Midgley vs Dawkins, Nietzsche, Hobbes, Mackie, Rand, Singer...
An article in Philosophy Now drew my attention to Gene-juggling by Mary Midgley. Here's the core of her rebuttal of The Selfish Gene:
Glorious!
It's not just Dawkins she eviscerates; Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Mackie are countered with Socrates, Christ, Darwin and Jane Goodall, retrieving justice from mere self-interested egoism. But we might adopt her strategy to displaying the triviality of Peter Singer or Ayn Rand.
Have a read - It will give you a laugh, and you will be better for it.
Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous,
elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.
Glorious!
It's not just Dawkins she eviscerates; Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Mackie are countered with Socrates, Christ, Darwin and Jane Goodall, retrieving justice from mere self-interested egoism. But we might adopt her strategy to displaying the triviality of Peter Singer or Ayn Rand.
Have a read - It will give you a laugh, and you will be better for it.
Comments (379)
Laughed? I shat.
"Nat Dyer looks at the humanity of a philosopher who tried to make philosophy more human"
Nor is philosophy more or less human.
She looks terribly interesting, so thanks.
Midgley–Dawkins debate
In volume 53 (1978) of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, J. L. Mackie published an article entitled The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution, praising Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy.[34] Midgley responded in volume 54 (1979) with "Gene-Juggling," arguing that The Selfish Gene was about psychological egoism, rather than evolution.[35] The paper criticised Dawkins' concepts, but was judged by its targets to be intemperate and personal in tone, and as having misunderstood Dawkins' ideas.
Hang on I go change it to suit myself...
edit: There, fixed.
Wow I didn't know I love Mary Midgley.
DNA is information. It is not information that we can read, although we are making some strides along that path, it is information that our cellular consciousness can read. Epigenetics reads this information to construct a person. The information in these genes creates the person, and so the person is an expression of the information that created them.
A person is always in a process of self organization. To self organize you need to consider the self in relation to all other factors surrounding you. This way self interest is present in all instances of consciousness. It is not a moral consideration, but one of pure logic, that Mary seems to miss.
Nuh. I'm not going there with you.
But, Quoting Pop
From the PN article:
She may not be as distant as it might seem.
In the process of self organization we have to make decisions, and ultimately the decisions we make have either painful or pleasurable consequences, and wherever possible we tend to choose the decisions that have pleasurable consequences rather then the most responsible / altruistic ones.
No, we don't. This description of human behaviour is so overly simplistic as to be useless.
And yet sometimes the most successful behavior from a Darwinian stand point is cooperative and altruistic.
I mean, this is just stupid. I trust there is more to what she says, but you are not selling it well.
So she doesn't understand metaphor. Is that good?
Quoting SophistiCat
So that's wrong.
Finish the first paragraph, where she talks about his use of Metaphor, and get back to us.
Nah, Dawkins is trash, set scientific literacy back by an order of decades. Fuck that guy. An atheist made for an American audience whose contact with theology has only ever been through the insanity of American evangelism.
Sure, not a theologian, not a philosopher.
This feels like Lost all over again: all evidence suggests it's crap, but I'm being assured that if I keep going it gets better.
Anyway, read it. So she's doesn't understand metaphor even when it's explained to her.
What's Lost?
Evolutionary biologists agree Dawkins is junk science.
What did she say about Nietzsche? Didnt see that.
Such as? I haven't read it in years, but don't recall it being presented as anything other than a shorthand.
Quoting Banno
I envy you. Lost was a TV series about 20 years ago that was incredibly dumb with intellectual pretensions.
Quoting frank
Reference?
Find a lecture by PZ Myers. Dawkins is an adaptationist. That's basically Nazi science.
The notion of Memes had some potential. For instance it'd be interesting to chart the evolution of language games; an analytic variation on the archaeology of knowledge...
And I've some sympathy for the aesthetics of Unweaving the Rainbow.
Haha! Straight to dubious Nazi accusations, like it!
That's not an answer to the question as I'm sure you're aware. Can you support your original assertion or not? Just curious, it doesn't matter much.
Madgley makes basically the same point, which is odd. The Selfish Gene is a popular science book aimed at bringing scientific knowledge to the lay masses. It seems odd that Madgley's first criticism of the book is that it didn't publish and new findings, as if she's not aware of the difference between pop sci and a journal.
It's clear her target is the supposed science being popularised as well as the populariser himself. and the unexamined assumption is that selfishness requires no explanation because it is [s]metaphorically[/s] literally built into the genes.
She does seem to have it in for genetics generally.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't think that's the unexamined assumption she's talking about. Dawkins was not a social Darwinist and The Selfish Gene doesn't push a social Darwinist agenda, although she seems to mistake him for one. The entire article seems like a substitution fallacy, based presumably on reading very little of the book she was criticising. Dawkins himself has frequently marvelled that we are as altruistic as we are.
The "selfishness" of the gene isn't built into the gene, but into also the environment, the selection laws that stem from them, and the process of hereditary reproduction. Midget claimed to be a Darwinist, so I don't think she can rationally take issue with heredity or reproduction. She does seem to have it in for gene theory though.
Are you just going to continue to pretend you said something else? I'll remind you of your words and my question:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is the same equivocation I was complaining of in Dawkins. If its built into something, it cannot be a metaphor. the scare quotes prevent me from taking it seriously, but the continuation of the sentence does exactly that. No. It isn't built in. Selfishness cannot be built into anything that does not have a sense of self. On the contrary it is projected onto the inanimate in a gross anthropomorphism.
The thing that the metaphor is a metaphor for is what is built in. It sounds like you're saying that unless the metaphor is continuously restated, it somehow ceases to be a metaphor.
Let us suppose, if you like, that genes behave in some ways as if they were selfish. What is the explanation for this curious fact? Because we agree, certainly, that genes have no self, and no interest in survival or anything else, because they have no brain, no awareness. So this would be something that stood in need of an explanation just as much as if it turned out that genes behaved as if they were altruistic. (Which of course they do all the time -cooperating in vast numbers to produce complex organisms.) But on the contrary, the selfishness of things without selves is taken as - what shall we say? - part of the natural order, and in need of no explanation but the explanation of everything else.
You're demonstrating cluelessnes. Stop being so belligerent and learn something.
But it is explained, quite thoroughly, in genetic theory. Of course, genetic theory has assumptions, all theories have. They're far from "unexamined" though.
Quoting frank
I've specifically asked you to teach me about your particular claim. You seem very intent on avoiding that. Is there a magic combination of words? Pretty please with a cherry on top? No? Well, if you can't...
" The first and slightly more respectable idea is the one which seems chiefly to attract Mr Mackie, because it fits in with traditional egoism. Mackie approvingly cites Dawkins's exposition of it in terms of three imaginary genetic strains in a supposed bird population. They are: Suckers, who help everybody indiscriminately, Cheats, who accept help from everybody and never return it, and Grudgers, who refuse help only to those who have previouslyrefused it to them. These 'strategies' are supposed each to be controlled by a single gene, and the help in question is assumed to be essential for survival.
In this absurdly abstract and genetically quite impossible situation, Dawkins concludes that Cheats and Grudgers would exterminate Suckers, and Grudgers might well do best of all. Mackie comments with satisfaction that 'a grudger is rather like you and me' (p. 410), and reproves Socrates and Christ for supporting Suckers in telling us to return good for evil. 'As Dawkins points out', he goes on, 'the presence of Suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy . . . This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche's view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type' (p. 464)... "
It's worth going into this a bit more. Midgley is a Darwinist, so accepts that characteristics which benefit the individual are more likely to be inherited by the next generation. If she does not accept at least this degree of "selfishness", she's confused about what she believes. In genetic theory, biological characteristics are coded for by genes, therefore sequences of genes that yield characteristics beneficial for survival will be passed on to the next generation, thus perpetuating the genes. This is the "selfishness" of genes: a metaphor for how survival characteristics of individuals act as media for the longevity of the genes that encode them.
There is nothing truly social about this metaphorical "selfishness", and Midgely's beef that Dawkins presents human altruism as arising from elementary social selfishness is dim. The fact that she knows this and does it anyway all the more so. The more I read, the more she strikes me as being quite happy to knowingly misrepresent her subject for the sake of tubthumping.
I did. The Myers video goes into detail about why adaptationism is bad science. Did you want a citation that proves Dawkins is an adaptationist?
Uh.
I even reposted the question, you cannot be this thick. Was the question: "Can I have a reference for the claim that Myers is an anti-adaptationist?"Again, your claim was about the evolutionary biologist consensus. Do you have a reference for this or did you just make it up? One person does not constitute a consensus.
By the way, Myers is also an adaptationist. You helpfully posted a video at the start of which he says adaptation is definitely real. :up: :100: :cheer:
You don't appear to understand what an adaptationist is.
:hearts:
Oops. Skimmed over that. :up:
Why, finally, does all this matter? There are many aspects of it which I cannot go into now, and I concentrate on the moral consequences which Dawkins and Mackie draw. Egoism, when it is not just vacuous, is a moral doctrine. It has, as Mackie sees, always a practical point to urge. Aristotle used it to tell us to attend to our own personal and intellectual development. Hobbes used it to urge citizens to treat their government as accountable to them generally, and particularly to make them resist religious wars.
Nietzsche, non-political and often surprisingly close to Aristotle, did on his egoist days preach self-sufficiency and self-fulfilment as a counterblast to the self-forgetful and self-despising elements in Christianity. But he is only a part-time egoist. Any attempts to use him as a signpost here would, as usual, be frustrated by his equal readiness to denounce bourgeois caution and exalt suicidal courage, or 'love of the remotest'. He hated prudent bargaining. His egoism is confused, too, by contributions from his personal terror of love and human contact. Still, against the wilder excesses of Christianity he certainly had a point, and he was able to make it without any reference to genes.
Is there any way in which reference to genes could become relevant to disputes about it? Dawkins makes the connection as follows:
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in our genes is ruthless selfishness. . . Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (pp. 2-3, my italics).
He contends, that is, that the appearance of 'a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals' including ourselves, is only a deceptive phantom. The underlying reality, as he often says, is not any other individual motivation either, but the selfishness of the genes. Yet he just as often talks as if this established that the individual motivation were different from what it appears to be—as here, 'we are born selfish'. .... And he has arrived at his notion of gene-motivation by dramatizing the notion of competition. Even as drama, this fancy is gratuitous. All that can be known about our genes from the fact that they have survived is that they are strong. If people insist on personification, the right parallel would no doubt be with a situation in which a
number of travellers had, independently, crossed a terrible desert. It might happen that in doing so they had unknowingly often removed resources which would have saved the lives of others—but this could tell us nothing about their characters unless they had known that they were doing so, and scraps of nuclear tissue are incapable of knowledge. We could be sure only that such travellers were strong, and to make a parallel here we must examine the concept of gene 'strength'.
This strength is not an abstract quality, but is relative to the strains imposed at the time. The fact that people have survived so far shows only that they have had the genetic equipment to meet the challenges they have so far encountered. Human pugnacity had its place in this equipment. But since people are now moving
into a phase of existence when that pugnacity itself becomes one of the main dangers to be faced, new selective pressures are beginning to operate. In this situation telling people that they are essentially Chicago gangsters is not just false and confused, but monstrously irresponsible. It can only mean that their feeble efforts to behave more decently are futile, that their conduct will amount to the same whatever they do, that their own and other people's apparently more decent feelings are false and hypocritical.....
Dawkins, however, claims innocence of all this. He says he is merely issuing a warning that we had better resist our genes and 'upset their designs': Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature . . . Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs .. . (p. 3).
He does not explain who the 'we' are that have somehow so far escaped being pre-formed by these all-powerful forces as to be able to turn against them. He does not even raise the question how we are supposed to conceive the idea of 'building a society in which individuals co-operate generously, and unselfishly towards a common good', if there were no kindly and generous feelings in our emotional make-up.
It's the view that many characteristics are evolved to fit the organism's environment.
You gonna cite that source or stop bullshitting any time soon?
"Gene-juggling" doesn't look all that good to me -- but I've not finished reading it. It's early, for all involved. For instance when a couple pages in I got to the business of Suckers, Cheats and Grudgers, I immediately thought of Axelrod, but his book hadn't been published yet and I'm not sure how widely the work was known. (My copy of The Evolution of Cooperation has a foreword by Dawkins.) I don't know if Jane Goodall had yet told the world about the Gombe Chimpanzee War when this article was written. Anyway, I think it's entirely possible she's getting Dawkins wrong, but I don't particularly care.
What does interest me is her approach. As I understand it, from sniffing around her work on Google Books a bit yesterday, she's interested in what lies behind research programs in the sciences, motivating and guiding them, and she thinks that stuff is fair game for philosophy. Done well (Nietzsche maybe, Wittgenstein, Dewey I think, Sellars) that can lead to interesting insights about the overall shape of disputes in philosophy, the argument behind the argument, as it were. Done poorly, well, you get deconstruction, and I'm a little uncertain here because much of her work seems to focus on the little philosophical asides and obiter dicta of scientists. If she's going to build her case on that sort of thing alone, it's just Derrida all over again; if she uses those remarks as clues to investigate the hidden structure of ideas, you could get something as interesting as Sellars. I don't know yet.
