind.
Originally
published in New Statesman, the Christmas issue for 2011, of
which I was guest
Editor.