BookTalk.org

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Ch. 1 - Why are people?

A little girl asked this question. Why are people? Richard Dawkins quotes approvingly a comment that "all efforts to explain this before Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 are worthless". His point is that explaining why people exist requires that we understand the profound philosophical significance of zoology. In opening the question of the scientific basis of selfishness and altruism, he says "'nature red in tooth and claw' sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably." The moral lesson he draws is that "if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature." The problem as he sees it is that "universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense."

All this is on pages 1 to 3 of The Selfish Gene. I think Dawkins is basically correct in his analysis. However, I wonder if evolution of culture, as a specialised example of biological evolution, gives us the potential to move towards a situation where these universal ideals do make biological sense?

Can you explain what you mean by biological sense?

From the Endnotes for Chapter One.

I am familiar with them; save your stamp.

I love this sort of sarcasm.

There is such a thing as being just plain wrong, and that is what, before 1859, all answers to those questions were.

He isn't criticizing man's desire to find an answer to the question of "why are people?" But he is saying that we got it all wrong BD, or Before Darwin. Yeah, I just made the BD part up. Feel free to use it.

There are so many statements in this book that excite me that I don't even know what to say. But I will say that I LOVE Dawkins...in a completely heterosexual kind of way.

Robert Tulip wrote: All this is on pages 1 to 3 of The Selfish Gene. I think Dawkins is basically correct in his analysis. However, I wonder if evolution of culture, as a specialised example of biological evolution, gives us the potential to move towards a situation where these universal ideals do make biological sense?

I vote no to this, Robert. I recall from some time back that you and I have different views about the relation of culture change to evolution. I think that culture evolves only in a general way that is utterly unlike biological evolution. The two can be represented as analagous, but that's as far as it goes, IMO. We would have to create this culture in which universal ideals are put into practice, as opposed to the natural process of selection that applies in evolution.

DWill wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote: All this is on pages 1 to 3 of The Selfish Gene. I think Dawkins is basically correct in his analysis. However, I wonder if evolution of culture, as a specialised example of biological evolution, gives us the potential to move towards a situation where these universal ideals do make biological sense?

I vote no to this, Robert. I recall from some time back that you and I have different views about the relation of culture change to evolution. I think that culture evolves only in a general way that is utterly unlike biological evolution. The two can be represented as analagous, but that's as far as it goes, IMO. We would have to create this culture in which universal ideals are put into practice, as opposed to the natural process of selection that applies in evolution.

Chris OConnor wrote:Can you explain what you mean by biological sense?

Hi guys, and thanks for the interesting responses.

The way I see it, the universe is deeply anthropic - it has to be just for humans to have evolved on the earth. We know very little about why people evolved, but we do know the universe gave us a sheltered and stable planet for four billion years. A reasonable postulate is therefore that the 'universal ideals' of morality are encoded into the anthropic nature of the universe, at least as manifest in our stable planet, and so make biological sense. Especially, the anthropic idea that the universe is somehow loving and forgiving can be a way to explain the Christian God as the presence of love in the universe. If the idea of God makes biological sense, then the universal ideals of morality are adaptive for our survival.

In the core Christian text of the Sermon on the Mount, we see this divine adaptivity defined in terms of the concept of blessedness. Jesus says the blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers, the pure in heart, the merciful, etc. This is a list of moral qualities which can be analysed from a Darwinian angle using the mathematical techniques that Dawkins explains in The Selfish Gene.

Further, the evolution of the human brain enabled a new agenda of biological evolution - using language to enable cooperative behaviour. Language is actually something of a veneer, sitting on top of our older genetic inheritance of non verbal cooperation and competition. Words change the evolutionary ball game, with ideas able to mobilise and regulate human activity on a large scale.

Robert Tulip wrote:. . .The moral lesson he draws is that "if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature." The problem as he sees it is that "universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense."

All this is on pages 1 to 3 of The Selfish Gene. I think Dawkins is basically correct in his analysis. However, I wonder if evolution of culture, as a specialised example of biological evolution, gives us the potential to move towards a situation where these universal ideals do make biological sense?

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, Robert. But I think what Dawkins is saying is that the concepts of universal love and true altruism do not make evolutionary sense in respect to survival. But Dawkins has mentioned already in the introduction (to the 30th anniversary edition) that we are capable of rising above our instincts:

Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale. pg. xiv

This is why I think I think it's crucial for people to understand evolution because it gives us a chance to know ourselves (just as the Greeks said), understand our motives and make choices to override our primitive hardwiring.

Chris OConnor wrote:

There is such a thing as being just plain wrong, and that is what, before 1859, all answers to those questions were.

He isn't criticizing man's desire to find an answer to the question of "why are people?" But he is saying that we got it all wrong BD, or Before Darwin. Yeah, I just made the BD part up. Feel free to use it.

Definitely like the BD.

In my 30th anniversary edition, there's an introduction to the 30th anniversary edition, a preface to the 2nd edition, foreward to the 1st edition, and preface to the 1st edition. Anyway, in one of these, Dawkins wrote that if extraterrestrials visited earth and they were interested in seeing how advanced we were as a species, all they would need to ask is this: have we discovered evolution yet? I don't think that's an exaggeration to how important evolution is.

Anyway, I've only read chapter one so far, but I'm stoked. I'm very glad I'm finally taking time to read this book.

Yes, there are too many little prefaces here! But among the things I liked about the "Introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition" is Dawkins' answer to those who said the book depressed them with its view of life as blind and purposeless. People are frequently saying things like this regarding scientific discoveries, starting right with Copernicus. But even scientists themselves can get into that reaction. Stephen Weinberg, the physicist, observed that the more we know about the universe, the more meaningless it appears. But that is his purely subjective judgment, which his expertise in physics makes him no more qualified to make than anyone else. There is no objective measurement for meaning. So Dawkins doesn't buy it when people say they wish they hadn't become enlightened by a truth, because it has destroyed their former sense of purpose. No matter what we may find out about the universe, there are no constraints at all placed upon our ability to conceive of purpose in our lives. Dawkins puts it much more eloquently:

"Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't, not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly accused " (xiii).