No, its the view that all characteristics of a population must be products of adaptation.
For instance, an adaptationist once created a hat that mimicked the appearance of the brow ridges on our hominin cousins. He was trying to understand what survival advantage the ridges might imbue.
Now that you've watched the Myers video, you can explain why that's bad science.
Dawkins is an adaptationist. Adaptationism is debunked. Dawkins is debunked. I dont want to explode your logic centers, but...
It's extraordinary that the argument has gained any currency. The metaphorical selfishness of genes is used to explain, and prove - against all experience - the universality of human selfishness, from which the metaphor is taken. An argument form worthy of a creationist.
Assuming that it must is the bad science part.
No, it isn't, that's pan-adaptationism. Dawkins is not a pan-adaptationist. Like Myers, Dawkins also believes that genetic drift is a factor in evolution. He just knows that adaptation is the more important, as per evolutionary biology consensus, while Myers appears to be a joyfully paranoid crackpot who knows very well he is far outside the mainstream in believing that genetic drift gave birds wings.
Quoting frank
Well, you sort of have. My mind is blown that you think one person outside the mainstream of evolutionary biology somehow represents the entire consensus. My mind is similarly blown that, no matter how often you're called out on that dishonesty, you gaily plough on with it as if it were effective.
Biologists do believe adaptation is the most important factor in bacterial evolution, but not for humans. What characteristic of a population tells you whether adaptation is most significant?
I think you're confusing biologists and creationists. You're a religious man, I take it.
Quoting frank
Thank you for, after being asked about six times, finally citing something vaguely related to your original assertion. It's a shame that the study in question says nothing about Dawkins' scientific publications (what you call "junk science"). It's a bigger shame that the study was by the Templeton foundation, which gives us a lot of information about the people who agreed to be a part of it (few scientists would agree to help the Templeton foundation, though Dawkins himself gave an anti-creationist talk there).
Nope. Biologists. Humans dont have a large enough population to exhibit adaptation as the primary force of evolution.
So you answered yourself: if Dawkins believes adaptation is the most important factor in human evolution, He's out of step with science.
I'm a flat out nihilist, btw. I have no religion.
Then you're outright lying about the biologist consensus on human evolution, since that consensus is that humanity evolved largely through natural selection. Seems par for the course for you.
EDIT: Just to be not Frank, Pew Research's 2009 poll showed that 87% scientists believed that humans evolved naturally.
Quoting frank
And yet you quote Templeton Foundation studies and spout creationist nonsense. I think you're confused.
Not lying. An evolutionary biologist told me that. I didnt glean it from the internet.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Of course. ?
So back to how Dawkins isnt in step with science.
Adaptation is not the dominant force in human (natural :lol: ) evolution according to scientists, but you said Dawkins believes it is.
Do you stand by that?
Or of a pessimistic, egoist reader of Darwin, such as Ernst Haeckel, who tweaked Darwinism to "evolutionary racism". Not saying that Dawkins is racist but he shares with Haeckel a very aggressive understanding of natural selection. One in which only the ruthless survive.
Politically, this view supports rightist economic policies, generally speaking. E.g. Pareto.
But the data is more complex. Social species abound, including among mammals like us. All mammal societies involve both competition and collaboration. To reduce evolution to competition is simplistic, and to argue that all instances of altruism are in fact forms of selfishness is jaundiced.
It's like La Rochefoucauld arguing that all altruism is a way to pump up and conserve self-esteem (which he called self-love, amour propre). You could just as well say it more positively: we try to avoid evil and do some good because we want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror... because we judge ourselves, rightly so, and we don't like the feeling of remorse. Feeling good about yourself after having helped someone is not a bad feeling per se (with moderation). The "selfishness" of it is in the eye of the beholder.
:100:
Are you talking about change within our species, rather than its emergence?
The bad science part is to assume that it's simple. For instance, there is probably some genetic basis for character traits, but there's no one-to-one relationship between genes and character traits. "The genes of love" or "the genes of selfishness" are gross simplifications of far more complex realities.
Some day I expect a biologist will find the gene for attributing complex social behaviors to simple genetic causes. ;-)
Yes.
It's more the assumption that elements of human society must necessarily have explanations in the context of adaptation.
Those elements may actually exist because 'shit happens.'
That's it? Well, two evolutionary biologists told me the opposite. So much for that.
Quoting frank
Yes it is. Just repeating it doesn't make it true. Except for some creationists, evolutionary theory does not maintain a separate subtheory for humans. From Darwin to Steve Jones, the orthodoxy of evolutionary theory has been that natural selection is the dominant force of evolution, for humans in particular and life generally. Myers thinks it's genetic drift. That's one guy, not a consensus.
My understanding as well. It's been my impression that there is a long-running debate about what exactly is selected in natural selection, a healthy debate, and I thought Dawkins made a solid contribution to that debate, whether he's right or not, by starting at the ground floor with replication. There's a interesting puzzle there about traits, which environmental pressures can reward or punish, and the genes and alleles of genes that underlie them, which the environment can't get at directly. But then you can look at the allele itself and think of it having an environment, blah blah blah. I always took "selfish" here as a reference to blind, mechanical replication, and that's all.
It wasnt Myers who did the research on that, but he did present that research in that lecture.
This was fun when I thought you might be inspired to get yourself up to date. You're just sounding like another psych patient now.
Adios!
I don't know. I find 'adaptation' a vaguish term for a few reasons. One is: adaptation to what? The environment is usually not static so a species has to 'adapt' to a range of conditions, threats, opportunities, themselves constantly fluctuating. This means that a species may be adapted to it's past environment but not it's present one. And still survive for quite a while. So adaptation is relative.
Another point is that, when you see a male peacock show off his tail, it's hard to fathom what it is adapted to... The male peacock tail was selected because it pleased the ladies of the species. It's no adaptation to nothing out there. At best a beautiful tail implies the male can feed itself decently enough to maintain the huge piece, and may perhaps become a better provider for its female... but it'd be an even better provider without this huge tail slowing it down...
And at least he knows he's going against the consensus.
P.S. The Templeton Foundation -- your idea of a source -- bases its unquestionable wisdom on human genesis on a 3000 year old book. "up to date" indeed.
What?
Reference for adaptation is the dominant force in human evolution?
To be fair:
Quoting Dawkins: Genes Aren't Us - A Devil's Chaplain, chapter 2.4
Did you even watch the video you linked?
Quoting frank
Happy to oblige, although just a Google scholar search on "human evolution review" will sort you out. I'm just waiting for your reference for that original assertion that the evolutionary biologist consensus is that Dawkins'publications are junk science. Key words being "evolutionary biologists", not "creationists who'll talk shit to the Templeton Foundation".
Then your beef is with really simplistic sociobiology, right? Humans respond to the Beatles as they do because 200,000 years ago...
Eh. Everyone knows that stuff is tricky and people aren't always all that circumspect about it. As near as I can tell, Midgley is somewhat skeptical of sociobiology (incl. E. O. Wilson) but believes we ought generally to begin the analysis of human behavior by remembering that humans are after all animals, and what we learn about "them" helps us understand ourselves. To some, that would make her a sociobiologist. Big shrug.
DNA doesn't even replicate itself. It's just the software, and it needs some hardware. Proteins do that, enzymes, etc. A whole machinery of them. DNA is just a cookbook for proteins. It gets copied (and read, regulated, repaired, and many other things) by some of the very proteins it's coding for. So you could say: DNA is coding its own duplication by proteins, but you can also see it as proteins needing to write down their own recipes on some cookbook, and selfishly making copies of their cookbook along the way...
If one likes to personify polymers, why stop at DNA?
Exactly my point, and well put. It might be possible to tell a "selfish protein" story in which DNA is how proteins reproduce themselves, or move up to cellular machinery, or up to cells, or organisms, our species. That's a healthy debate about the concept of natural selection, and the modern synthesis settled on DNA, which Darwin didn't even know about.
Except we don't pass on our characteristics to our progeny by sending the proteins our DNA encodes. We send chromosomes.
What about the eyes in the peacocks tail? You don't think they use the tail to scare away predators. And do male peacocks sit on eggs? How much "providing" are they doing outside of shooting sperm?
This is pan-adaptationism. Sexual selection, also formulated by Darwin, is also a contributor to evolution.
Good science doesnt make unfounded assumptions. If humans are selfish, we cant assume there's a survival advantage to that. Same if humans are altruistic.
The adaptationist approach is attractive and intriguing. "I know art must enhance survival, I just need to figure out why."
But no, we dont know that art or any other aspect of human society enhances survival. In fact it isn't clear what "enhancing survival" even means.
Absolutely. And that's why DNA takes center stage in the modern synthesis, not any of the other candidates. Darwin couldn't have known this, so that left some work to do getting natural selection to play nice with genetics. I always thought of Dawkins as part of that tradition starting, I guess, with Fisher.
Joke aside, the problem about the selfish gene theory (or metaphor, whatever) is that it puts the world upside down. It tells people they are machines who serve 'selfish genes'. It's attributing to life at it's elemental level some "will", and vice versa, denying this will (and it's selfishness) to human beings, where it belongs. People do bad things, and genes are just machines, not vice versa.
It's not even new. It's called finalism, and it's considered a thought crime among biologists. Dawkins' big idea is akin to 'élan vital' of Bergson, or to the 'struggle for life' of Haeckel: just another outdated misunderstanding of Darwinism.
Above my paygrade, but it looks to me like you're opposing a caricature of bad science with a caricature of good science. That said, I personally wouldn't encourage biologists to do an end-run around anthropology.
Eh. I read a bunch of his books years ago and was never tempted to reach this conclusion. YMMV.
There's nothing controversial about anything ive said. It's all standard stuff.
Of course, Darwin was a genius. But it's no adaptation to nothing, it's a flourish, an embellishment of life, an emerging phenomenon that was selected on easthetical grounds among a variety of possibilities.
How did Dawkins set evolutionary theory back by decades?
Yes, sexual selection can yield arbitrary feedback loops.
Happens a lot. Ruthless competition is not the only thing that happens in evolution. Love, or if you prefer, sex plays the central role.
Eh, Mary Midgley quotes him:
Okay so he changed his mind at some point. A good point for him I suppose.
" In the species most like our own, lasting resentment after injuries is by no means a prominent or important motive. In some cases, of course, immediate fighting is possible, but prolonged grudge-bearing is rare and trivial. Jane Goodall notes with interest how in her chimps the usual effect of an injury is something very different—a distressed approach to the aggressor with a demand for reconciliation. What seems to be most noticed is not the injury itself, but the failure of the social bond:
[I]A chimpanzee, after being threatened or attacked by a superior, may follow the aggressor, screaming and crouching to the ground or holding out his hand. He is, in fact, begging a reassuring touch from the other.
Sometimes he will not relax until he has been touched or patted, kissed or embraced[/i] (In the Shadow of Man, p. 221).
[I]While a male chimpanzee is quick to threaten or attack a subordinate, he is usually equally quick to calm his victim with a touch, a pat on the back, an embrace of reassurance. And Flo, after Mike's vicious attack, and even while her hand dripped blood where she had scraped it against a rock, had hurried after Mike, screaming in her hoarse voice, until he turned. Then as she approached him, crouched low in apprehension, he had patted her again and again on her head, and as she quietened, had given her a final reassurance by leaning forward to press his lips on her brow[/i] (p. 114).
As she points out, this reaction makes it possible to resume the relationship as though the injury had never taken place. (A community of retentive 'grudgers' would by contrast be a terribly insecure one; no lapses would be tolerated.) She rightly remarks, too, that small human children do the same thing. It is only for adult human beings, with their much stronger powers of memory, imagination and foresight, that this simple reaction becomes impossible. "
The Gombe Chimpanzee War lasted nearly four years.
People and other animals aren't just selfish or just cooperative and nobody worth listening to was ever saying they are, not even Dawkins. The question is how to knit together the blind, mechanical reproduction of genetic material with the layered, complex behavior of the creatures carrying that material.
That's a good question alright. Some argue that rape fantasies have been genetically selected by our evolutionary history, for instance. E.g. our history is one of rape --> we developed some liking to it --> more rapes happened. What would be the moral consequences if it was proven true?
a. To pardon at least some rapists, those who can prove their genes made them do it?
b. To edit out of our genome the guilty genes by various eugenic techniques?
c. To punish rape harshly, while playing out our age-old fantasies with consenting adults?
I vote for c., if anyone needs to know. It is not radically new but more needs to be done (on both fronts of solution c).
My point here is to show that the gene argument brings very little that is actually new to this debate. Moralists have been warning us of the bestial nature of man since what? The Jurassic? No wait...
It would take a lot to convince me there's a "rape gene". I'm not sure that even makes sense.
Here's the odd thing; why does it please the ladies? It must be, so the myth would have us believe, because partnering with a male with a big tail somehow helps the female's genes to survive...
How's that?
Evolution is messy, and we should have in mind the chaotic interplay between genes and environment, not a smooth ride for the egoist.
This by way of agreement - with most of the posters here.
The best theory I know is that nice feathers in male birds code for health and fitness, which would be why they are seen as attractive by the ladies in most bird species.
