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There's no doubt about it: getting inspiration from different fields of study can be immensely fruitful. A nonbusiness discipline — be it history or anthropology — can provide a useful framework for thinking about old problems in new ways. Indeed, cross-fertilization between fields has been going on a long while. People who study management, for instance, freely borrow from all fields of science to theorize about organizational behavior and business strategy. Evolutionary psychology and biology are especially popular sources of inspiration. But should they be?
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has spent much of his career explaining science to the public. More than 20 years ago, his book The Selfish Gene shattered the popular belief that evolution necessarily favors altruism and self-sacrifice. Returning to the first principles of Darwinism, Dawkins asked what was being selected in evolution. His answer? Not the species, but the most basic element of information — our selfish genes. Today, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, England, and he has written numerous books on evolutionary biology. In this conversation with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, held in his Oxford home, Dawkins talks about the role of science in our lives, and he identifies some of the more glaring public misperceptions of scientific theories. In particular, he disentangles the current notion that certain behaviors are in some way preprogrammed into people by what happened in our very distant past. He also explodes some contemporary myths about the Human Genome Project. A staunch defender of science as a haven of rational thought, Dawkins counsels businesspeople to recognize the limitations — as well as the beauty — of science.
Nowadays, managers like to talk of people's behavior as being "hardwired." Is it right to think of loyalty, for example, as an evolutionary characteristic?
It's not hard to see why people like to think that way. It's easy to imagine the benefits of loyalty half a million years ago when we were hunting and gathering in bands and dependent upon one another for survival. You would have survived better if you were loyal to other members of your band. But people shouldn't be too simplistic. Science is more complicated than that.
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| Don't go boldly to the chairman of the board and tell him he's the alpha male. | |
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| — Richard Dawkins |
Take the theory of selfish genes. It can be used to predict almost anything, including the kinds of cooperative behavior that we ascribe to loyalty. Kinship is one reason for cooperating. Reciprocation is another. People enter into cartels and cooperative arrangements because they fare better in groups than as individuals. That's what the genes themselves do. The reason we are coherent individuals is that in past ages, our genes have cooperated well with other genes to build our bodies. Genes cooperate for selfish reasons. So what is it that is supposed to be hardwired?
What about the popular idea that certain males are born to dominate and lead — the so-called alpha male concept? It has been used to explain charismatic leadership.
You have to recognize that hardly any of the research on alpha males is relevant to humans. We mustn't pick up evolutionary ideas in a simple way, which is very tempting, and which you might be urged to do by some overenthusiastic biologists. Don't go boldly to the chairman of the board and tell him he's the alpha male. While it is certainly reasonable to suppose that managers often act out of complex psychological dispositions that are rooted in humanity's distant past, you shouldn't naively tell the chairman he is increasing his chances of genetic success by doing what he does. He almost certainly is not.
Is it wrong, then, to ask scientists whether some people are naturally suited or unsuited for leadership?
You can ask, of course, but you will have to separate science from opinion. I can think of innumerable reasons that explain why few women are leaders at the top of their fields. Maybe they are hardwired to be followers — or maybe their lack of success has to do with the fact that in our culture, women have fewer advantages than men. Or maybe it is because so many women break off their careers to have children. Or because some women are the victims of prejudice. Whatever the facts, I don't feel qualified purely as a biologist to say why there are fewer female leaders. I don't think anyone can. I may have a personal opinion, but it would be very dangerous for laypeople to think that a scientist's personal opinion on such matters counts for anything. The job of a scientist, you see, is not to say, "I'm a scientist and I believe such and such," but rather to say, "I'm a scientist, and let me explain what you would need to do in order to decide for yourselves." And, then, there are limits as to how far we can go. For example, if our thesis about leadership was that hormones were all-important in deciding whether women could or couldn't lead, then to test it we would strictly have to do a Nazi-type experiment and inject females with testosterone to see whether that made them more likely to be leaders. Of course, that's not an experiment anybody would wish to do.
So science, then — contrary to the popular view — is ambiguous when it comes to interpreting behavior. Are you saying that scientific theories can never be applied to business?
What I'm arguing is that theories like evolution are about the big picture. Compared with the period over which life has been evolving, the whole sweep of human history is almost unimaginably small. Hold out your arm. Imagine that life begins at your shoulder and extends to the tip of your finger. Until about halfway down your forearm, there's nothing but bacteria. Only when you get to the palm of your hand do you start to find multicellular life. The dinosaurs don't even appear until about halfway along your finger, and humans arrive at your fingernail. All of recorded history — from the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans right down to the present — is just dust in the scraping of a fingernail. Science that operates on that sort of timescale can't easily be adapted to day-to-day life.
Let's look at another issue in which science takes center stage. The Human Genome Project has whipped up enormous controversy. Many people claim that it provides the key to genetic manipulation. Others claim that it will lead to miracle cures. What's your perspective?
In itself, the Human Genome Project is not about altering anything — it's about discovering. Both the space program of the 1960s and the Human Genome Project are terrific examples of what thousands of highly skilled, highly talented people can do when they cooperate to solve a problem. The joint effort is great in the same way that building the pyramids or medieval cathedrals was great.
But there is a huge gap between producing a map of the human genome and doing anything with it. The genome project is like taking the hard disk of a computer and scanning every square micrometer of it, writing down the code — 1,1,0,1 — for the entire disk. The project's only output is the sequence of the base pairs — adenine-guanine or cytosine-guanine — that determine the coded genetic information in DNA. Sequences of A-T, C-G, C-G run for mile after mile, and most of this "tape" is meaningless except for a few crucial bits that tell us where to start and stop reading. But the tape doesn't even begin to tell us what the genes are doing, any more than all those ones and zeros tell us what the data on your hard disk is saying.
There are whole industries touting the economic possibilities of mapping the human genome. Are we actually in the process of discovering genetic cures for diseases like cancer?
You have to understand that when somebody says that they've discovered a gene for cancer, what they really mean is that they've identified a particular region of the A-T, G-C, A-T sequence that produces a certain outcome. Of course, there are genes whose effects are pretty hard to escape — the gene for hemophilia, for example — so, in a way, we can speak of the determinism of genes. But a gene is not the sole determinant of a particular effect. It's safe to say, for example, that there is no single gene that determines homosexuality. Indeed, you are just as likely to change a gene's effect by altering the environment — something we've always been able to do — as by changing the gene.
I like to use the analogy of a big sheet hanging from the ceiling by a thousand rubber bands. The shape of the sheet symbolizes the developing body. The rubber bands don't just hang vertically — they crisscross in a great tangle. Now imagine that the tensions in the rubber bands symbolize the genes, so you can represent a mutation by cutting one band. If you do cut a rubber band, the balance of tensions will shift, and this change will affect the shape of the whole sheet. The message is that genes don't have effects in isolation. And that's why I would urge a word of caution toward all those newspaper headlines that say there has been a new discovery for, say, curing schizophrenia. So many people think that if you find a gene for such and such, a cure is imminent. But genes do not have a one-to-one correspondence with effects.
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