Ch. 2 - Genetic Determination and Gene Selectionism

[Chris OConnor]

Ch. 2 - Genetic Determination and Gene Selectionism

[Interbane]

I'm reading this book a bit slowly and have only just now finished this chapter. This chapter expresses Dawkin's frustration with being misunderstood as a genetic determinist. For example, men are more genetically likely to be promiscuous. This would leave some women who have been cheated on to be susceptible to the argument that it's genetic and the guy can't help it. Dawkins goes on to list the large number of other factors that should be included in any determinist perspective.

If we taught girls to play with GI Joes instead of boys, then it wouldn't be so misleading that gender plays a deterministic role in our behavioral tendencies toward toys. The point is there are many other factors influencing behavior than genes. Also, it's necessary to say that genes influence behavior rather than determine them.

[DWill]

Neither of my local library systems ever bought this book, which seems wrong. I hope to get a hold of it, though. It seems no matter what RD says, people don't believe him. He's made it about as clear as he can that he sees us as the animals who have been able to escape the bounds of our genes--not entirely, of course, but to a still significant degree. He sees culture as our creation, which in itself precludes genetic determinism. But because he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene, and because he talks about humans occasionally in that book (since we are animals), people understand him as saying it is our nature to be selfish. What he is saying, regarding humans, is that we don't have a nature in the same way that cultureless animals do; our nature has acquired a considerable plasticity.

It is also questionable whether the scenario he describes in The Selfish Gene qualifies as deterministic at all. Determinism, to have any real meaning, would be a case of a single gene or genetic unit controlling a behavioral outcome. This does happen in the case of discrete physical features, but that is not what people mean by determinism. They mean behavior that is determined. Dawkins tells us about the extremely complex environment that genes have in relation to other genes in the genome. Before the outside environment ever gets to act on the individual 'gene machine,' there is an environment within that greatly influences how genes will be expressed. The word 'determinism' just seems wrong to me for this genetic dance that goes on during embryonic formation.

[Interbane]

Well said. Do you believe that the universe in hard determinism?

[DWill]

Well said. Do you believe that the universe in hard determinism?

I didn't understand the question.

[Robert Tulip]

Well said. Do you believe that the universe in hard determinism?

I didn't understand the question.

Interbane has not constructed his question with correct grammar. I think he means 'do you believe the universe is deterministic?'

On this question, the answer is obviously yes, in that the inverse square law of gravity determines the motion of matter through space and time.

Human freedom is tiny by comparison to the immense deterministic forces of the universe. If the units of evolution are genes, then Dawkins is right in comparing our lives as flotsam of the sun to the leaves of trees. Leaves grow and die each year while the tree lives on, just as human beings are just one unique collection of genes which have been through thousands and even millions or billions of bodies. Our oldest genes have been carried around the galaxy a dozen times by the gravity of the sun. If the sun is like a tree of life, then people are like its leaves. Over deep time, the deterministic forces of matter are decisive.

Yet, human freedom is real, in that free choice cannot be predicted by analysis of matter. Even if at some ultimate level most of our choices are guided or even determined by genetic instinct, there remains a rational liberatory and creative freedom of the human soul which is indeterministic. The evolution of the human brain has given us genes for freedom in the liberty of the mind.

[Interbane]

What do you mean by freedom Robert? Am I free in choosing the words I'm currently typing? Neurons operate in a physical way. Our brains are merely collections of neurons. The extreme complexity of a life's worth of input makes it impossible to predict what we do or say, but that doesn't mean it's not the result of physical processes and thus determined.

[Robert Tulip]

What do you mean by freedom Robert? Am I free in choosing the words I'm currently typing? Neurons operate in a physical way. Our brains are merely collections of neurons. The extreme complexity of a life's worth of input makes it impossible to predict what we do or say, but that doesn't mean it's not the result of physical processes and thus determined.

The physical processes cannot be completely known, so the question whether all action is caused or indeterminate cannot be answered. Thought appears to be free from the human perspective. The evolution of reason appears to introduce a radical indeterminacy in the universe in the form of human freedom.

[Interbane]

The physical processes cannot be completely known, so the question whether all action is caused or indeterminate cannot be answered. Thought appears to be free from the human perspective. The evolution of reason appears to introduce a radical indeterminacy in the universe in the form of human freedom.

Your word choices are all in line with orthodox thinking. "Appearances", and that physical processes aren't completely known. The thing is, we currently know enough to make a statement on this. To sit on the fence betrays your fear of the answer. Though the complexity of the human mind is so vast that it 'appears' that reason is manifest free from determined causes, that seems less and less to be the case. Unless you propose a way that quantum indeterminacy is carried upward into higher physical processes to eventually affect human reasoning. This is a weak line of reasoning unfortunately.

[Robert Tulip]

The physical processes cannot be completely known, so the question whether all action is caused or indeterminate cannot be answered. Thought appears to be free from the human perspective. The evolution of reason appears to introduce a radical indeterminacy in the universe in the form of human freedom.

Your word choices are all in line with orthodox thinking. "Appearances", and that physical processes aren't completely known. The thing is, we currently know enough to make a statement on this. To sit on the fence betrays your fear of the answer. Though the complexity of the human mind is so vast that it 'appears' that reason is manifest free from determined causes, that seems less and less to be the case. Unless you propose a way that quantum indeterminacy is carried upward into higher physical processes to eventually affect human reasoning. This is a weak line of reasoning unfortunately.

In philosophy, a distinction can be made between things in themselves as they actually are, known as noumena, and things as they appear to human perception, known as phenomena. Physics suggests that the noumenal reality of things in themselves is deterministic, the result of mass in motion. However, at the phenomenal level of perception, the world is in large part undeterministic, simply because we cannot know all the determining factors. Hence, even if by logic our lives are determined by causality, we appear to be free.