This does not explain the extravaganza that a peacock trail is. Most probably Darwin was right and it's just that the sexual pairing system of peacocks (complete with mating dances and rituals of course) went in overdrive somehow, with the ladies really really liking them shiny colors.
Women "of a certain age" become invisible; no longer sexually desirable, they fade into the social background. The granny in front of you at the checkout, the one you stoped for at the pedestrian crossing, they never enter into your consciousness.
Until they become annoyed.
At which stage they verge on omnipotence. Nothing takes one aback so much as being told by one's great mother. One can't hit back, you see. Physically or verbally. What is said has to be taken on board.
As a rhetorical device, her tone fits.
I don't think that's why he wrote any of those books.
You could, you know, look at Dawkins in exactly the opposite way: the machinery that underpins life is in itself relatively simple and serves only to replicate certain molecules for no particular reason; but the mathematics of differential reproduction leads to the extraordinary variety of form and behavior we observe. You insist on the narrowness and simplicity of inheritance to reveal just how powerful evolution by natural selection is, that it can make all this out of almost nothing.
There's something curiously masculinist here...
Yep, and in so doing used a metaphor that should rightly be dropped.
Okay. Well spotted. There's some truth to the point that capitalism has something competitive that fits our nature of competitive animals, as long as one remembers that capitalism amplifies human greed, and puts us on a runaway train to climatic hell.
Not shown.
Quoting Banno
Horseshit.
Yes, through her sons with big tails that will please females.
Not your best argument.
Why do the philosophically minded want to ground their views in science? Because otherwise they're just flailing in the wind. That's not comfortable.
Plus, there's lots of new science. It seems like a rich field to find new ways to approach philosophical issues.
Quoting Banno
Or yours.
But I will grant you -- if only to make @unenlightened's ears bleed -- that there was at the time a convergence of economics and evolutionary theory to the extent that they both relied more and more on game theory. In both cases, this is largely a retooling of existing theory, as I understand it. But there is a difference: the economic theory being retooled was not empirical at all. We're in a somewhat different position with evolutionary biology because we know empirically how inheritance works and we know empirically that the distribution of alleles in a population can change over time; evolutionary game theory just provides a framework for known, rather than, as in economics, postulated effects.
Which is not to say there's any reason to think Dawkins thought of evolutionary biology as an application of laissez faire economics.
I'm reading her wikipedia entry and the Philosophy Now article about her. I like her a lot so far, so thanks for the introduction.
She always was a polemist, a fighter, a sarcastic and down-to-earth writer. The paper you posted, Gene-juggling, is complex, a bit convoluted, but acerbic and assertive, and as you said, it works. There's something shrudely effective in her very British wit. I don't think age had much to do with it.
The last sentence I read in the PN bio was:
So it seems to go way back.
I totally subscribe to this (from wiki):
Also she wrote about the problem of evil in an agnostic/atheist frame, which is a topic that gives me much puzzlement. So I'll try and read that.
Oh, well, it was a decent theory....
I think you are correct that it was part of the zeitgeist. It was certainly central to Midgley's beef. She called Dawkins' theory "biological Thatcherism".
I note that The Selfish Gene is mainly based on the work of William Hamilton in the hippy, community-oriented 1960's, which was about the theoretical genetic basis of altruism. A decade later in Dawkins' book, the same ideas are presented in defense of individualism. Hypothesis: the change in zeitgeist explains the change of perspective here.
Said more crudely, a book making more or less the same Hamiltonian case about how our social behavior might have some evolutionary background rather than be pure 'nurture', but titled "The Altruistic Gene" would not have sold so well in the late seventies. It would not have resonated quite as much as "The Selfish Gene" did.
From a genetic standpoint, the rapist benefits iff there are viable offspring iff the victim benefits too.
IOW if rape passes on the rapists’ genes it necessarily also passes on the victim’s genes.
This genetic fact has no bearing on the moral status of rape, because genes are not moral patients, people are.
My point entirely. Bringing genes in the equation does not help much.
What would an altruistic gene be? It can't be just a gene for altruism, since that's what selfish genes that yield altruism are. Extending Dawkins' metaphor, an altruistic gene would be a gene that sacrificed itself for the sake of another gene. Such a gene could then not be passed down to future generations. It makes no sense, so apparently the attraction to the idea is emotive, not scientific.
In which case it seems like Midgley's error is less shocking than I first thought. The dislike for the idea of a gene behaving as if it were selfish, even though that is a useful metaphor for the actual behaviour, is all that it takes to invalidate a theory. One might wish that genes themselves behaved as perfect altruists, and it doesn't matter that this makes no sense, the important thing is it feels right. Anthropomorphism, where Dawkins intended mere metaphor, trumps science and logic, and hardly for the first time.
This doesn't make genes selfish, which as you say is a metaphor.
That is precisely the metaphor: that altruistic behaviour benefits the genes that give rise to it. That is not an "altruistic gene" as in the opposite of what Dawkins described: that is a "selfish gene" for human altruism.
unless the rape is part of a deterioration of the group (causal, correlated, whatever). IOW if the behavior leads to a group that does not work well together, other groups and other sets of genes may wipe them out in war or they may not thrive for other reasons.
Her point -- and I think it is correct -- is precisely that it is NOT a useful metaphor. That a better metaphor would be that the genes are strong (i.e. efficacious).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not just. It could be a gene that 'collaborates' with other genes for an optimal outcome... A gene that works as part of a whole, like each player in an orchestra. Or it could be a metaphor for a gene (or set of alleles to be precise) that induces some capacity to empathy and altruism. Or it could mean that some of our collaborative and positive traits have been selected as efficacious, somehow, for the survival of the group.
Yes, but that's just anthropomorphism. To extend the metaphor accurately, you'd also have to see "altruistic" behaviour in genes, which is illogical.
Quoting Olivier5
Well it is a useful metaphor, insofar as it has pedagogical power, whereas just wanting genes to be altruistic on grounds of taste has none. Also, that was not her point. Her point rests on pretending that the metaphor is not a metaphor, such that she can construct the straw man that the selfish gene idea is some kind of social Darwinism and attack that straw man.
Interesting... What pedagogic power, may I ask?
She makes a series of points, to be fair. One is that indeed Dawkins is ambiguous on the metaphor thing. Another points is that even if it was just a metaphor (which it's not), the 'selfish genes' idea would be a luridly simplistic and misleading metaphor, that it misrepresents the scientific knowledge about ethology and evolution. Yet another point is that doing so is immoral, as it leads Dawkins' readers to either rationalise and amplify their most selfish behaviors (if they are 'winners' in the economic game, their genes deserve it), or to fatalism (if they are 'losers' in this game, that's because they have losers genes).
If this needs explaining at this point, you're rather admitting that you're criticising something you don't understand. Genes undergo mutations which may vary biological characteristics, and selection pressures choose from those characteristics, and thus those mutations, those that will be most frequently propagated via reproduction (e.g. the theory of natural selection). Thus metaphorically genes are adapting to propagate themselves. Even if the biological characteristic is altruistic, such as human altruism, the genes responsible for that altruism are individually adapting to increase their own longevity. This is a useful metaphor.
Let's contrast this with what seems like a popular rebuttal on this thread, including Midgley's article on The Selfish Gene: " I'd like genes to be nice and friendly like nice friendly people. Therefore Dawkins is wrong and a social Darwinist and Nazi, and genes are altruistic and love one another and that's that." Science it ain't. There is no underlying literally true mechanism that this longed-for, anthropomorphising genetic altruism is a useful metaphor for. It doesn't even make sense. If a genetic mutation increases the likelihood of survival of an individual, it increases the likelihood of survival of all of the genes in that individual. It doesn't need to coordinate with other genetic mutations to do this, it simply needs to increase its own chance of survival.
Quoting Olivier5
She claims this. This amounts to her choosing to pretend it's not always metaphorical. I recall no such instruction from Dawkins' book to cease taking genetic selfishness metaphorically, do you?
Quoting Olivier5
Repeating the straw man doesn't make it real. This isn't pinocchio.
Quoting Olivier5
No. That's treating the metaphor as being literal. You do understand what a metaphor is, right?
Quoting Olivier5
Yeah no. I don't know whether Midgley is just pathologically dishonest, a moron, or, most likely, a mixture of both. You are free to dumb yourself down to her level, but most of us are perfectly aware that how genes propagate has absolutely nothing to do with how we ought to behave as humans. It does not, for instance, eradicate the view that humans themselves are intrinsically altruistic, any more than atomic theory eradicates the view that room temperature iron is a solid. So speak for yourself, not for those generally interested in actual science.
Now, to be fair, the memes of dances did come down from their platonic realm onto the puffins too. I don't know about octopuses.
And where is the selfishness coming from? It's in the eye of the beholder. A better metaphor would be: alleles that survived were historically better at 'propagating themselves' [metaphorically] than those that didn't survive. That says nothing about their inherent selfishness or altruism. It's a good scientific metaphor. Much better though less dramatic than some Chicago mafioso metaphor, so less appealing to the kids.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Midgley quotes a few.
[quote=Olivier5]that it misrepresents the scientific knowledge about ethology and evolution[/quote]
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What part of "it misrepresents the scientific knowledge about ethology and evolution" did you fail to understand?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Why, I think it does, by saying that any altruism in transactional, a desguised selfishness.
Okay. So you don't know what a metaphor is. Fine. A metaphor describes a thing by comparing itself to another, more familiar thing, in certain relevant aspects. It is not a one-to-one equivalency between two things. When we speak of natural selection literally, it makes sense to ask where the ability for genes to undergo mutations that increase its propagation potential. That is a good question; natural selection is a good answer (the only scientific answer). When we describe this behaviour as "selfish" metaphorically, it does not make sense to ask where this selfishness came from as if it were a literal thing. Do you understand?
Quoting Olivier5
No, she decides that the metaphor has been abandoned without justification, because that's what suits her straw man. There's no point in which Dawkins says "Actually now this isn't a metaphor anymore." Dawkins reminds us many times, starting with the introduction, ending toward the end of the book, that this is just a useful metaphor, and yet Midgley's argument that he means it all literally is that he does not remind us every single time: "Not a word of caution about metaphors follows." This is the crux of Midgley's attack: there is no minimum number of times Dawkins can insist that selfishness is a metaphor such that she will accept that he means it metaphorically.
This is entreating her readership to gross stupidity. She is saying: no matter how often he tells you something, it just won't sink in, will it?
Quoting Olivier5
If you think the selfishness metaphor says anything at all about ethology, you have treated it not as a metaphor but in a literal sense.
Quoting Olivier5
And that's anthropomorphism, an inability to reconcile the literal fundamental altruism of humans and the metaphorical selfishness of genes. Genes aren't people. Metaphors aren't literally true.
What I understand is that the metaphor of "selfish gene" maps to itself, it has no content, nothing that it is alluding to other than itself.
It doesn't actually mean anything more than "Let's see how the world would look like if the traditional perspective was reversed, that is, if we'd consider that genes were replicating themselves through us, instead of us through them."
So it's a different perspective to evolution, one driven by genes rather than by the fitness of individuals to their social and ecological environment.
Then you do not understand the metaphor no matter how often it is explained to you. This is a limit of your understanding, not of the metaphor, and certainly not of the underlying theory.
The Strong Gene, then. Or "Gene the Survivor".
It means what I said it means:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I cannot understand this from 'strong gene', although if the argument is now merely a question of which single metaphor we prefer, it seems like the previous argument is very much resolved.
"Gene the Survivor" is my favorite. It rolls off the tongue nicely, is dramatic enough for the kids, with just a tinge of Nitschean theater, and it almost rhymes with Conan the Barbarian. But it also expresses well the resilience of life, and the important idea that our hero Gene has survived SO FAR. We may be adapted to our past but are we adapted to our present?
Gene the Survivor's movie is TO BE CONTINUED...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
[quote= Midgeley quoting Dawkins] The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in our genes is ruthless selfishness. . . Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (pp. 2-3, my italics).[/quote]
Metaphors aren't literally true. The world is not literally highly competitive, and this does not entitle us to expect certain qualities in our genes, like ruthless selfishness, because it's a metaphor, and so genes are not literally ruthless or selfish. And because genes are not literally selfish, we are not born selfish.
Indeed. But we are born survivors, so the better metaphor is: "Gene the Survivor".
Now I wonder, who could play the part if it was made in a movie? Vin Diesel? Jean-Claude Van Damme?
We are not born literally selfish, that's correct. We are born from stuff that's metaphorically selfish.
Quoting unenlightened
Where has anyone said that competition in nature is a metaphor? It's one of the three postulates of natural selection.
If it were the 70s, I'd vote for someone grittier like... Gene Hackman.
GENE THE SURVIVOR
(episode MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMCCCCLXXXIV)
Gibberish.
Sound argument, I have no rebuttal.
:rofl: Basically we're describing The Royal Tenenbaums.
What does it take in order for something to be metaphorically selfish?
Can you just scroll up? Saves having to repost the same thing many times. Cheers!
I've read this thread. I want you to answer the question, that way I will not misattribute words or meaning to you.
