In Retrospect: The Selfish Gene
nature.com
nature.com
To elaborate... prior to reading TSG, I thought of myself as an atheist, but I held open a (very) small amount of willingness to consider the idea of some sort of creator, mainly because I'd not heard a convincing counter to the "irreducible complexity" idea. After reading TSG, I felt convinced that there is a reasonable way for, say, the eye, optic nerve, etc., to evolve, that doesn't require the entire thing to appear at once.
Once I crossed that hurdle, I felt a lot more confident in publicly declaring myself an "atheist" instead of just saying "agnostic" which always felt like something of a weasel term.
Of course, having grown up in the "Bible Belt" and having many family members who are devout Christians, this led to some interesting, erm, "discussions" over the years.
I also appreciated TSG for introducing me to things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and the works of Robert Axelrod, Robert Trivers, etc. and ideas like "kin altruism", "reciprocal altruism", etc. A lot of things make more sense after reading that book.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Daw...
I'm still perplexed by those who saw it as an argument for selfishness. I watched a TV interview of Dawkins about 10 years back where one of the interviewer's first questions was along these lines. It must be so frustrating for him.
Dawkins says he regrets the title, but perhaps the perceived controversy also helped its fame.
I read Edward O. Wilsons' "On Human Nature" the year it was published (1978)...I just happened to stumble upon it in a bookstore...a wonderful read which prompted me to wonder,"What other thinkers are out there that I don't know about?"
This was two years after Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene"...I was unaware of the book, or Dawkins in general, for at least a decade...when I discovered it I devoured it...
It had the effect of further cementing the philosophy of living my previous inquiries had led me to...
I've discovered no benefit to putting a label on myself, whether that be atheist, agnostic, or theist...early on I discovered others held tightly to their views and were usually very unlikely to change them...discussions were interesting and invigorating, but ultimately fruitless...
What I most appreciate about the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson is that they are quite serious thinkers...they encourage us to "go with the best available evidence"...there's no better advice...
There's ample evidence that we humans are finite beings, and IMHO we don't much like the idea of that, i.e., we want answers as to why we exist at all...and we're often unwilling to embrace "the best available evidence"...
Further, I think that those who cannot accept that we appear to be finite beings misunderstand the concept of "infinity"...it extends backwards, forwards, in any direction our human linguistic invention of the concept of "time" might include...infinity implies limitless possibilities...
I'll continue to proceed with my life based on what "the best available evidence" suggests...if new and compelling evidence is uncovered I'm willing to turn on a dime...
To take a memorable quote from the book:
"We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."
It's not technically accurate. Genes are not selfish - they are inanimate chemicals and they don't do programming. Dawkins is obviously being poetic but you could write less bleak poetry.
Some Feynman for comparison:
"It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man [...] It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders."
Jollier and doesn't resort to anthropomorphising molecules.
He should read his own book.
"If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death"
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"
are largely depreciated so these things can happen. Maybe death to infidels and apostates will go next.
Cue all of the younger folks who will be confused, because they're sure "meme" == picture with two comedic captions.
1. The crucial thing with genes is that they are "binary", you either get a gene from a parent, or not. Mutations happen, but they produce new genes. Genes are "immortal" (exist for many, many generations in identical form). Memes, on the other hand, are not binary in this way. Ideas constantly change, and we can't reduce them to a binary code.
2. The rules of genetic competition are complex, but we have a good framework: natural selection and sexual selection. However, to explain memetic competition, we need to talk about psychology and sociology and so forth (in addition to biology). There are already fields doing that, from psychology and sociology to literature and religious studies, mostly in a non-scientific way, because we have yet to find a good scientific one.
3. For those reasons, "memetics" never succeeded as an academic discipline. The field has not succeeded in providing useful theories to be tested that tell us quantative things we don't already know.
Of course, at the same time the insights you mention are true. But they are not anywhere near as powerful as the concept of genes. They are mostly useful as an analogy, and to open people's minds, but not scientifically.
Memes are not ideas, they are behaviors. They are either preserved exactly (like genes) or something modifies them to create a new replicable behavior (again, like genes.) The difference you attempt to paint here is spurious.
Why do you say that? Wikipedia's definition disagrees with you,
> A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".
as does Dawkins himself, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Origins
And Genes aren't behaviors either. Behaviors are something that the phenotype might perform due to certain genes, but the behavior is not the gene.
Genes are a code. They are abstract, discrete, and immortal. That's why they are so useful in biology. As the Wikipedia article notes, the lack of such a parallel in memes limits their scientific utility.
"Genes as the unit of selection" was, at the time TSG was written, a controversial theory. Group selection was the popular viewpoint (the very tempting notion that individual animals make selfless sacrifices for the herd). Dawkins meticulously showed that the contrary gene selection viewpoint was the best theory for the observed evidence - original, conceptual scientific theory at its best.
He introduced "memes" as a speculative addition at the end of the book. There's nothing wrong with speculation, and it can be a valuable tool to discover insights which later form theories, but its fundamentally different to the rigour needed to establish new scientific knowledge.
"Memes" are an interesting concept, but people take the idea too far IMO, and Dawkins was right to confine his speculations to one chapter. I'd definitely agree with a weak version of the theory - ideas which include the notion that 'spreading this idea is good', tend to spread more. (Compare Christianity and Islam versus Hinduism or Buddhism). The strong version of the theory, though, goes too far, and sees people as being entirely determined by their ideas. People have independent minds and can analyse, judge, refine and/or reject the ideas they encounter - they're not passive slaves to memes.
