Part 3. 'The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey'[edit]
This episode looks into the
selfish gene theory invented by
William Hamilton, which holds that humans are machines controlled by genes. Curtis also covers the source of ethnic conflict that was created by
Belgian colonialism's artificial creation of a racial divide and the ensuing
slaughter that occurred in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is a source of
raw material for computers and cell phones.
In the 1930s,
Armand Denis made films that told the world about Africa. However, his documentary gave fanciful stories about Rwanda's
Tutsis being a noble ruling elite originally from Egypt, whereas the
Hutus were a peasant race. In reality, they were racially the same, but the Belgian rulers had ruthlessly exploited the myth to divide the Rwandan people. But when it came to independence, liberal Belgians felt guilty, and decided the Hutus should overthrow the Tutsi rule. This led to
a bloodbath, as the Tutsis were then seen as aliens and were slaughtered.
In 1960,
Congo had become independent from Belgium, but governance promptly collapsed, and towns became battle grounds as
soldiers fought for control of the mines. America and the Belgians organised a coup, and the elected leader,
Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and executed, causing chaos. However, the Western mining operations were initially largely unaffected.
Mobutu Sese Seko was installed as president, killed his opponents and stopped a liberal democracy from forming. Mobutu changed the Congo's name to
Zaire, looting millions of dollars and letting mines and industries collapse.
In Congo, with a civil war ongoing,
Dian Fossey, who was researching gorillas, was captured. She escaped and created a new camp high up on a mountain in Rwanda, where she continued to study gorillas. She tried to completely protect the gorillas, which were very susceptible to human diseases and were hated because they terrorised the local people. Fossey sabotaged the local people's traps and tried to terrorise them by claiming to cast spells on them. Ultimately, Fossey's favourite gorilla, Digit, was killed by the vengeful locals. Curtis draws a parallel between Fossey and the colonialists who oppressed the Congolese, describing her as one of many westerners who brutalised and terrorised African peoples for their own high-minded ideals.
John von Neumann in the 1940s
Bill Hamilton was a solitary man who saw everything through the lens of
Darwin's theory of evolution. When he wanted to know why some ants and humans
give up their life for others. In 1963, he realised that most of the behaviours of humans were due to genes, and he began looking at humans from the genes' point of view. From this perspective, humans were machines that were only important for carrying genes, and it made sense for a gene to sacrifice a human if it meant that another copy of the gene would survive. In 1967, American chemist
George R. Price went to London after reading Hamilton's little-known papers and discovering that his equations for the behaviours of genes were equivalent to computers equations. He was able to show that these equations explained murder, warfare, suicide, goodness and spite, since these actions could help the genes.
John von Neumann had invented self-reproducing machines, but Price was able to show that the self-reproducing machines were already in existence — humans were such machines.
These revelations had a enormous effect on Price. Previously a staunch
rationalist, Price began to believe that these equations had been given to him by God, even though some argue that they are evidence against the existence of God. In 1973, after converting to extreme Christianity as a last chance to disprove the selfish gene theories' gloomy conclusions, Price decided to start helping poor and homeless people, giving away all his possessions in acts of
random kindness. These efforts utterly failed, and he came to believe that he was being followed by the
hound of heaven. He finally revealed, in his suicide note, that these acts of altruism brought more harm than good to the lives of homeless people.
Richard Dawkins later took Hamilton and Price's equations and popularised them, explaining that humans are simply machines created by the selfish genes. Curtis likens this to ""reinventing the
immortal soul," but as computer code in the form of the genes.
President Mobutu
In 1994, the ruling Hutu government set out to
eradicate the Tutsi minority. This was explained as incomprehensible ancient rivalry by the Western press. In reality it was due to the Belgian myth created during the colonial rule. Western agencies got involved, and the Tutsi fought back, creating chaos.
Many flooded across the border into Zaire, and the Tutsi invaded the refugee camps to get revenge. Mobutu fell from power. Troops arrived from many countries, allegedly to help, but in reality to gain access to the country's natural resources, used to produce consumer goods for the West. Altogether, 4.5 million people were killed.
By this point Hamilton was well-honoured. However, by now he supported
eugenics and believed that the help provided to the ill and disabled by modern medicine was counter to the logic of genes. He heard a story that HIV had been created from an accident with a polio vaccine, which it was thought could have been contaminated with a chimp virus. This supported his idea that modern medicine could have negative consequences. Hamilton travelled to
Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while the
Second Congo War was raging. He went there to collect Chimpanzee faeces to test his
theory that HIV was due to a medical mistake. While there he caught
malaria, for which he took
aspirin, which lodged in his gut, causing a haemorrhage which killed him. His hypothesis about the creation of AIDS would ultimately be entirely debunked.
Curtis ends the episode by saying that Hamilton's ideas that humans are computers controlled by the genes have become accepted wisdom. But he asks whether we have accepted a fatalistic philosophy that humans are helpless computers to explain and excuse the fact that, as in the Congo, we are effectively unable to improve and change the world.