No no, the aim of every gene is to go extinct, not to survive, because genes are antinatalists. Fortunately, most genes achieve this sooner or later, and it is only the unlucky or incompetent few that find themselves continuing to be reproduced. (This is a metaphor.)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Alas, I am losing all respect. Genes cannot have an aim, they cannot compete because they cannot know a win from a loss. Competition in nature is not a metaphor when it is used about organisms that can envisage an outcome that is preferable to another outcome. Eg, Stags compete during the rut. It is not the case that genes compete because they are guaranteed 100% aimless.
This is the danger of metaphors. They start off as handy ways of thinking about unfamiliar things and with familiarity become taken literally by people who really ought to know better.
"Gene the Suicidal" doesn't have the same ring to it, I'm afraid. Your metaphor has limited blockbuster potential.
Actually it was a typo. The title should read: "Gene the Shellfish".
Competition in nature is not a metaphor full stop.
Quoting unenlightened
I can kill someone with a hammer. That is not the danger of hammers but of killers. Hammers are still very useful.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:up:
Quoting creativesoul
I'll refer to myself:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What does it take for something to be selfish?
To act in its own self-interest.
Are genes capable of acting in their own self-interest?
Oh well. I've finished the paper now and it's shockingly bad. I'm disappointed.
pp. 451 - 454 at least graze the issue of the unit of selection, but mainly to entertain group selection and mainly reject it and then quote Gould.
There are two excellent issues here that she could have spent the entire paper on:
All the rest of the paper was junk and her treatment of these issues was insubstantial.
Literally speaking? No, of course not. They are dumb chemicals.
Yeah, it's not good. The Selfish Gene is a book about reciprocal altruism, and yet Midgley believes that 'not all altruism is reciprocal' is a genuine criticism. She seems to have low expectations of her readers and I dislike that immensely.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, a mutation is beneficial only if it benefits the entire organism, which in turn benefits it's entire genome. Like a group that benefits from a particularly good hunter. But there still had to be a benefit due to that mutation.
So there are no such thing as selfish genes.
If there are no such things as metaphors
"I think she was. Which is too bad, because there are very good reasons to criticize that book, on biological grounds." - Massimo Pigliucci
https://twitter.com/mpigliucci/status/1317860473111498752
Why are you guys so caught up in this? If you dislike the metaphor so much, fine. As I mentioned earlier, Dawkins did too and preferred the term Immortal Gene. You can google it. My problems with the book is that it's outdated science, don't waste your time going around in circles because the terminological usage offends you so much.
Acting in one's own self-interest(being selfish) is not existentially dependent upon language use. Being metaphorically selfish is being called "selfish" despite the fact that that which is being called so is not capable of being so(despite the fact that what is being called "selfish" is not). Being metaphorically selfish is existentially dependent upon metaphor. Being selfish is not. You're conflating the two.
:up: Yes, we appear to be a long way from where we started. Which is good.
Quoting Saphsin
The reigning theory of reciprocal altruism at the time was group selection, an idea that is now niche.
Quoting creativesoul
The emboldened part holds true. Your penultimate sentence is irrelevant, since nothing and no one holds that genes are literally selfish. What are you getting at here, that the book should have at worst been called The Metaphorically Selfish Gene? Is that your experience of how metaphor is done? "All the world is a metaphorical stage, and all the men and women merely metaphorical players?" "Advertising is the metaphorical rattling of a metaphorical stick inside a metaphorical swill bucket." I see a problem here...
There is no such thing as a selfish gene.
That is correct. And the world is not really a stage.
If you're looking for me to defend the use of metaphor when doing science or philosophy, you're wasting your time. Metaphor is a poor substitute for either.
Then don't use it. Most of us are comfortable with it.
:ok:
Yes,
I agree. The 'metaphor' means something quite true and oft forgotten: that genes can only replicate themselves.
Soooo selfish of them! I can't believe the scoundrels... You'd think they would have the good grace of replicating a few alternative versions of themselves, rather than replicating just themselves all the sodding time, right?
I really wish my genes could replicate silver spoons and bank notes. I think that's the least they could do, but apparently they are just too selfish, huh?
This sort of thing is amusing:
Yeah, that's a list (and throw in Robert Trivers too) of names nearly forgotten these forty years later, names disgraced and buried in a dusty corner of the annals of biology, practically heaped in ignominy.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I wonder if a shortcoming of the organism-centered view is that evolution might only happen to be non-Lamarckian. If evolution is about changes from one generation to the next in a gene pool, rather than changes in a population of organisms, then evolution is necessarily non-Lamarckian.
And something tells me biological evolution must be necessarily non-Lamarckian. Might be the difference between replication and imitation. Might be the reality of species. I'm honestly not sure, and I'm out of my depth.
That touches on another problem with Midgley, which is that she dismisses the genetic theory of evolution on the basis that genes aren't propagated, only their likenesses. But, persuant to your question, a gene is identified as the type within a population, not the token within the individual. Reproduction is the means by which a gene propagates through that population over generations. I don't see it as either/or: one is part of the other.
Partly because I find bizarre, convoluted metaphors funny, but also because I believe it is wrong to miseducate lay people with the wrong ideas about evolution. If you want to discuss a specific point of sociobiology, I'd be happy to.
Right. That business about physical particles, wow. It takes effort to talk genetics without the word "information" once coming into your mind.
I started watching the Aeon video and I like her resistance to a simplistic model of beastly instincts and civilizing reason keeping them under control, and her suggestion that we actually listen to what ethologists say about animal behavior in all its complexity, including social complexity. I think there's lots of rethinking to be done there and she's picked a great starting point. I'm enjoying the discussion of individualism, but she just seems absurdly wrong to drag Dawkins into it.
Still excited about other aspects of her work.
Are you saying that DNA is indifferent?
Or is DNA on a mission, and is it entirely committed to that mission? If so then DNA is biased.
A bias is emotional information - an aversion to something, and an attraction to its opposite.
Is Mary Midgely's article indifferent, or is it also on a mission, like DNA?
:up:
Though any criticism using anthropomorphism should lead us to wonder if there is any situation where positing such traits, even when describing 'us', isn't also a fallacy. IOW in the face of determinism and all the possible philosophical assaults on the sense of theire being an 'I' and persistant self and choice, etc.
IOW, one of the reasons some guys here are in awe with Dawkins is that he explained to them that they were not free agents but mere machines. In the book, "Gene the Selfish" controls the human beings he is encased in. Them kids' obsession with determininism was confirmed by some (fake, distorted) biology, so they got all excited.
I've read through Dawkins' response to Midgley (here). It's confused blah. He says "biologists use these words ("altruist", "selfish") in a [I]special[/I] way, and then he fails to define the oh-so-special meaning he gives to them... To wit:
We are left to wonder how a gene could possibly "behave" in the first place, how it could possibly "behave" to increase another gene's "welfare", and even how it could possibly pay for the "expense". As for "the exact opposite" of altruism, what would that be? An entity that behaves to increase its own welfare at the expense of other entities' welfare? How would that happen in the case of a gene? The gene for cholinesterase tells the gene for hemoglobin to get lost because he's taking over it's locus? Or are we talking about alleles, mysteriously undermining the chances of other alleles present in other organisms? The whole conceptual framework is muddy and unhelpful.
I wrote an essay on it for a class on moral psychology 13 years ago:
https://geekofalltrades.org/essays/evolutionandaltruism.php
He immediately defines both words. It seems knowingly misrepresenting people is a genetic trait in genetic theory disavowers.
You understand he's talking about people here, not genes. The point that you couldn't possibly have an "altruistic" gene is one I made quite a while ago. It doesn't make any sense. A selfish gene -- one that adapts to prolong itself -- is both viable and accurate.
You cannot have an altruistic gene if you define it the way he does, evidently. A gene can only replicate itself. It's not like it has the capacity to replicate a Mercedes-Benz instead.
Precisely, therefore you cannot have an altruistic gene full stop. You can have a gene for altruism , which is not a metaphor.
Homologous recombination is a type of genetic recombination that occurs during meiosis (the formation of egg and sperm cells). Paired chromosomes from the male and female parent align so that similar DNA sequences from the paired chromosomes cross over each other. Crossing over results in a shuffling of genetic material and is an important cause of the genetic variation seen among offspring.
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/homologous-recombination
Quite simply because this:
"This is that the basic unit of natural selection is best regarded not as the species, nor as the population, nor even as the individual, but as some small unit of genetic material which it is convenient to label the gene" (The Selfish Gene, p. 50).
is unscientific trash. The rest of the book, including the idea of the selfish gene - built, ironically, upon this elementary 'unit' of unempirical rubbish - is just so much detritus that follows from this. Also, I should say that I said Dawkins set literacy back by an order of decades - in the sense of the pop understanding of evosci. The theory - and the science - has been chugging along quite nicely without - one might say despite - his rubbish. It's a pseudo-biological Platonism that is as every bit pernicious and idealist as philosophical Platonism is.
One of the absolutely bonkers things about reading The Selfish Gene is just how much he has to consistently qualify just how useless and misleading it is to talk about genes in the way he does. Like, every third paragraph is devoted to saying something like 'don't forget, I don't really think genes are selfish, I just want to treat them as if they are'. Literally a third of the book is him self-correcting and qualifying how terrible a metaphor it is, while milking what little use he can of it in the rest of the book. It is incredibly muddled, and it obfuscates far more than it illuminates.
Thanks for looking this up and providing a link. It was excellent!
:clap:
:smirk:
:roll:
He's not talking about genes in that quote, he's talking about behaviours and it's standard terminology whether you like it or not. Again, there seems to a ubiquitous inability to distinguish between the behaviours of genes and the behaviours of humans manifest as a startling anthropomorphism of dumb chemicals, as well as a total disregard for the difference between metaphor and literal truths. I've never seen such wilful or joyous decisions to be perpetually confused by perfectly simple things.
Quoting StreetlightX
And yet, according to Midgley and pretty much everyone here, he cannot say it enough for it to sink in.
Quoting StreetlightX
Oh god, we've abused the word 'metaphor' to death already, let's not kill 'literally' as well.
Yes, a reminder that those with knowledge have the privilege of calm, clarity and facts, while those without require aggression, obfuscation and fiction.
He is. You are in denial.
One can argue based on the evidence of this thread alone that Dawkins pitched his book at maybe too high a level for a popular science book. Fair enough. But Midgley assumed her readers to be morons and, last time I checked, this thread was meant to be a celebration of Midgley, not an assassination of Dawkins. Midgley's point is not that she was confused by his metaphor, but that he didn't really mean it as one, the main ingredient of her social Darwinism straw man.
Personally I see the value of the metaphor, it has good explanatory power as all good metaphors should. It matters little to me if it's lost on some, especially if they get curiously enraged by it. I thought The Matrix was shit, and Alien much better than Aliens. Someone's always going to miss out.
It really doesn't: everytime he's pushed to lay out the implications of it, he's forced to dilute it to the point of triviality. Hence why the book is filled with these 'paradoxes' which he then 'solves' which makes lay readers think he's some kind of genius, when in truth, they are puzzles of his own making forced on him by an inadequate conceptual apparatus. It's a rubbish metaphor and Midgley was right in her 'intemperance', and should not have apologized for it.
:up:
It doesn't require explaining, just read the quote carefully.
Quoting StreetlightX
Such as?
Quoting StreetlightX
Again, Midgley is arguing he doesn't mean it metaphorically at all, quite dishonestly.
He is obviously speaking about the behaviors of genes and animals. What else? The behaviors of lampposts?
Then there is no basis for communication. He's saying that altruism and selfishness are not emotional states at any scale. If you're reading into that that he's claiming that genes are literally selfish, there's no point in correcting you, since you can read into my correction its exact opposite or anything else.
In any case the question of 'metaphor' is a sideshow. Dawkins uses it as snakeoil to slide in and out of when and as he needs; the question is if the underlying notion which it is used to communicate - the gene as the sole unit of natural selection - is valid or not. It isn't, and the book is a waste of the trees that were destroyed in its printing for it.
That's fine, I read it a long time ago and don't pretend to have perfect recall of it.
Quoting StreetlightX
Not to Midgley's criticism as I see it. The claim that Dawkins pretends the metaphor is only a metaphor is central to her social Darwinism straw man.
Indeed, and he is also saying that these ways of speaking are about the behaviors of genes and animals. Hence my objection remains valid:
We are left to wonder how a gene could possibly "behave" in the first place, how it could possibly "behave" to increase another gene's "welfare", and even how it could possibly pay for the "expense". As for "the exact opposite" of altruism, what would that be? An entity that behaves to increase its own welfare at the expense of other entities' welfare? How would that happen in the case of a gene? The gene for cholinesterase tells the gene for hemoglobin to get lost because he's taking over it's locus? Or are we talking about alleles, mysteriously undermining the chances of other alleles present in other organisms?
She cuts to the quick after her small discussion of metaphor to note that it's all just a bunch of window dressing to get across the point that "Shorn of its [the metaphor's] beams, it turns out to be a point about the ultimate 'unit of selection'". And then further down: "When the mountains of metaphor are removed, in fact, what we find is not so much a mouse as a mare's nest, namely the project of finding a unit which will serve for every kind of calculation involved in understanding evolution; a 'fundamental unit' at a deep level which will displace, and not just supplement, all serious reference to individuals, groups, kin and species, and which (for some unexplained reason) will also be the unit of selfishness or self-interest". Again, all this is exactly right.
