For Watts, natural selection is no benevolent “invisible hand,” automatically producing “optimal” outcomes - which is how the current fashion for drawing parallels between Darwinian evolution and Adam Smith’s vision of “perfect competition” would have it. He knows that we live in a “war universe” (as Burroughs would puts it) - all the more so in that this condition is the result, not of some active, Manichean malice (as it seems to be, for instance, for Cormac McCarthy), but simply of the blind forces of natural selection.
Now, Watts is sociobiological in this latter, audacious and scary, sense. On the other hand, I admire the audacity of Richard Dawkins, when he starts to sound a lot like William Burroughs, suggesting that we are lumbering robots struggling to escape the control of having been programmed by ruthlessly “selfish genes,” and that our most cherished ideas are viral infections that have taken over our bodies and minds (“memes”). Such blatant projections of contemporary social prejudice and unequal conditions into “nature” are beneath contempt, not even worthy of the energy it would take to refute them. (Both these assertions come up, for instance, in Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, which I recently had my students read). To explain about sociobiology: I despise it when those “evolutionary psychology”‘ types tell us that women are “hardwired” to be attracted to older, wealthier men or that “criminality” (a word or concept left carefully undefined) is significantly genetic, since children of “criminal” parents adopted into “non-criminal” families are (supposedly) much more likely to become “criminals” themselves than children of “non-criminal” parents adopted into “criminal” families. But he has enough conceptual audacity that he makes it work, chillingly and powerfully, in Blindsight.
Which is often something that drives me up a wall. Watts is a hardcore sociobiologist, in outlook. [The usual warning applies: this review unavoidably contains SPOILERS). It’s a space opera, and a First Contact novel, and a vampire novel - and also a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness. Peter Watts’ new book Blindsight is the best SF novel I have read in quite some time.
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