Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, recently wrote an open letter to Prince Charles regarding Charles’ opposition to genetically modified food. The letter says in part,
On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.
The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning–and hence the very possibility of stewardship–is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.
Pretty sound advice, except that in his book Weaving the Rainbow, Dawkins has pretty clear animal rights sympathies and repeats the animal rights canard about speciesism being the last acceptable form of bigotry. Of course the rights view is completely incompatible with the stewardship view of nature, so I’m wondering just where Dawkins comes down on this debate (and after reading Weaving the Rainbow it is clear he doesn’t always invest the sort of time and energy in other issues as he does into evolutionary biology issues).