Getting hung-up on 'whether it's a metaphor or not' is all rather irrelevant, or a sideshow at best - although there is something to say of Dawkins' slip-and-sliding in and out of metaphor when and as he pleases to cover-up the inadequacy of his presentation.
You've thought about everything haven't you? You must be a brain in a vat or something, fed on royal jelly.
He has, to his immense credit.
Quoting StreetlightX
It isn't a small discussion: it starts on the first page and ends on the last. She ends the article with the same straw man she starts building on page 1, wherein memes inherit the anthropomorphic status she decides genes have been given, and relies on throughout.
Two pages prior, for instance, she bemoans the alleged fatalism of selfish genes, as if genes being selfish somehow determined how a human will behave in a given instance, which is again anthropomorphism.
In the page before that, she equates the metaphor of genes being Chicago gangsters with the statement that people are Chicago gangsters.
Her entire essay is centred around this gross straw man that, no matter how often we're told that genes are not synecdoche for people, that they're not really conscious beings with wills of their own, we must in fact believe that that's precisely what genetic theory tells us (for her gripe is with genetics generally, not just Dawkins, as her corpus attests) so as to dismiss genetics as social Darwinism.
If this is a metaphor I don't understand it.
Then it seems to me that you are not a good reader, who mistakes a framing device - one explicitly authorized and in fact tributary to the very source it critiques - for substance. Gripe with genetics?
"The reason why he [Dawkins] cannot get off this subject is not that he knows no genetics, but that all the genetics which he or anyone else knows is solidly opposed to his notion of genes as independent units, only contingently connected, and locked in constant internecine competition, a war of all against all."
Hmm.
I still don't follow. If genes behave 'as if' they had self-interest (that is, only metaphorically speaking), why would this have any bearing on our behaviour or our need to teach altruism?
It's as if Dawkins had said:
"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Let us therefore try to teach theatre-relevant occupational health and safety, in case a fire breaks out."
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/claygate-attack-woman-telegraph-hammer-19041217
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/woman-attacked-moseley-hammer-wielding-18427078
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1282394/Portsmouth-hammer-attack-Local-describes-teen-girl-found.html
Not as easy as you might think. Perhaps consider a bladed weapon instead? 'The right tool for the job', I always say.
I still think fondly of the way Austin eviscerated Ayer in Sense and Sensibilia, but she seems to have taken him on in a different manner.
Does anyone know if she wrote anything about H-H-Heidegger (pardon the typographical stutter--I'm so far gone even seeing his name enrages me)? If she did, please let me know, but not if she admired him. I don't think I could stand it. Sob.
I really don't think any improvement in my reading comprehension is going to show that she dispenses with the straw man early on when she clearly doesn't, or that one third of Dawkins' book is dedicated ('literally') to explaining the metaphor, which it clearly isn't. The problems with reading appear to be yours and to be frequent.
Quoting StreetlightX
Dawkins is not Midgley's only target. She takes the same umbrage with other geneticists, theoretical or experimental. Her gripe, that genes effect human behaviours such as altruism, is all too evident here though.
Quoting coolazice
He's just saying that just because our genes behave a certain we, it doesn't mean we should. Because assholes have a habit of anthropomorphising genes too.
Quoting unenlightened
With a spoooooon!
Another important drama in these "wars" was the mathematical discoveries and subsequent suicide of George Price, a colleague of Hamilton. This is interesting re. the possible consequences of bad philosophy, so here is the story (from Wiki):
Price was a mathematician who approached Hamilton late in his life, and out of the blue developed a new interpretation of Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, the Price equation, which has now been accepted as its best interpretation. He wrote what is still widely held to be the best mathematical, biological and evolutionary representation of altruism. He also pioneered the application of game theory to evolutionary biology, in a co-authored 1973 paper with John Maynard Smith. Furthermore, Price reasoned that in the same way as an organism may sacrifice itself and further its genes (altruism) an organism may sacrifice itself to eliminate others of the same species if it enabled closely related organisms to better propagate their related genes. This negative altruism was described in a paper published by W. D. Hamilton and is termed Hamiltonian spite.
Price's 'mathematical' theory of altruism reasons that organisms are more likely to show altruism toward each other as they become more genetically similar to each other. Thus, in a species that requires two parents to reproduce, an organism is most likely to show altruistic behavior to a biological parent, full sibling, or direct offspring. The reason for this is that each of these relatives' genetic makeup contains (on average in the case of siblings) 50% of the genes that are found in the original organism. So if the original organism dies as a result of an altruistic act it can still manage to propagate its full genetic heritage as long as two or more of these close relatives are saved. Consequently, an organism is less likely to show altruistic behavior to a biological grandparent, grandchild, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew or half-sibling (each carry one-fourth of the genes found in the original organism); and even less likely to show altruism to a first cousin (carrying one-eighth of the genes found in the original organism). The theory then asserts that the further genetically removed two organisms are from each other, the less likely they are to show altruism to each other.
On 6 June 1970, Price, until then an atheist, had a religious experience and became an ardent Christian.
Price grew increasingly depressed by the implications of his equation. As part of an attempt to prove his theory right or wrong, he began showing an ever-increasing amount of random kindness to complete strangers. In this way, he dedicated the latter part of his life to helping the homeless, often inviting homeless people to live in his house. Sometimes, when the people in his house became a distraction, he slept in his office at the Galton Laboratory. He also gave up everything to help alcoholics; yet as he helped them steal his belongings, he increasingly fell into depression.
He was eventually evicted from his rented house owing to a construction project in the area, making him unhappy because he could no longer provide housing for the homeless. He moved to various squats in the North London area, and became depressed over Christmas, 1974.
Possibly due to the long-term complications of his thyroid treatment, Price committed suicide on January 6, 1975 by cutting his carotid artery with a pair of nail scissors. His body was identified by his close colleague, W.D. Hamilton.
Great discussion by the way. I've just arrived from a forum where not one thread is of this quality.
The interesting contribution (for me) that Midgley provides in her solid take-down of "Gene the Shellfish" is that social behaviors are mediated by emotions, such as indeed empathy, affection, but also anger, envy, etc. So she is saying, perhaps as you are saying, that in-between genes and behaviors, there's a third level, that of emotions. Our genes may somehow affect our emotional make up, and our emotional make up affects our behaviors. In short, the route between genes and our behaviors would be indirect, and go through emotions.
All this is of course theoretical: it's essentially based on mathematical formulas, rather than on empirical data about the actual altruism of elephants or fishes.
That makes sense to me. Midgley's objections seem to be of the magical human variety, wherein anything less than human that influences human behaviour is bad and anyone who talks about it is pushing a political agenda. Gould is a creationist, so comes from that magical human background. They ought to see eye to eye on a lot.
This is rather different from, e.g., Myers' beef with Dawkins which is based on whether genetic drift or adaptation have primacy (spoiler: it's the latter), which represent disagreements in evolutionary science itself.
Ohh you're a loon. OK as you were.
Okay, a lapsed creationist, now agnostic. Point still stands. There's a subset of people who need humans to be a bit magic: dualists, religious folks, and people like Midgley.
There are studies that show that humans look directly into one another's eyes more than our closest living relatives. The difference is down to genetics, but whether it was an adaptive change, we dont know.
It's become possible to analyze genes looking for signs of adaptive change. One studies concludes that our faces are primarily the result of genetic drift. Maybe one day we'll see how genetics is tied to human behavior.
Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Keysers, C. (2006). Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans
I'm sensing you're in that subset. No offense...
Anyways, leaving this dumpster fire of a conversation.
Gould is an advocate of the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, that science and religion can live happily because only religion can explore values, that science has no business there. He was raised an orthodox Jew iirc and now holds that, gun to head, there probably isn't a creator. He's in that subset: believes there might be a magical man in the sky who made us, therefore only religion can enquire about our values.
Quoting FrancisRay
You were interested in how science accounts for empathy, no?
I agree that Dawkin's influence shouldn't entirely be held against him. It's not his fault that while inspiring a generation, he was also embraced by neo-Nazis.
Usually, when we we talk against "Dawkins,' it's his legacy of intriguing, but fatally flawed works we're targeting, not the real Dawkins, who, as Wilson pointed out, is not a scientist.
About as accurate and fair-minded as one could expect. Likewise it's not Gould's fault that he was brainwashed as a child to the point where he's incapable of understanding evolution. I'm sure Midgley has her causes too.
Idrc. Not an orthodox family, mea culpa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould
I appreciate you may not agree. There is always a paradigm-problem for these discussions where mysticism becomes relevant. I would rather say that the natural sciences have no method for studying or understanding empathy, but scientists like to speculate beyond the data. All they have for data is the assumption that empathy is a real thing and not just a misinterpretation of behaviour. Only a few decades back they were arguing that consciousness is a misinterpretation of behaviour. and they have no method even now to refute this claim except first-person reports.
I have no beef with science or scientists, but I wish they'd be more careful to distinguish between what they can and cannot study with their methods. That the physical sciences can explain empathy is, as far as any scientist knows, a science-fiction fantasy. I would say it is very obviously a fantasy, just anther hang-over from the grand-fantasy of Behaviourism, so never quite understand why anyone would think otherwise. It seems some sort of major paradigm-shift is required to switch between our respective positions, I find this a constant source of fascination but have never found a way of addressing it. . . . . . .
That's what the paper is about. Are you sure you read the right one?
Quoting FrancisRay
Ah, this is a matter of faith for you then. Not so much "science has not" but "science can not" disguising a "science must not".
Quoting FrancisRay
Oh, people have been reminding them since the heliocentric model.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:grin: :cool:
Wait, you're a Dawkins fan, you picked the name Kenosha Kid, and you've inexplicably picked on orthodox Jews.
I see a banning in your future.
:rofl: That's excellent!
So, it's all about altruism, after all. NOT selfishness, and NOT some sort of metaphor of altruism but the real behavior, that consists in an individual helping another even when that help costs the individual a little something. This behavior, common in the animal world in particular among social animals, had prior to Hamilton and Price no Darwinian explanation. The mechanism for the genetic selection of altruism that they came up with is simple enough: sacrificing a bit of your own comfort for someone with similar genes than yours ultimately benefits the genes you have in common and their future odds of survival. Altruism to members of the same clan can get positively selected over the long run because it benefits the survival of the group and their somewhat common genepool.
The discovery depressed Price mightily, who later committed suicide. But it could be seen, rather than as a depressing idea, as a very positive one in that it means that evolution rewards kindness.
Enters Dawkins, who repackages the idea as "the selfish gene", for reasons probably linked to the zeitgeist. "The Altruistic Gene" would not have sold quite as well in the rising individualism of the late 70s. In doing so, Dawkins muddles the debate quite a lot. But thanks to Stephen J Gould, we now have a clear idea of the historical sequence and of the real stakes at hand.
People have been insisting on what science should and should not study for as long as science has been going. It doesn't stick. They're not bothered.
Quoting Saphsin
Creationism implies a creator. There are (bad) creationist theories of evolutionary biology (which Gould, consistent in his separation of church and science, rightly denounces).
Gould believed there might have been a creator and believes that religion is the key to understanding human values. Okay, he's not really a creationist, obviously (though this is a thread devoted to utterly misrepresenting scientists), but he was guilty of magical thinking. It makes sense to me that he and Midgley would see eye to eye: both have a closed door policy to science investigating what makes us who we are.
You've read a lot more of this stuff than I have, so I'd be curious what your view of the landscape is. Is something selected by natural selection? If so, what? Do you have a sense of the current consensus on this, or what the leading competing views are now? Obviously forty years ago whether group selection was likely or even possible was still a very active question.
While I'm interested in your views, I really don't understand the animus you display here. If Dawkins was wrong about genes, he was wrong. It happens. The course of science is meandering. I'm in no position to judge whether he's right, but I like that he makes as clear a case as he can for his view of the unit of selection. As I said, I thought of him as advancing the debate. If his view is wrong then he has done everyone a service by making the best case for the wrong view that he can, so that its shortcomings can be clearly shown. In that tweet that @Saphsin shared, Pigliucci says there are solid biological criticisms of Dawkins's view, but that Midgley was indeed attacking a straw man. Here's a recent snippet summary of Pigliucci's criticism:
Quoting Pigliucci
Okay, cool. TSG is forty years old, and even at that time one-sided and misses some important stuff. Sounds good. It's not my field but I could imagine this is all true. And if Pigliucci is right to characterize Dawkins as dug-in and dismissive of alternative views then that's interesting, but it's mainly consumers of popular science books who would need to be wary, as working scientists aren't taking their cues from such stuff anyway.
I still can't help but feel there is a value to the community in a certain sort of narrow-mindedness. You can look at the position of Quine in American philosophy: his preferences and commitments are always as clear and consistent as he can manage, and that made his objections (I'm thinking of the development of modal logics in the mid-century, for instance) valuable as a rock to hurl yourself against.
For all I know, the gene-centric view will win out in another forty years and the current almost universal embrace among philosophers of possible-world semantics will be all but forgotten. We can all just keep doing our work rather than handicapping some supposed horse race of ideas.
