Two-Track Minds

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the Catholic blames the Pope for his excessive progeny. The Protestant congratulates himself on being free to put, instead, a little rubber thing on the end of his John Thomas. That, he declares, is what being a Protestant is all about.

The Pope is right about the little rubber things: they are against Nature. Often, however, going against Nature is what rationality is all about. That, stripped of theology, is a good first approximation to the message of Keith E. Stanovich’s lucid and passionate book, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin.

In the uncompromisingly “gene-centric” view of neo-Darwinian theory advanced in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 The Selfish Gene, we are, like other animals, robotic vehicles of genes, designed for their efficient replication. Human culture in all its splendour is just part of our gene-copying equipment. Its elements are “memes.” (Dawkins’s...