Nature mag doesnt think much of it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... NatureNews

The gospels according to Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.



Even Nature mag recognizes Dawkins as nothing more than a cranky preachy dude in his old age!

Some comments were interesting

There are very few reviews of the book available online. I only saw three which were the Guardian,Nature and the Sunday Times of London which just gives an intro.
He has an very busy schedule of talks ahead promoting the book,mostly in the U.K. and the U.S. He's also appearing just outside my city Dublin at the end of October.
Maybe I'll go and see if his memes can infect my brain. He was voted the world's top thinker in 2013 by Prospect magazine readers.
Does this prove that evolution really has stopped?

The idea of genes as selfish is pretty much passed its time.

The idea of memes has pretty much passed its time, too. There could be a similarity between what the critics say about the unwarranted reductionism of his selfish gene theory and that of his meme theory. He did succeed in coining a word that has endured, but the realm of 'meme' is popular sociology rather than science.

DWill wrote:The idea of memes has pretty much passed its time, too. There could be a similarity between what the critics say about the unwarranted reductionism of his selfish gene theory and that of his meme theory. He did succeed in coining a word that has endured, but the realm of 'meme' is popular sociology rather than science.

My understanding is that there are aspects of the selfish gene “theory” that have been proven correct over time. Selection works along (at least) three axes in nature: the gene, the organism and the group. Though the individual gene is not considered the base unit of evolution, the gene-centric view remains part of modern evolutionary synthesis and can be seen as an approximation of some of the dynamics at work. Dawkins himself describes the “selfish gene” as a metaphor and as a metaphor it has proven a very useful way of understanding how evolution works.

I have always seen Dawkins as a science communicator—more author and philosopher than working scientist. (He was University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.) And The Selfish Gene, like all of his books, were written for a popular audience. Of course, some of Dawkins’ ideas in The Selfish Gene have not been borne out by the evidence, but this is how science works. I would recommend reading some of Stephen Jay Gould’s original criticisms of Dawkins’ gene-centric view because I think Gould, too, was probably right in many respects.

But, yeah, the meme is an interesting way of looking at how ideas spread. The similarities to biological evolution seem to me merely an observation that Dawkins made in passing that has since spread like, well, a "meme."

I don't see why people think the "selfish gene" metaphor no longer applies. Genes are still the replicators. Just because genetic expression is complicated and is affected by the environment doesn't really change that.

After all, the metaphor simply means that, during the process of natural selection, genes “act” as if they were selfish. And that means that those genes that replicate faster than others—those that make their “vehicles” leave more copies of those genes—spread through the gene pool, out-competing other gene copies. It’s a metaphorical and, to me, enlightening description of natural selection, for it helps one see more clearly how evolution works.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.co ... on-part-i/

But Dawkins' doctrine of everlasting selfish doom, a kind of an evolutionary original sin, contains errors. He over-extrapolates from incomplete categories, and makes an error so common it has its own name, the fallacy of composition. Dawkins’s devil isn’t in the details, but in straying too far from them.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... cooperate/

It's just a bad, fallacious metaphor now that more is known about the cooperative aspects involved.
The metaphor also encourages erroneous extrapolations.

I agree with DWILL regarding the idea of "memes"
Meme theory is not a theory that has any kind of testability attached to it. It's highly unscientific.

Dawkins is also a very poor philosopher. If he's a scientist then I'd expect him to be able to introduce issues of philosophy of science, in the same way someone like Massimo P does with regularity. Instead he dedicates himself to criticizing religious fundamentalism. His fan base are mostly intellectual midgets that are looking for an alternative cult.

He's an excellent writer and describes many aspect of evolution better than perhaps any scientist ever has.
After that, he's just a a bitter old cranky guy who's time is past.

ant wrote: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... cooperate/

This guy used the phrase "evolutionary original sin" twice in three paragraphs. This is not exactly careful prose. Ironically, he's complaining about misinterpreting the metaphor.

His scheme sees only two outcomes, selfish or altruistic, and is zero-sum: X gains by Y’s loss. This accurately describes genes competing against variations of themselves for the single slot of dominance in future populations. But does all of creation fit into that scheme? Clearly not, since it excludes: X and Y both lose; X and Y both gain cooperatively.

You really think Dawkins doesn't realize cooperation can have mutual gain?

Dexter wrote:

ant wrote: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... cooperate/

This guy used the phrase "evolutionary original sin" twice in three paragraphs. This is not exactly careful prose. Ironically, he's complaining about misinterpreting the metaphor.

His scheme sees only two outcomes, selfish or altruistic, and is zero-sum: X gains by Y’s loss. This accurately describes genes competing against variations of themselves for the single slot of dominance in future populations. But does all of creation fit into that scheme? Clearly not, since it excludes: X and Y both lose; X and Y both gain cooperatively.

You really think Dawkins doesn't realize cooperation can have mutual gain?

Scientific American is a pretty darn good example of a promoter of the mighty powers of science, almost to the extent of promoting scientism. They're over 100 years old and are highly selective about what they print. They must agree with the author's primary points, which I also happen to agree with.


I really do think Dawkins chooses not to move away from his "selfish" metaphor because it's the scaffolding of his personal unscientific worldview.
That's an inferential conjecture based on his constant mean- spirited rhetoric and his anthropomorphic representation of Nature being blind to purpose. And as such, concluding that his cognitive capabilities are vigorous enough to assign purposelessness to all of Nature when there's no evidence that it is an inherent quality of Nature.


If he does realize cooperation can have mutual gain, he's not interested in recalibrating his "genes are selfish" meme to add balance to the theory.

ant wrote:If he does realize cooperation can have mutual gain, he's not interested in recalibrating his "genes are selfish" meme to add balance to the theory.

Actually, in the forward of later editions of the book, Dawkins tries like heck to clear up some of the many misconceptions, which are widely disseminated on Creationist web sites. For example, Dawkins very clearly articulates that the gene-centric view is only one way of looking at evolution, borrowing the Necker cube to illustrate this idea. And he also discusses the title—the Selfish Gene—at length because obviously many people have a very difficult time getting past it. I’m pretty sure that most Dawkins haters, and there are obviously a lot of them, probably skimmed through The God Delusion with barely suppressed rage. But more importantly, they don’t have a clue about the many subtle concepts wonderfully illustrated in Dawkins’ science books. Because many believers don’t care about science at all and, indeed, are ideologically motivated against it. And so Dawkins has become the big bad bogeyman.

Anyway, though it’s been a few years since I’ve read The Selfish Gene, I distinctly remember Dawkins’ metaphor of rowers in a boat to demonstrate the concept of cooperation—and competition—between genomes. It’s no good being a super fast rower if you’re in a boat with a bunch of slow rowers. The metaphor actually goes much further than that. There's a whole chapter on it! And it shows where Dawkins truly shines as a science communicator.

Edit: Here's a great primer about "selfish genes" from David Sloan Wilson, a prominent evolutionary biologist and proponent of the concept of group selection (also known as multi-level selection) in evolution. Sloan differs from Dawkins on many key points, but he also agrees with Dawkins on many key points as well.

https://evolution-institute.org/article ... ish-genes/