How does evolution explain this?
Also your categorization of creationism is way too broad, that's not what most people think of as creationism. I mean I'm very inclined philosophically from looking at evolutionary history and the picture it shows that there is a tension between Evolutionary Biology and Theism, but people can hold onto both views without being a creationist, just like people hold onto all kinds of poorly compatible views.
You and your cat share about 90% of common DNA. You're far closer to him phylogenetically than you think.
Going on a limb here but... Let's see. The Price-Hamilton theory predicts that one's feelings of solidarity correlates with genetic closeness. That means one is more likely to feel a desire to help a sibling than a cousin, more likely to want to help a cousin than a more distant relative, etc. I think it's generally correct, statistically speaking; it would help explain the pregnancy and universality of racism for instance. But if we go beyond the species, the theory predicts that we are more likely to bound with mammals than with reptiles or fish because we are closest to them, which I think is also by and large true.
I'm scared to answer because it seems like you're joking but my faith in humanity has been truly shaken. In case you're being serious, natural selection doesn't spitball every conceivable scenario. What's relevant is the environment in which the characteristic evolved and how that evolution bestowed a survival advantage. If you were kidding, apologies.
Quoting Saphsin
I falsely recalled him coming from a strongly religious background, which I've retracted twice. My point wasn't that he was a god-botherer but that he was of that mindset that there are human phenomena that are magic.
Quoting Saphsin
That's what it is.
Quoting Saphsin
I wouldn't disagree, although I'd always find suspect the scientific robustness of someone who, deep down, feels they have the big answers and are just filling in the detail of _how_ God did it
Btw you'll generally find Catholics accept that evolution is real, since the Pope John Paul George Ringo II accepted the theory in the 90s. So your definition of creationism is not only far too specific, it's incorrect.
Perhaps that my caring for a cat that is not a close genetic match is a sort of peacock's tail - showing off my caring and supportive nature in order to impress potential mates.
I have goldfish and chooks. The fish do fuck all. It would certainly be easier to buy eggs than to keep chickens. Girl has a pet lizard.
I grow poppies, too, and other flowers. I'm not happy when they don't do well. How close are my genes to theirs?
Don't know about your cat, but I heard somewhere a bit of the story of dogs that I found fascinating. It's a very old relationship. The theory was that wolves would naturally scavenge a bit around the settlements of early humans. Animals have a characteristic ethologists call "flight distance", how close you allow a possible threat to come before bolting. The idea is that wolves with a shorter flight distance would be the beginnings of domestication: humans come out to chase wolves away from the garbage dump, and one doesn't run off immediately but stays and gets a closer look, eventually leading to interaction, maybe deliberate feeding of that wolf by a human. To me, the idea of some random variation laying the groundwork for small changes in behavior that enable big changes in behavior and then genome (since we soon get artificial selection), that's all pretty cool.
If we're guessing, I'd say your initial desire to have a cat had little to do with altruism, and that the care you have for it now has much to do with the fact that you see it every day and it depends on you. Being a cat owner, you probably ascribe more human characteristics to it than is justifiable.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I also thought of the original domestication of dogs when Banno introduced his furry babe magnet. My understanding was that dogs were useful at finding large prey, humans better at killing it. It was in the interest of dogs to ensure humans had excess food. Now they've evolved eyebrows to look sad. We're such suckers.
Would you describe your relationship to your goldfish as significantly altruistic? I don't understand why people have them at all, so I'm genuinely interested.
Those of a more philosophical disposition will disagree. The trouble with the explanation "God wills it" is that it is so uninspiring. It leads to nothing - even undermining prayer, since god will do as he pleases regardless.
It's the logic of this theology that offends. The will of god explains everything, and so tells us nothing.
Explaining all behaviour in terms of selfish genetics strikes me as adopting the same logic. Even if it is right, it is shallow.
Midgley provides a simple answer to your question, by the way. She says that genes may shape emotions, rather than shape behaviors directly, at least in this case. So the idea is that genes for general benevolence and empathy for other living beings may have been selected because they proved efficacious among social species. We spent most of our prehistorical time in the company of our siblings, and so did our social ancestors for millions of years. Therefore, a hypothetical predisposition for general kindness underwritten somewhere in our genome would have most of the times benefited a cousin or another [I]anyway[/i], in practice.
But sometimes, a human baby gets adopted by wolves, or a begonia by a human being, and it also 'gells'.
Damn! It was that simple!
But it isn't _all_ behaviour, is it. No one is claiming you have a gene to get a cat and feed a fish. Evolution deals with the origins of biological characteristics. If we have an intrinsic inclination toward altruism, which we do, it will have had some survival benefit in the past, and must be encoded in us genetically such that the trait can be inherited via chromosomes. Whether you get a dog, a cat, a fish or none of the above isn't a question about evolution, nor whether you give to a charity for the elderly, the disabled, rescue dogs or reforestation.
This is an outdated view. As Banno mentioned, it dove-tailed nicely with some 19th and 20th century outlooks, but it never had empirical backing. See the SEP article on adaptation for the basics of strategies for testing hypotheses about adaptation.
I'm really not sure why this is hard to understand.
Ba-dum-cheee
It does have ample, recent empirical backing, some of it enumerated with references in my thread on natural morality. You have to, you know, read the journals to know what they say.
Like the Bible? The Catholics have that too. Not all creationists are literalist nutjobs.
You are mistaken.
Did you check the references, or do you prefer to protect your position with ignorance?
And then there are those who rhetorically say they accept Evolution happened, and Darwin was maybe right about a thing or two, but if they feel the need to fill evolution with divine intervention to make the whole story work, they're probably also a kind of creationist.
Then there are people who don't directly interfere with the scientific claims of evolutionary biology, but they feel the need to add some metaphysical interpretation to it to make it compatible with their own religious beliefs. "Evolution is a process was used as a process to guide God's creation" or something along those lines. I don't think this counts as creationism. Saying that you need to be an atheist to also accept Evolution as scientific theory or else you're a creationist is a really high standard that I don't think works.
My position is the same as that of contemporary biology. Your's is of 19th Century biology.
Arent you curious about what scientists are saying today? It's fascinating stuff.
That wasn't the question. The point is rather that you don't need to reject evolution to be a creationist. Creationists believe in a creator, that is all.
Quoting frank
The contemporary biology you refuse to read, thus remain ignorant about
There is no contemporary research that says that if we have trait X, then X must provide a survival advantage.
Only neo-Nazis and Peterson incels believe otherwise.
As for the things he got wrong. I think that he would probably admit that he has changed his mind about a few things. But I think it is also important to consider how important it is for scientists to be wrong. We really never know if a theory is right or wrong. So all we can do is attack the theory until it has won the war of attrition against all objections. This means that the unsung heroes of science are all of those guys who sacrificed their careers and reputations by supporting the wrong positions. No Nobels for those guys. But no science without them.
To memory, this isn't what anyone calls a creationist. When people say creationist, they don't mean any belief in a religious God involved with the universe, they mean a belief system that rejects Evolution. Memory of every discussion involved with the term and quick googling seems to coincide with my definition. Clearly you had different experiences, so I'm very confused.
That you will bother reading. That's how ignorance yields stubbornly bad positions. If you're not going to do the research, keep quiet on the state of the art.
Quoting Saphsin
It was precisely the question:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Creationists like Catholics and even IDers don't reject evolutionary biology, although the latter bastardise it.
Quoting Saphsin
They mean a God who created the earth and stars and plants and animals. Some creationists, like many Catholics, believe that evolution is true, but does not apply to humans. Some, like IDers, believe evolution is true but guided by God. Some believe it is true en tout. It's just usually that the evolution/creationism argument is between fundamentalist nutjobs and evolutionary biologists. But we ought not tar everyone with the same brush. In fact, I lived with a creationist who believed in evolution.
This.
It's a nice book because it places more emphasis on experiment and observation, with some recent examples of empirical natural selection. It's aimed at first year undergraduates so it's not too technical. OUP iirc.
That is a good point, and I would add, given our genetic code, is it possible to even answer this question in a non self interested way?
Well that opens a whole can-o-worms. For those of us who view humans as devices to propagate genes, our purpose is to propagate genes. Can we transcend that particular purpose? Can we come up with a new purpose "in a non self interested way" until we understand how our brain, conscious and emotional, is processing information about our world?
Yeah, this was my original point: that Dawkins set scientific literacy back by an order of decades. Perhaps I ought to have said 'popular' literacy or somesuch. And as I said somewhere back there, science has indeed gone on chugging quite in spite of Dawkins' antiquated views. But of course everything you quoted from Pigluicci is exactly right: the reality of multi-level selection alone should make everything written by Dawkins a waste of anything but good fire kindling. Plasticity, evolvability, epigenetics - if you know any of this you know how laughable and unscientific the view set out in TSG is.
And I don't think the comparison to Quine is fair. Science doesn't work like philosophy. You don't study geocentrism in order to get a more rigorous sense of heliocentrism. You acknowledge that it once existed as a superfluous view, now ridiculously outdated, and you do the work of calculating the orbits without caring one iota for pre-copernican science. To the degree that Dawkins bothers me, it's no different from someone citing Ptolemy regularly and having it taken seriously as a 'strong setting out of a position to engage with, even if just to dispense with'. No. That's not how science works. You dump the old shit and forget about it.
I agree with how you explain humanity, but there must be a way. Consciousness is an evolving process of self organization so it seems it will at some point transcend this impasse. Can you think of a solution?
You're probably right, but I suppose I'm imagining the beginning of a research program, or the realization that a new theoretical framework is needed. The old framework should be determinate enough that it either won't accommodate new research or it is really obvious how uncomfortably they fit together. I suppose I'm kind of thinking of apo's vague and crisp thing, and crisp can help you advance by failing in a way that's easy to see and persuasive.
Of course, once you switch horses, the old horse is only worth thinking about for historical reasons or if the new horse runs into trouble that would make you wonder if the old horse had something to it that you should have brought along and that you can use in the new model, horse number three.
I can not think of a solution. But I am hopeful.
Is consciousness the key? It certainly seems to be at the forefront when we consider philosophy. But a lot of cognitive research seems to support the ancient notion that we are actually ruled by our emotions. So maybe emotions are the key. Meanwhile, perhaps we can take as a temporary purpose that we not destroy ourselves or our earth.
I was going to say this is wildly off-topic, but in a way it's not because Quine was a major force for naturalism in analytic philosophy and he pretty explicitly thought of philosophy as a kind of helper discipline for real sciences.
I'd always recommend the essays in Ontological Relativity and From a Logical Point of View as the place to start. He writes well, and he was probably the most influential American philosopher throughout the mid-century explosion of science and academic philosophy (coinciding with the spectacular growth of the American research university).
Consciousness is the central problem. It forms around and preserves the self. It is a process of self organisation. It is worth noting what the self is: the physical self operates through a belief system that exists in and evolves in a collective consciousness or culture. So what the self is, is to some extent drawn from the information surrounding the self. So self interest is not necessarily in conflict with the interest of one's family or community, or perhaps the world. Having said this, it is still centrally self interested, as it could not form around a central self disinterest. This would be a P.zombie, and they could indeed make dispassionate and rational choices as they are indifferent as to how the choices effect them, however in the process they forfeit consciousness and life, but a consciousness is never indifferent. Every instance of consciousness is an experience, and, as you say, ruled by emotion, which is either painful or pleasurable or something in between. Thus affected, it makes self interested choices, and Mary's article is a prime example.
I cannot see a solution within the materialistic paradigm either, as any solution requires messing with consciousness itself, which apparently dose not exist. It requires a paradigm shift to idealism, and then there may be more options.
Yes, very true. All scientists have been wrong so far, one way or another. But the dispute here is not really about genetics. It has ideological undertone. Three examples:
1. Research into the possible genetic basis of altruism was represented by Dawkins under a title referring to selfishness, against all logic. Why? Probably because this way it could sell better in the zeitgeist, and incidentally served to justify rightist policies, whereas the idea that evolution rewards altruism would presumably have had the opposite political effect.
2. The reason Midgley was furious about Gene the Shellfish was that it described human beings as slaves to their genes. Such full biological determinism is eminently ideological -- it tells people that they are not free -- and it's an ideology with dark history (eugenism, racism, slavery, nazism, etc.).
3. The reason Kenosha Kid here is willing to die on Dawkins hill is purely religious: Dawkins was an aggressive atheist, while his chief contradictor Gould was a benevolent agnostic who did not fancy attacking religion. And since the Kid is also an atheist, he sees Gould as a "bad guy" who dared to criticize his Atheist hero Dawkins. So he busies himself painting Gould as religious. He called him a "Creationist" and an "Orthodox Jew", against all evidence to the contrary.
All the posturing, spite and confusion on this thread are ideological in nature.
