To Hell with my Genes!

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

Honestly, Dawkins' gene metaphors suggest nothing to me beyond a new perspective of reproductive fitness. To equate this to some genetic volition is reading way too much into his statements. Dawkins explicitly cautions against this fallacy in Unweaving and berates other scientists in their misuse of poetic metaphor. I wonder, if neoDarwinism is in so much danger, why resort to this level of argumentation?

I am not an ontogenist, nor a scientist, so I cannot speak to the meritability of your references, although others here are more equiped to address those challenges, than I. It seems to me, however, that your time would be best spend producing arguments rather than rebarbative accusations. I hope that is not too much to ask. Please consider the differing levels of understanding present in the community.

Timothy Schoonover · Sophomore Joined: 22 Nov 2002 Posts: 269 Gender:

Sqwark

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of a discussion community. If you have something to discuss you are welcome to create a thread and address whatever issue is on your mind, but I think you will find that hi-jacking a popular thread with hostile and off-topic rhetoric in order to promote your personal beliefs is an excellent way to earn a rather unsavory reputation.

It may surprise you to discover that I, as well as most of the community, simply do not have the time or energy to thoroughly research the claims of every poster's "extensive research." I do not think it is unreasonable or characteristic of laziness to request that you make a case for your point of view by participating in our discussions. That is what we're here for afterall.

What I find most amusing is the defensive nature of your responses given that I have yet to express opposition to Larmarkism or Epigenetics. In fact this thread wasn't even about the validity of selfish gene theory, it was about its compatibility with a humanistic worldview. Apparently you missed that point, and barged in, issuing provocative language and looking for a scuffle. You'll have to forgive us simple, ignorant, and lazy folk if we do not buy into your "dogma" act.

So my advice to you is to create your own thread with your own topic and discuss it there with those individuals not driven away by your rebarbative badinage (whoops I said it again). That is assuming you are able to tolerate discussion.

wmmurrah · Almost a regular Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 28 Gender:

Tim,

While I agree that your argument presented in post 197 is speculative to some extent I must say that I feel the same way. Human consciousness is a result of evolutionary processes. Humans have evolved the ability to makes choices. This is most likely a better strategy for survival, for both the genes and the individuals. Just as sexual reproduction in many ways was more adaptive than asexual reproduction and proliferated the planet

Also, I think many of us are caught up with this free will vs. determinism concept. Both these ideas were created by humans to understand the world. But our level of understanding the world has developed to the point that maybe these concepts are outdated. IOW, maybe the answer to the question "do we have free will or are we merely pawns to determinism?" is "neither." Maybe reality lies outside these two concepts. I remember in graduate school the big debate being nature vs nurture, how much do each influence who we are. But I believe this dichotomous concept is also misleading. Both play an integral role. THey are two ways of looking at the same thing. (I'm sure we can discuss this more while reading next months book

)

My point is that when concepts are no longer useful we must be willing to give them up. And such concepts as those we are speaking about are only useful if the describe reality. So maybe the question should be "is reality a free will vs determinism dichotomy?" I personally suspect not.

wmmurrah · Almost a regular Joined: 03 Feb 2003 Posts: 28 Gender:

Sqwark,

I do not understand how selfish gene theory is incompatible with the idea that humans have free will and can control their destiny. Could you please explain this to me?

Louis42 · Eligible to vote! Joined: 06 May 2003 Posts: 18 Gender:

wmmurrah

Sqwark seems to have dropped off the radar, so here's my two cents worth:

I think that most opposition to the selfish gene idea (theory is perhaps a strong word) is based on an unresolved cognitive dissonance dating back to around the mid 1800s. This dissonance is present in almost all modern educated people, with a few exceptions (these exceptions are mainly weirdos who participate in online book discussion forums), and it goes as follows:

1) I know that I am an organism belonging to a species which arose through millions of years of selective evolution, and that every aspect of my phenotype is in fact simply an adaptation that allowed my ancestors to survive the conditions they lived in.

2) I also know that I am capable of rational thought, and that the decisions I make are "free", in the sense that I could always have done otherwise. I know that my education allows me to consider these decisions in a rational way, and to arrive at objective conclusions.

