Abstract
I was initially drawn to this book by its intriguing title, Why Mankind Has Needed Religion Whereas Bees Have Not. Sir Peter Lachmann FRS is one of the greatest British immunologists, but this short study is not at all a technical book. It is a ‘big picture’ book, written late in the life of a person of immense technical expertise, reflecting on the wider implications of his science. There is a foreword by Rowan Williams.
A beekeeper since 1976, he points to certain peculiarities of bees, in particular the ‘re-queening phenomenon’. Bees like humans live in communities in which cooperation is essential for survival. Characteristics like level of aggressiveness, laziness or untidiness vary from one bee colony to another. But a beekeeper may radically change the habits of a colony simply by introducing a newly mated queen from a better-behaved colony. The bees that emerge from the eggs laid by the new queen entirely follow her genetic makeup and learn nothing from the bees among whom they grow up. Re-queening shows that variations in bee behaviour is genetically determined even if we do not know which genes are involved. Hence, Lachmann concludes, bees have no need for the various community building prescriptions supplied for humans by the different religions.
This simple but far reaching illustration about genetics and behaviour – occurring late in the book – follows a concise account of Darwinian evolution (the origin of separate species described by natural historians and palaeontologists); molecular evolution (the mechanism by which evolutionary change is actually brought about); and the entirely different area sometimes called ‘cultural evolution’. It is here that humans (for example) are starkly different from honeybees among which difference in behaviour between different hives is entirely genetic.
Lachmann criticises Richard Dawkins’ use of the term ‘meme’ as the homologue of the gene and his proposal that cultural evolution takes place at that level. It is preferable to understand cultural evolution occurs at the group level with the development of language and information exchange, and it needs a mechanism which maintains the stability of a behavioural variant over a long period of time. This is where Lachmann argues that the ‘prescriptions’ of the various religions have helped build ‘moral communities’.
This in turn leads to a high level account of religion, virtue, ‘natural law’ and the evolution of ethics. Lachmann questions the existence of eternal unnegotiated ‘rights’ but is equally critical of the catastrophic record of the secular religions which have pandered to the worst aspects of human nature (racism, xenophobia and genocide). For the wellbeing of human development he contrasts fideism and scepticism and shows how this ancient clash of perspectives far from being restricted to religion now includes such matters as genetically modified foods, vaccination, stem cell research and reproductive technologies. Scepticism in the sense of critical questioning is crucial for human survival at a time when our moral communities are no longer local and cooperation must take place at a global level.
This is a gentle, wry and lucid book. It is provocative, never polemical. It is also timely. Had certain mathematical models been properly refereed (scepticism), the world might not be on the brink of economic disaster.