The irony of course is that if one takes Dawkins' seriously, one would have to subscribe to what amounts to a theological conception of evolutionary theory. From Evan Thompson's Mind in Life:
"Despite its modern scientific garb, the informational dualism expressed in these passages [of Dawkins and Daniel Dennett] is philosophically less sophisticated than the ancient form of dualism. In the ancient dualism of soul and body—as expressed, for example, in Plato's Phaedo—the soul (psyche) and the body (soma) interpenetrate and influence each other in the life led by the self. An impure body corrupts the soul; a pure one frees the soul. In contrast, in the new dualism [Dawkins writes], "information passes through bodies and affects them, but it is not affected by them on its way through." This notion of information as something that preexists its own expression in the cell, and that is not affected by the developmental matrix of the organism and environment, is a reification that has no explanatory value. It is informational idolatry and superstition, not science".
Dawkins is on the side of theology, not science.
But then, messy, undirected and random does not work for everybody. Some people, to this day, are still afraid about the idea that evolution has no direction, no predictability. It gives them vertigo. And I think this is why they are replacing "God the Creator" by "Gene the Selfish". Because you see, they need a boss.
Apparently you've never read it.
Quoting Olivier5
Science should not be religion-friendly. Religion-blind, sure. But Gould was a terrible scientist who appealed to non-scientists because he was more compatible with magical ideas of humans. His reputation within biology is appalling, and, while misrepresenting theory, he recast his pariah status as a martyr status, which appeals to paranoid lay people as the guy outside the institution telling the only truth is a greater religion than Christianity. But science is communal knowledge, not one voice.
He really did set the popular literature of the field back, misrepresenting it as in absolute chaos then plagiarising George Williams to appear to set it right again. Unfortunately he was no George Williams, never really got Darwin or comprehended the timescales he was dealing with, resulting in a theory in which organisms pretty much just appeared at random. This will never be respectable work in the evolutionary biology field, not explicitly because it matches how creationists like to characterise evolutionary theory, but because it's just flat-out wrong.
Decades later, Gould's idea still has no standing. Not that it matters. There was a New Yorker article by a biologist surveying the devastation Gould's bad science wrought on the field. I read a Comment article on it by a non-scientific Gould fan which can be summarised as : "Yeah, maybe. I'm still going to read him, though." At the end of the day, what's true is far less important that what feels right, and what feels right is always magical humans.
Case in point, actually... Midgley wrote A LOT against genetics, and in the above article alone there are several instances of her objection to the idea that human behaviour is influenced by human physical nature. Question: has anyone ever seen Midgley object to an evolutionary biologist description of bacterial behaviour? Of worm behaviour? Of mollusc behaviour? Of guppy behaviour? Of lizard behaviour? Of sparrow behaviour? Of squirrel behaviour?
I have not and I doubt it exists. I think that Midgley really doesn't have an offensive position on evolutionary biology at all. She has a defensive position on magical humans.
Don't confuse me with a sucker. I could already spot a fake philosopher when the book came out. I remember it took me about 2 seconds of analysis, as the thesis was relayed to me by a friend, to conclude it was scientifically absurd and morally jaundiced.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And yet you're not. The issue here is that Darwin can be weaponized against religion, and that Gould has blunt this weapon a tiny little bit. That's the only reason you are pissed off about him, and so blatantly unfair. Your passion about this is unhealthy; it comes from a dark place and it makes you do seriously objectionable shit.
No less a figure than John Maynard Smith:
As another leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said:
As evolutionary psychologist John Tooby attests:
His citations [2]:
I could go on. But this guy has already collated a good selection of biologists' views on SJG.
Augustine, whom I read recently is the third-most influential figure in the history of Christianity (behind Paul) had this to say:
in 430 AD! I wonder how Augustine would be received in the Bible Belt.
That explains all, thanks.
Quoting Olivier5
Anyone who blunts human curiosity, from the Holy Inquisition to the ID brigade, including SJG, will earn some measure of my contempt, sure.
I think this is about right, but it applies to both sides. Very disappointing.
Quoting Olivier5
It's true that The Selfish Gene is partly ideological—I think that all popular biology is inescapably ideological—but it's in the realm of Hobbes rather than Hitler, and with a certain liberal and "scientific rationalist" understanding of the Enlightenment. It has little in common with Nazism.
Because what you miss in the passage above is that Dawkins's moral and political message is that, thanks to our unique intelligence and scientific society, we are not slaves to our genes, that we are free—precisely the opposite of what you imply he's saying.
[quote=The Selfish Gene]We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.[/quote]
That's true - I was impressed by a TV appearance of Dawkins, in which he said:
[quote=Richard Dawkins]I very much hope that we don't revert to the idea of survival of the fittest in planning our politics and our values and our way of life. I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. It's undoubtedly the reason why we're here and why all living things are here. But to live our lives in a Darwinian way, to make a society a Darwinian society, that would be a very unpleasant sort of society in which to live. It would be a sort of Thatcherite society and we want to - I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.[/quote]
However, very shortly afterwards, and in the same interview, he says:
[quote=Richard Dawkins]Why we exist, you're playing with the word "why" there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, "why" in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like "Why down mountains exist?" as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe.[/quote]
Which I think clearly, if inadvertently, highlights the basic philosophical contradiction within Dawkins' view, which is that what an Aristotelian would call 'efficient and material causes' are the only real causes. It is precisely the idea of 'final cause' - 'the reason that something exists' - that has been eliminated, in Dawkins' understanding, in keeping with modern philosophical naturalism generally. And so effectively, that he can't even understand why someone would ask such a question as 'why are we here?'
So, had I been an audience member, I would have posed the question: given that you agree that Darwinian reasoning is an insufficient basis for morality, what kind of alternative would you consider, given that you have also devoted the whole later part of your career to arguing against the religious rationale for morality?
That's fair. Or he might be saying that there is no use looking for a "why" in the way that we look for causes in science (or even religion), and that we have to use our own intelligence and our eminently reasonable liberal values to decide on our own existential purpose. In which case, he might not be entirely rejecting final causes, but merely separating them from science.
I'm not saying Dawkins was a nazi. I am saying that the reason Widgley was furious is that she spotted (or believed she did spot) an echo of social Darwinism in his book.
Quoting jamalrob
How can machines be free, though? By science? So science tells them human machines that it's rational to be altruistic with other human machines who are related to them, and not with, say, human machines that are very different from them genetically. And therefore??? science tells them human machines to fight their natural racist tendencies? Like, why? If being racist is rational and natural, why should it be avoided?
Of course it does. You're a sucker for snake oil salesmen of fake certainties, when I'm not.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Not shown. Knowing that it's not a meaningful question does not imply not understanding the question. Everyone, even the most level-headed atheist, has to deal with the same feelings of feeling special, destined, more than a bunch of chemicals hewn from death and catastrophe. The trick is to not mistake this with knowledge.
Saying it is 'nothing more than feelings' begs the question - it presumes that the notion of final cause can only be a matter of feeing, but that presumption is itself part of what is at issue in this debate.
What I'm pointing out is that Dawkins quite reasonably rejects Darwinian thinking as a basis for social or individual morality. And yet the latter part of his career mainly comprises dissolving the traditional basis for morality in what his colleague Dennett calls 'the acid of Darwin's dangerous idea'. So - how to avoid nihilism? If the universe really is purposeless, and we just blind robots enacting the program of selfish genes, what is the philosophical basis for a humane culture?
And I think that is an extremely well-worded description of the problem. And any explanation is going to seem like it's about something else, not 'I'. This is why Midgley and the like never criticise evolutionary genetics descriptions of ants or beavers. No one has a subjective experience of being either that, taken at face value, will appear different to the science. But for humans it's different. Any scientific explanation for, say, why humans love spending time by the water is always going to be compared to the feeling of being by the water, and qualitatively they do not correlate. We can acknowledge the survival benefit of living near water, but that's an intellectual experience, not an emotional one.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well let's be clear... He does not reject Darwinian explanations for moral instincts. He rejects the idea that how genes behave has anything to do with how people do or should behave. The Selfish Gene itself takes the view that humans are altruistic, not circumstantially but genetically. That those genes behave as metaphorically srlf-interested parties cannot yield the conclusion that our genes make us inherently selfish, although we are that too.
Quoting Wayfarer
If we accept the genetic basis of evolution and accept evolution (if), are we really robots behaving according to instruction? Mostly, perhaps. Most of the things you do you are not aware of, and most of your decisions aren't really rational. You've largely had the problem of survival taken out of your hands, so most of the things you would, in hunter-gatherer times, have had to be aware of are no longer in your world. As a result we have a lot of spare capacity for thought and the freedom to do with that as we choose.
This question of non-essential meaning is best answered by existentialism, a point I touched on in my natural morality thread. Like morality, the question of what meaning we should find for ourselves arises precisely because we are living in an environment starkly different from anything that had any bearing on our evolution, thus evolution cannot answer the question. Hunter-gatherers likely did not have these profound questions.
Hunter-gatherers still exist, and they may ask themselves more profound questions than you think, thank you very much.
By all means, offer a counter-example.
Quoting jamalrob
That's great that he had a positive message. Unfortunately, his approach has been shown by evolutionary biology to be wrong. We don't have to daydream that science can help us escape from becoming Nazis. There is no basis for believing that our nature is something we need to turn against.
So it could be that Nazism is a disease that we haven't learned to cure yet, and that loving, caring, critters are down there inside us waiting for that day.
Quoting Luther Standing Bear
Isn't this just the central dogma? Just because we call it a "dogma" doesn't mean there's any idolatry or superstition here.
[hide="pointless aside"]That whole quote from Thompson is just argument by analogical paraphrase, carrying along connotations from a purity/impurity opposition that isn't even mentioned. Why do you like this sort of stuff? I would have thought you had gotten over a taste for Derrida long ago.[/hide]
Here's something that if I were educated I would have already known:
Quoting Wikipedia
Dawkins has said he should really have called it "The Immortal Gene". Just a tiny bit more evidence that while Dawkins may be narrow-minded about biology, he was trying to represent what seemed to him forty years ago to be quite mainstream views distilled in memorable and understandable form.
But there's an interesting existential element here, arising from the fact that non-hunter-gatherer lifestyles were thrust upon his people.
Another that occurred to me was when I went hunting with a tribe in Tanzania. It was a show, really. Sure, they did live that way to an extent. They lived in mud huts and killed birds with sharpened sticks. But what we were seeing was how they negotiated with a non-hunter-gatherer world. It was, in reality, capitalism: they took their way of life and turned it into money to buy things from traders.
You should read people like Levi Strauss, who lived with hunter-gatherer tribes still living as hunter gatherers. Obviously there's still going to be some effect of dealing with a European, but it's not as stark or tragic.
I've read quite a lot of Levi Strauss, and he too speaks of complex knowledge systems and forms of science among hunter-gatherers. In fact, those guys need to be far smarter and knowledgeable than we need to be to survive. Don't underestimate them.
-- Hillel
Oh, I don't. The problem is, once again, you didn't read what I wrote.
That hunter gatherers do not have existential crises about their ethical or executive freedoms. Showing that native Americans preferred their prior existence is hardly relevant.
Nope. You said:
(my bolding)
I presented quotes about the meaning of our lives, as parts of nature, from a Native American writer, including one directly impinging on the questions raised by this thread ("lack of respect for growing, living things soon lead to a lack of respect for humans").
Yes, that's what I meant by executive freedom. What you posted was a man regretting that his hunter-gatherer existence had been overturned by a more powerful non-hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That's not pertinent. What would be pertinent would be data from actual hunting and gathering tribes that had never been otherwise that showed existential doubt about the meanings of their lives or how they should behave with one another. If you know of anything I'd be interested, not for this thread; for something else.
I am. You're missing the point. What I want to know about is not former hunter gatherers reminiscing, but actually hunter gatherers with existential angst. I've given up on you ever understanding and am looking into myself.
I have, for the other thread quite extensively. Hunter-gatherer tribes tend to have strict, fairly static ethics and ways of life. There is typically no disagreement on what is right and good. I've seen zero evidence that hunter gatherers worry about the meanings of their lives.
What part of "This concept of life and its relations was humanizing and gave to the Lakota an abiding love. It filled his being with the joy and mystery of living; it gave him reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all" did you fail to see, read, or understand?
The difference between A) a hunter-gatherer tribe which knows of no other existence, small, close groups based on cooperation and like-mindedness, and B) a hunter-gatherer group destroyed by a more powerful non-hunter-gatherer group, forced to adopt a completely different lifestyle based on less egalitarian and fair-minded principles, does not seem subtle to me. In fact it seems immense. How is it that no matter how often you look at this difference, you completely miss it?
And how the heck are we supposed to know of a tribe who knows of no other existence??????
:gasp:
How could it not? My suggestion to Wayfarer was the sort of existential doubt about meaning he discussed, and about morality as discussed in the thread I mentioned, would not likely occur in hunter-gatherer groups. Your quote if anything supports this, since his ode to his former way of life is very sure about its correctness.
Quoting Olivier5
As I already explained to you, less invasive contact with hunter-gatherer tribes, e.g. Levi Strauss, while still not ideal, would be informative.
The particular thing I was just looking into was how peaceful tribes become warrior tribes. Anthropological evidence suggests that the default reaction to another tribe is one of mutual respect and reciprocal altruism: an extension of how individuals within a single tribe treat each other. Tribes only tend to become hostile to other tribes only once they've encountered a warrior tribe. (War is a cancer.)