Although it may not seem so at first, these two ideas are incompatible. If I am a genetically determined organism, I should be designed to make decisions in the most cost-effective and survival-ensuring way, which is certainly not an expected characteristic of the purely rational moral agent of Kant's fantasy. There is in fact no plausible adaptationist rationale for a Kantian moral sense to ever evolve (although the moral philosophies of Hume are perhaps more accessible to natural selection.) The real dilemma most educated people face is between what psychology and genetics are telling them that they are and what their subjective intuitions would seem to indicate (I say educated people because uneducated people are usually either unaware of or willing to discount the psychology and genetics, and are also not so wrapped up in the Kantian ideal of a perfect rational agent.)

Efforts to reconcile this discontinuity have recently begun to surface, with some claiming that free will is an illusion and doesn't actually exist, and others (such as Dennett) have argued that free will can arise as a product of culture (more or less, I won't reproduce his argument in full, since it essentially occupies his whole book.) I, for one, find these arguments unconvincing so far, but perhaps that is only because so much of the science is still missing. We'll probably get to go over these ideas in much more detail when we read Pinker's latest.

That's the long answer...the short answer is that Dawkins isn't the most restrained writer there is, and passages such as this one may contribute to misinterpretations of his idea:

"Now they [the replicators] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, [...]"

Anyway, just a thought, really

Edited by: Louis42 at: 6/22/03 9:10 pm

Meme Wars

Sqwark:I have yet to read Rainbows (it's on order) but he certainly employs this type of double back flip liberally in all his other work, reassuring us at the end of River Out of Eden that we can overcome the tyranny of our genes, yet without saying how this might be possible when their pre-eminence is his entire thesis.

Meme Wars: Dawkins has suggested several times in his writings that even though genes have created the environment for the appearance of a new replicator called "memes" or social units of replication, these new replicators seem to be setting themselves free of genes.

An example is celebate priests. It is true that genes are not being passed on by the priest, but what the priest can do that others cannot due to their commitment to spouse and children, is pass on the religious memes into many adult and children brains. In this sense, memes have co-opted genes for its own self replication. It is through the meme-complex called self that we can set ourselves free of genes.

sqwark: NeoDarwinism has dispensed with the organism in favour of the gene, and yet this gene-centricism itself is not treated with proper scientific qualification, so hamstrung is the ideology by its own dogma.

The current research from molecular biology increasingly suggests that Lamarckian processes are at work as a direct response of the organism to its environment, and that neither organisms nor evolution are just a random collection of bits and bytes made intelligible by an all-seeing natural selection (which after all is an abstract term to describe something which has worked - it doesn't actually 'explain' anything).

Meme Wars: Genes in multi-celled organisms must pass through the bottleneck of meiosis, where they are only passed on through sexual recombination. These genes are unalterable at conception, meaning the environment of the individual organism cannot influence or alter the code of its offspring. This is why selection does not operate out of the organism or in group selection. Their program has already been predetermined at conception. Females are already born with about 40,000 immature eggs through meiosis and are not altered through the life of the female. Another surprising fact is that virtually all multi-celled sexual creatures are born with about 40,000 eggs, irrespective of the fact that larger organisms such as man and elephant may ovulate only about 200 to 300 of these eggs in their lifetime. This argues against Creationism or intelligent design and argues for the relatedness of all species that employs sex as a means of propagation.

Memes on the other hand do not depend on Mieosis or sex to spread itself to the next generation. Just as viruses also do not depend on sex for replication. Memes spread by cultural imitation, not sex. Viruses spread by social contact of some kind. On the other hand, the Bacteria mitochondria in each of our cells does not participate in sexual mixing of genes. Yet it is also dependent on the bottleneck of sexual transmission as a channel for replication beyond the organism.

There is no credible scientific evidence for the manipulation of genes in the sex cells by the organism, therefore, genes are the prime element involved in evolution, not the individual or groups of individuals. It is between genes and environment.

Meme Wars
montyquest@aol.com

PeterDF · Freshman Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 214 Gender:

There seem to be two distinct areas of debate addressed in this thread. First is the alleged undermining of a moral or ethical framework by the Selfish Gene idea. The second is the perennial problem of free will verses genetic determinism.

