Robert Tulip wrote:Richard Dawkins argued in The Selfish Gene that we can regard genes as the agents of evolution, simply using individual humans as hosts. Each gene has a stable lifespan far longer than any individual person, continuing to exist as it is transmitted from generation to generation.
Part of the problem here is that we think of agency in terms of conscious intentional decisions, but evolution just does not work that way. Evolution is measured by actual success of reproduction, a measure for which deliberate intent is only a small factor. So the question of what evolves, the species, the gene or the ecosystem, can reasonably be answered in different ways.
Good analysis. Obviously Dawkins imputed a kind of "pseudo-agency" to stir the pot -- to draw attention to the odd nature of the causality in operation. As far as I know he never crossed the line to claiming actual agency, and of course to sociobiology it makes some sense to talk about, for example, "struggle" between female genes and male genes in the success within offspring. For example, male genes have some incentive to "overuse" the gestational resources of Mom, since they can still succeed by exploiting a larger number of host Moms.
Still, such coy abuse of language can easily lead us to pay too much attention to the rhetorically interesting effects and to, quite literally, anthropomorphize the genes. It's how mythos happens in the modern world, and I suspect it would be sensible to break some of those myths.
Like a lot of rhetorical twists, I think it also opens up interesting questions about the way to think about our own thinking. If we perceive a certain mindlessness about the freakish power of arms races to turn humans into idiots, might not a good metaphor bring some of the unconscious forces into consciousness? Most people of my generation can divide their life into "before" and "after" for how their understanding of the world was changed by seeing "Dr. Strangelove." For all of its goofiness and exaggeration (though Stanley Kubrick claimed every individual plot development is based on some true events of comparable insanity, right down to the Doomsday Machine itself) the movie hammered home the insanity of the nuclear arms race like no other story ever did, including "On the Beach" and "Failsafe."
So if humans are not the puppets of the guns, what explains their bizarre power to override our rationality?
And if markets merely respond to demand, without actually shaping it for the purposes of commercial manipulators, what explains the evolution of the NRA position from absolute opposition to guns in school, in the 90s, to straight-faced advocacy of arming teachers (students will eventually be targeted, but not yet) as a "solution" to the problem of shootings in schools? At some point you begin to perceive the insanity of the gun companies themselves, and you have to ask the nature of the forces they are in the grip of.
What, in other words, have we done to ourselves? And what failures of self-understanding lead us to double down on the insanity of the path we are on?