by the title as much as anything, I started reading Dawkins latest offering, ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’. I liked the title because it seemed to be a direct salvo at FIFA and the IOC, who grandiosely like to call their respective tournaments the very same thing. Having recently suffered through the FIFA World Cup Final in South Africa, where Holland played ninety minutes of what Johan Cruyff described as, ‘anti-football’, I sure as hell knew I was not witnessing the greatest show on Earth. After a brief opening spell, I soon realised that I was reading the wrong Dawkins book. There was nothing in his latest tome that I did not already agree with.

I have long been an advocate of Darwinian science and needed no convincing of its veracity. The intricate and wondrous details of evolution were not my cup of tea at that point in time. So It was about then that I thought I should dig out his much earlier work, the highly celebrated, Selfish Gene to see if it had any light to shed on the human propensity for sport and for winning. I had flicked through the text some years earlier but soon got lost in the technical language and had just as quickly put the thing done. Now, with the Sporting Polemics project foremost in my mind, I had a concrete reason to try again and this time to persevere. And what rewards did that perseverance deliver!

I now have a distinct suspicion that I was not the only one to be seduced by the title only to be defeated by the content. I also have the suspicion that many people have totally misunderstood what Dawkins was about, jumping to the conclusion that Dawkins was offering a scientific explanation for the nasty and selfish behaviour of humans throughout the ages. My suspicions were confirmed when, having completed the first chapter, I bothered to follow up the footnotes at the end of the text. Under the footnote title, I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. Dawkins has this to say to his readers:

Critics have occasionally misunderstood The Selfish Gene to be advocating selfishness as a principle by which we should live our lives! Others, perhaps because they read the book by title only or never made it past the first two pages, have thought I was saying that, whether we like it or not, selfishness and other nasty ways are an inescapable part of our nature. This error is easy to fall into if you think, as many people unaccountably seem to, that genetic determination is for keeps absolute and irreversible. We don’t see red sunsets as irrevocably determining fine weather the next day, and no more should we think of genes as irrevocably determining anything. P267

And most critically Dawkins adds:

There is no reason why the influence of genes cannot be easily reversed by other influences. P268

Further into the footnotes under the all revealing heading, We alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators Dawkins emphatically explains:

it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences. P331

Presumably, by other influences, Dawkins is referring to our environment, both natural and more significantly, man-made. So having refuted the notion that humans are prisoners of their own genetic make-up, and that genes, being forever selfish in that they have one purpose and that is to replicate themselves, thereby making humans intrinsically selfish, Dawkins proceeds to offer a revolutionary vision of humans being the first species to be able to consciously override their genetic inheritance. This revolutionary vision is explored in chapter eleven, which I am ashamed to say, I never even reached on my initial reading of the work.

In this chapter, Dawkins outlines a new form of evolution that is constantly moulding we humans. Not the genetic evolution by natural selection first described by Darwin, which unfolds over millions of years. No, the new force of evolution is that of ideas emerging from within our culture, and these ideas, termed ‘memes’ to rhyme with ‘genes’, can influence humanity within mere decades or less. Dawkins explains this new evolution as follows:

For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new replicator can make copies of itself, new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup in which the first memes arose. P193

And, in a lovely, if rare, moment of scientific humility, Dawkins adds:

We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possibly kinds of evolution. P194

If I have understood Dawkins correctly, the implications of his work have powerful and immediate implications for how we conduct ourselves both as individuals and as societies. Now, more than ever, we need not succumb to the dog-eat dog world of our ancestral forefathers not to mention our present day avaricious financiers. The idea, or meme as Dawkins might term it, that cooperation might be a more efficient way for humans to survive has stubbornly been around for some time. Dawkins puts it this way:

Nature often plays the role of ‘banker’, and individuals can therefore benefit from one another’s success. They do not have to do down rivals in order to benefit themselves. Without departing from the fundamental laws of the selfish gene, we can see how cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish even in a selfish world. We can see how nice guys may finish first. P224

The implications for society generally are obvious, but the implications of cooperation and mutual assistance within the highly competitive world of professional sport are a little more perplexing. Is winning the race, the game, the tournament, ever compatible with cooperation and mutual assistance? Probably not in a world where money still equates with power and status. But in a future world where humans have transcended scarcity, and resources are distributed for need rather than expropriated for greed, the very nature of sport may have transcended its primal urges.