What would be interesting is how they handle the transition. Is there disagreement, schism? Does anyone think what they're doing is wrong? And if so is it merely transitory? That's an example of existential doubt in a hunter-gatherer tribe.
Did I miss Rand? I thought we were working from left to right.
And you are very sure of your own correctness too, so this is nor here nor there... The question of Wayfarer had to do with the meaning of life and final causes as potentially valid questions. It never was about doubting your way of life in some form of extreme existential angst... You keep losing the plot.
Will watch.
Ever see The Gods Must Be Crazy?
At one point they go with a group of French hunters dressed up in fluorescent garb to avoid killing one another (:pray:) and with a number of barking dogs, and then the two chiefs look at one another in disbelief, and one says: "Bunch of fools. They never going to kill anything dressed up like that. All the animals can see and hear them..."
Sounds cool and I will watch -- does the filmmaker explain in the film how he came to be doing this? If so, I'll see it, but if not I'd be curious.
I'm going to start a thread in the Lounge for documentary recommendations, starting with this one.
One of the things that really dawns on you watching is how easy it is to misinterpret strange customs from afar, but also in all fairness, the efforts that those guys really invest in understanding what they see. They need to be able to explain the country to their family and friend when they come back (as any normal explorator must do, and you also see some of that restitution at home in the documentary), and therefore they really try to see a lot and probe their subject with questions. They try to be fair and evidence-based in their judgement.
So the whole problem with TSG is the title.
Quoting Olivier5
I think you are giving Dawkins and Darwin too much credit. We had eugenism, racism, slavery, nazism, etc. long before either (OK, maybe the Romans didn't call themselves Nazis).
Yes, full biological determinism certainly leads to some very problematical conclusions. But that isn't a good enough reason to reject the theory of gene selection. The question is: Is the theory correct or incorrect? If the theory is correct, then we have to figure out how to deal with that reality. We can't reject the science just because we don't like the result.
I suppose this title represents the book's thesis, no? My point is that there is something fishy about his presentation of a theory about the possibility that altruism was selected naturally, under a title that says the exact opposite...
Quoting flaco
Yes but not a scientific theoretical basis for same.
Darwin provided some people with a scientific theoretical basis for theories of racial superiority/inferiority (survival of the fittest organism). By shifting emphasis to gene selection, Dawkins demonstrated how natural selection can support altruism.
1. The demonstration was not his but from Hamilton and Price.
2. Price's math is actually based on kin selection, a form of group selection. The exclusive focus on genes is misleading.
3. For some yet unknown reason, Dawkins misrepresented the thesis in his book, turning a work on altruism into a book on the selfishness of genes.
This is still the book you assessed in 2 seconds without reading, right?
It does strike me as odd. Even the idea of the zeitgeist doesn't quite cut it: I've read enough of his socio-political protestations to see that he doesn't sit easily with Milton and Thatcher... There must be something else.
Back to cats. Or rather, to the genes of Toxoplasma gondii. This little plasmid is responsible for the rise of civilisation, which it did simply in order to reproduce its genes. It found a way to make rats like the smell of cat urine. This enabled it to move from its accustomed habitat, the rat, to its favoured reproductive host, the cat. Once it had mastered the trick of changing the way mammals think, it went big time and moved host to humans, convincing them to look after cats. The need to look after cats led to agriculture, so that there was a plentiful supply of grain for the mice and rats that form the cat's diet.
You know it's true.
Behold, your true master:
Everything comes back to cats. Even aliens, as this Nazca Lines image shows. Or maybe it shows cats are aliens. I forget which.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-peru-unveils-giant-cat-etching.html
We seem to be talking past each other. Dawkins' exact point is that the unrelenting statistical imperative for genes to produce organisms that are likely to propagate more copies of the genes does not necessarily lead to selfish behavior in the organisms that carry those genes. Note the difference between genes and organisms that carry the genes. There is no contradiction.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes. It is at odds with the thesis of the book. In his forward to the second edition he expresses his regret for making that particular statement.
yet 'the altruistic gene' doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
Dawkins and his ilk are generally tone-deaf to the existential plight of h. sapiens. Indeed, they show no awareness of what an existential plight might consist of. They ridicule religion as 'failed empirical hypothesis' but it was never intended as that to begin with. And for those who never thought that the Bible was literally true in the first place, the fact that it's *not* literally true doesn't have the devastating philosophical implications that Dawkins hopes for. Again, his is a kind of mirror image of the very fundamentalism that he criticizes.
The Virus of Faith
Fair enough. It's still an odd mistake to make.
The only other motive I can think of is religious. It's a bit far-fetched. The idea is that Darwin has always been used by atheists against religionists (as is fair I believe) not least by Dawkins. Now, Dawkins might have wanted to publish a book about Price and Hamilton's research on the theoretical heritability of altruist behaviors. The work was a conceptual breakthrough in sociobiology and deserved sharing. But no doubt that the publication of a book entitled "The Altruist Gene" would have given arguments to the ID folks, Dawkins' arch-enemies... They would have chanted "God gave use the genes of altruism, hallelujah" till kingdom come. Hence the thesis had to be presented in a cold, materialist manner, not in a manner that gives any hope to them "magic thinkers".
Well that wouldn't make sense, because the "selfish gene" is not a "gene for selfishness".
Quoting Wayfarer
But that would be perfectly reasonable. Evolutionary biologists are not in the business of existential plights, nor should they be. What you do with the you you've been given is part of that gift. You can thank evolution for being able to breathe in your sleep; your life choices are on you.
Quoting Wayfarer
Actually, I've read The God Delusion and his target is not non-literalist Christians. The poorly named 'militant atheism' movement is not a reaction against people finding meaning by going to church. It's a reaction against people trying to ban scientific education in schools and replace it with creationism claiming to be science. I'm sure you'll agree that is not a good thing.
I thought of bringing this up when you mentioned you're a cat owner, but then I remembered that Toxoplasma gondii tends to effect men in the opposite way, and you come off as guy.
In that case they should stick to their knitting and not write books which end up in the Religion section of the bookstore.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Dawkins' attitude to what he condescendingly refers to as intellligent believers, is that they only soften things up for the fundamentalists whom he thinks characterise actual religion. When the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, was awared the Templeton Prize a few years ago, you know that Dawkins compared him to Quisling? Even Peter Higgs is on the record saying that he sees Dawkins as an anti-religious fundamentalist.
If Dawkins only had flat-earthers, young-earth creationism and deranged jihadis in his sights I would have no problems agreeing with him, but he's on a mission to convert. He says at the beginning ot TGD that he hopes that Christians who pick up the book put it down as non-believers. Had the rather opposite effect on me, as I thought it was so philosophically specious I re-examined many of the traditional apologist arguments, and found them vastly superior.
Not in my bookstore.
Be that as it may, why should he?
What is Richard Dawkins allowed to write about?
What sorts of things is he allowed to write about what he is allowed to write about?
I assume you're not especially threatened by his participation in the great discussion of religion or spirituality; you disagree and you may even think he argues, so to speak, in bad faith.
But none of this is a threat to your views, so why do you care what he says?
This was the context:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So I was saying that if he's not in the business of existential plights, then perhaps it would be wise to stick to his knitting, and not ill-informed anti-religious polemics.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's a philosophical discussion on the merits or otherwise of Mary Midgley's criticism of Dawkins. In a broader sense, it's also a discussion of the influence of evolutionary biology on society and culture.
Which you would prefer evolutionary biologists not participate in. Cool.
I perhaps did not anticipate having to make this clarification and should have: evolutionary biologists are not in the business of existential plights in their capacity as evolutionary biologists. What they do in their free time is all part of that freedom. It doesn't follow that evolutionary biology in particular is obliged to answer questions about environments that evolution itself has not been privy to. If it has no bearing on our genetic heritage, there will be a limited answers from genetics.
That said, while we are an animal evolved in one environment now living in another, we are still that animal, so the answer is never completely independent of our genetic heritage either. If we accept the genetic basis of evolution and the truth of evolution, that is
We're the rational animal, and that's a difference that makes a difference. Saying we're just an animal, or just a species, is the epitome of biological reductionism, of which Dawkins is a prime exemplar.
Do you think the principles that reason recognises - the law of the excluded middle, and so on - are 'the product' of evolutionary biology? I would say, of course not. H. sapiens evolved, no doubt whatever, but at the point of being able to realise such abstract truths, escaped the bounds of biological evolution, became something more than what biological evolution can explain (as Alfred Russel Wallace said.) No other species can contemplate the meaning of the Universe (let alone weigh and measure it!) But biological reductionism wishes to say that our capacity to carry out these astonishing tasks is something like an adaptation in the service of genetic proliferation. Have a read of Thomas Nagel's essay Evolutionary Reductionism and the Fear of Religion.pdf. Nagel professes atheism, but he has no trouble spotting the deep contradiction at the heart of these arguments.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Of course they can participate in the subject, they're principle stakeholders. But Richard Dawkins was one of the so-called 'New Atheists', the others being Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who launched a series of anti-religious polemical books in the early 2000's. None of those books were informed by evolutionary biology so much as by a visceral hatred of anything religious and weaponising biological theory to attack it. That was what Mary Midgely - who was also not a religious apologist of any stripe - was criticising. And she was right on the money, in my view.
:up:
It's the dogma, but it's what Dawkins draws from the dogma - what he thinks it entails - that's quite literally unscientific. Actually theological. To put the problem as starkly as can be: genes don't exist. Or, less provocatively, the individuation of genes can only be processual, not structural. Here's Evelyn Fox Keller:
"One gene can be employed to make many different proteins, and indeed the expression “one gene–many proteins” has become fairly common in the literature. The problem with this formulation is that the gene has lost a good deal of both its specificity and its agency. Which protein should a gene make, and under what circumstances? And how does it choose? In fact, it doesn’t. Responsibility for this decision lies elsewhere, in the complex regulatory dynamics of the cell as a whole. It is from these regulatory dynamics, and not from the gene itself, that the signal (or signals) determining the specific pattern in which the final transcript is to be formed actually comes" (The Century of the Gene)
And once you take these environmental dynamics into account, the dogma loses much of it's explanatory power. In fact Derrida - who, hey, you invoked - is pretty bloody apropos here. The Derridian geneticist says: there is no outside the cellular environment (or, more accurately, the developmental system). Il n'y a pas de hors environnement cellulaire. Fox Keller again:
"Fifteen years ago, the historian and philosopher of biology Richard Burian observed, “There is a fact of the matter about the structure of DNA, but there is no single fact of the matter about what the gene is.” In the interim, things have only gotten worse ... As Peter Portin observes, “Our knowledge of the structure and function of the genetic material has outgrown the terminology traditionally used to describe it. It is arguable that the old term gene, essential at an earlier stage of the analysis, is no longer useful.” William Gelbart, working at the forefront of molecular genetics, concurs in suggesting that the gene might be “a concept past its time.” “Unlike chromosomes,” Gelbart writes, “genes are not physical objects but are merely concepts that have acquired a great deal of historic baggage over the past decades.”
I know this is just a bunch of quotes, but in lieu of actually detailing the complexities of gene expression, the point is that the problem with Dawkins lies at the level of the individuation of gene, let alone all the rubbish about 'it' being 'selfish'.
That all sounds fine, and pretty typical for how science, ahem, evolves, particularly the Portin quote:
What I don't see is
1. Any evidence that Dawkins was misrepresenting the consensus of the early 70s.
2. Even if he were, that his doing so was "unscientific".
It's (2) that matters, that you have repeatedly accused Dawkins of, and you could be right, I just still don't know why you think that. If by the early 70s all the cool kids were already abandoning the idea of "the gene" and Dawkins was some fuddy-duddy who insisted no, the genetics he knew was good enough for his grandfather and good enough for him, you'd have at least part of a case -- still just that Dawkins's views were old-fashioned or outmoded, and even then you'd have more work to do before it seems fair to say there's a commitment to the old framework that amounts unscientific religious idolatry.
I'm still pressing this because even in this post you call Dawkins's view "unscientific" and "theological" and I still have no idea why that is what you want to say, instead of just saying genetic theory has moved on. Who else goes on the "unscientific" list? Everyone who contributed to the modern synthesis? Or is it just the work Dawkins was promoting -- Williams, Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Trivers, et al. -- or just Dawkins himself?
Yes thanks but I already know who Richard Dawkins is.
What I didn't know, and am frankly gobsmacked to learn, is that Mary Midgley attacked Dawkins back in 1979 (when Sam Harris was 12) on precisely the grounds that in the coming decades he and those other rascals would get up to all this mischief. That's not only prescient, but awfully generous of her to object so strongly to their future weaponising of biology against religion despite not having a pony in that race. What puzzles me though is why she would cast her objection in the form of a tendentious misreading of The Selfish Gene.
I thought they were badges or insignia, or communication devices like on Star Trek.
I'm aware of your position, hence my qualification. As far as I see it, in terms of evolutionary history, it makes no difference at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that anything that living organism does has that organism's genetic heritage as a pre-requisite. In order to discover the law of the excluded middle, we need a biological capacity for reason. In order to have that, it must have evolved in our ancestors. In order for that to be true, it must have had a survival benefit. This does not determine that the law would be discovered, merely that it _could_ be discovered.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sounds like magic again.