For what it’s worth let me chip in with my views. I’ll keep this “bite sized” and only deal with the first argument here.

As I understand it most of us on this forum would not accept the premise that moral values were in some way handed out like sweets, by some omnipotent sweetshop owner. (if you live on the left-hand side of the map substitute candy for sweet). Therefore it follows that morality must have emerged as a kind of by-product of the emergence of the human mind or because we are innately predisposed to understand the concept of morality. As monkeys and apes have codes and conventions to enable to manage their social interactions it seems that what humans have is a natural outgrowth of these kinds of behaviours. This implies that the latter reason seems most likely to be the right one. The selfish gene idea helps us to understand why these behaviours have emerged. As a result of Dawkin’s presentation of this idea (which strictly speaking was developed by the great evolutionary biologist William Hamilton) we are better informed, and better able to see how those forces that brought our species into existence act.

Dualism currently seems to be out of fashion – perhaps understandably when one considers Descartes version of it - but perhaps there is need for a different kind of dualistic approach to resolve the problem under discussion. I have developed a metaphor for defining the dualistic system I have in mind, which I have called the “Humanity Horizon”. I believe that Humanity Horizon dualism is appropriate because there are two entirely distinct agendas: as human beings our principle concern is that we achieve health, wealth and happiness (Our US friends might want to insert the word liberty here too). From the perspective of the genes the agenda is completely different ---- all that is important is the simple requirement of propagation. (Although I accept that their means of achieving propagation is often far from simple.)

We can think of the soap opera of human interaction as taking place above the humanity horizon. Up here we can think of it as our world, in which we can define our own moral imperatives, make our own laws, and if we chose we can defy the gene's agenda, (by using contraception for example) leaving the cold, calculating mechanistic world of the Selfish Gene/Blind Watchmaker below the horizon.

What the underworld below the horizon has to do with ethics and morality is illustrated best when one considers the most basic tenet of the human moral agenda: the right to life. It is clear that in nature - and therefore in the world below the humanity horizon - there is no right to life.

I think that one can safely draw the conclusion that we can draw no moral imperatives from below the humanity horizon. We acquire our importance as sentient beings by means of our emotional connection between each other, our subjective response to the world in which we find ourselves, and through whatever principles we individually hold to be true. None of this has anything to do with the entirely distinct agenda of selfish genery. Because the world below the horizon operates as a purely mechanistic system we could no more derive moral guidance from it than one could derive moral imperatives from the workings of a car engine.

However it should be clear that if we are to understand the origin of humanity, what makes us what we are and more importantly how our genetic conditioning makes us behave, especially when it makes us behave inappropriately, we must seek answers below the humanity horizon. I see evolutionary psychology as the science of investigating the world below the horizon.

This is an incredible and extraordinary time to be alive! For the first time in the long history of humankind we can begin to understand the forces that shaped us into the species we are. I think one might consider “The Selfish Gene”. “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Extended Phenotype as a trilogy of books which – uniquely – define the workings of the world below the humanity horizon. I think of them as being of incalculable importance to our understanding of our place in the Universe. “River out of Eden” and “Climbing Mount Improbable” clarify and expand the concept. Others might disagree but I see “Unweaving the Rainbow” as being different in that it deals with how we find beauty, wonder and meaning in our world above the humanity horizon without lapsing into false mysticism, theism and baseless spiritualism. Dawkin's latest 'A Devils Chaplain' is more eclectic and a somewhat different species of book.

The important thing to realise is that we can learn much from delving below the humanity horizon in our quest to understand what it means to be human. There may be ways in which we might have to redefine our view of what it is to be a human. But what it can never do is devalue our humanity because that exists where it always was: up here above the horizon. Are we different beings to what we were before before Dawkins wrote his books? Are we less than we were ? No - on both counts.

It may be that we will learn that some aspects of our behaviour are inappropriate in the very different context of the world we live in today as compared to the one we evolved to fit. But we humans - at least in terms of genealogical time - are what we are; what we always were; and what we always will be. The proposition of the selfish gene idea can not change what we are; it can only enrich and deepen our understanding of what it means to be us.


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