| Mary Midgley |
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BIOGRAPHY Midgley was born in London to Lesley and Canon Tom Scrutton, the chaplain at Kings College, Cambridge . She was educated at Downe House School (originally based in the former home of Charles Darwin ) and Somerville College, Oxford where she read Classics . She married Dr Geoffrey Midgley in 1950 (who died in 1997 ) and they have three sons. She taught for many years at the University Of Newcastle Upon Tyne and still lives in the city. She wrote her first book, ''Beast and Man'', at the age of 56. "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then". She also believes that she is "lucky" to have missed out in having to undertake a PhD . She argues that one of the main flaws in doctoral training is that, while it "shows you how to deal with difficult arguments", it does not "help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose." 2 THOUGHT AND WRITINGS Midgley sees philosophy as Plumbing , that is, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. "Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers ... noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with." 3 She is not a Midgley's first book, ''Beast and Man'' (published in 1978 ), was an examination of human nature and a reaction against both the perceived reductionism of Sociobiology , and the Relativism and Behaviorism she saw as prevalent in much of social science. Midgley argued that humans were more similar to animals than many social scientists then acknowledged, while animals were in many ways more sophisticated than humans. Midgley also criticised the belief that humans could be understood in terms of their genetic make-up, as she interpreted Dawkins' '' The Selfish Gene '' (published in 1976 ) to suggest. Instead, Midgley argued that humans (and their relationship to animals) could be better understood by using the Qualitative methods of Ethology and Comparative Psychology . Writing in the 2002 Introduction to the reprint of ''Evolution as a Religion'' (first published in 1985 ), Midgley reports that she wrote both this book and the later ''Science as Salvation'' ( 1992 ) to counter the "quasi-scientific speculation" of "certain remarkable Prophetic and Metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books.. often in their last chapters." The first book dealt with the theories of evolutionary biologists (including Dawkins') while the second book dealt with Physicists and Artificial Intelligence researchers. Midgley writes that she still believes that these theories "have nothing to do with any reputable theory of evolution" and will not solve the real Social and Moral problems the world is facing, either through Genetic Engineering or using machines. She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties." Midgley and Dawkins In volume 53 ( in general. For example, for Rhetorical purposes, Midgley interpreted the expression "selfish gene" to literally mean that Gene s have a Psychological dimension. Mackie and Dawkins [http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=5 subsequently responded to Midgley in volume 56 ( 1981 ). Both authors criticised her rudeness and argued that Midgley had comprehensively misunderstood (and misrepresented) their arguments. In volume 58 ( 1983 ), Midgley responded to these criticisms [http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=15], saying : "Apology is due, not only for the delay but for the impatient tone of my article. One should not lose one’s temper, and doing so always makes for confused argument. My basic objections remain. But I certainly ought to have expressed them more clearly and temperately". The bad feeling between Dawkins and Midgely caused by this affair apparently remains in 2005 {Link without Title} , she argued: However, this particular line of argument confuses the randomness of Mutation for non-random selection, and caricatures neo-Darwinism as centring solely on natural selection when it openly includes processes such as Genetic Drift and Neutral Evolution . Ironically, in his 1986 book, '' The Blind Watchmaker '', Dawkins presented a similar caricature to illustrate what neo-Darwinism is not. PUBLICATIONS Books:
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TRIVIA Mary Midgley appeared on BBC Radio 4 's musical interview programme, Desert Island Discs on 20 November 2005 . Her selections for the programme were :
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