Sentences like: "The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes" - once upon a time I would have said "oh wow, what an interesting possibility". Nowadays I see this kind of thinking as fundamentally vapid and lazy. Historians already knew how to analyse the spread of ideas throughout a society long before the concept of a 'meme' - Gibbon, for example, was writing about how the differences between the different sects of Christianity affected their spread, 300 years ago. (I could say something similar about social scientists, though I'm not a huge fan of modern social science for other reasons).
Saying that memes are alive, or that liberals and conservatives represent two different species, to me represents an ungrounded way of thinking, where concepts float without touching reality.
TL;DR - Dawkins achievement lies in definitively stating the case for gene selection (and writing a damn good popsci book); his concept of 'memes' is mind candy for the reddit crowd.
That is most definitely NOT what I said. What I said what that it might be the beginning of a species split. It will probably take at least a few hundred thousand years for that to play itself out.
And I also advanced a specific causal model: that genes and memes are competing for a common resource, namely, human bodies and the brains they contain. The human brain is the phenotype of both genes and memes (hence "nature" and "nurture") and so it is entirely plausible that they could compete with each other over this resource, and that this competition could result in a species split. Whether the split between conservative and liberal is a reflection of this or not is speculative, of course, but it's also testable. For example, you could see if political affiliation had a genetically heritable component, much like you can test if homosexuality has a genetically heritable component.
Sure, this idea is pretty far out there (this is an HN comment thread, after all, not a submission to Nature) but I think "vapid" is going a little too far.
One of the most important concepts to take away from The Selfish Gene is that the idea that genes have "interests" is just an interesting thought experiment to explore how gene selection can lead to what appear to unselfish behaviors like cooperation, sympathy, and sacrifice.
Dawkins does not actually believe that genes are selfish, which IIRC he says right at the beginning of the book. So to say that the interests of genes and memes align (or don't align) is a fundamental flaw. Neither genes nor memes have interests. They just are.
And further, to believe that birth control is somehow harmful to the propagation of genes is also to miss an important concept from the book: that there is more to evolution than a strict numbers game. If birth control permits parents to invest greater resources in each child, then each child will have a greater competitive advantage in the population.
Finally, there is a lens through which genes and memes might someday be comparable, and that is information theory. However, we're a long way off from the theoretical and computational footing to try such a thing.
Here's a question: What other books that were written for a popular audience (or that achieved a largely popular audience) also served as works that affected science itself? E.g. the article talks about The Selfish Gene being both a pop-sci book, but also a book that profoundly changed the field of Evolution.
Are there other good examples?
I think what I liked most about the book is the (clearly labeled) speculations. He was already anticipating a lot.
syllabus http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/51786/PEER_stag...
And it's a great read.
- Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
- The Embodied Mind - Varela, Thompson & Rosch
- Don't sleep, there are snakes - Daniel Everett
After reading and accepting the ideas the person can't say. -"God has a plan for me" or "I'm on a mission from god" To see life positively one has to interpret things like -"I'm so lucky my ID created me" into -"I'm lucky to be in this small habitual space in the galaxy where the sun shines and I don't have to fear death on a daily basis."
Reviews insist it's depressing but I don't think so. I'm not going to personally go shouting at people to "accept the truth". An atheist version of a Jehovas Witness is quite similarly obnoxious.
So I guess some people don't like to question their assumptions about the world, like danieltillett said.
I was inspired to this rant the other day when watching a video of tortoises flipping each other over [1]. Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result. No amount of kin selection can prevent this if there is not already a significant latent potential in the organism's behavioral repertoire to cooperate (flip). The notion that a single gene is somehow in control is a complete and utter fiction, SNPs are not robust ways to build behaviors or even to create phenotypic diversity. The variation that leads one tortoise to flip the other over is likely the product of thousands of genes and is far more continuous than a simple 'flipping gene.' In fact, if you see flipping behavior at all it is extremely likely that the developmental program and the genome of the organism as a whole is structured such that the behavior will arise repeatedly in different individuals as a result of a number of different minor changes in gene expression. If a flower grows, its is more likely to be the case that the ground is good for growing flowers than that the flower suddenly innovated.
tl;dr If you want your tortoises to flip, you're going to need more than one gene and you can't think about evolution on an individual basis.
0. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257223, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Jablonka2/publicati... 1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tortoise+flip
I believe Dawkins would argue this doesn't result in an evolutionarily stable strategy. Refer to chapter 10 of the Selfish Gene, I think it directly answers the concerns you have.
Furthermore I don't see how your turtle flipping example negates the TSG idea. (but I'm very far from an expert on the topic)
I'm not sure if you are actually disagreeing with TSG.
Dawkings repeats several times in the book that to him evolution is not about individuals, but about genes. Heck, even the title is "selfish gene", not "selfish tortoise".
Your tortoise benefits from screwing over his competitors, but his genes might not. Like, for example, suppose there is a combination of genes for noncooperative tortoise. He leaves others to die so the next generation is all assholes like him and they die out because there is noone to help when they inevitably get in trouble. Boom, genes are gone.
In fact, TSG also tries to analyze how cooperative and noncooperative strategies may coexist in single species and tend towards some equilibrium, which depends on costs/benefits of particular behaviors. And, iirc, such crude strategies like "always defect" often ended up outsmarted by subtler ones.
Dawkins seems to define "selfish gene" as "one caring about its long term survival and spread", whether individual tortoises like it or not. Because that's what ultimately counts - contemporary tortoises are shaped by genes which survived millions of years by whatever means happened to be successful, which needs not to be defection.
And, btw, you may want to actually read TSG, it's pretty cool :)
I second my sibling poster. You are clearly a very smart person who has no qualms about confidently misrepresenting a book you haven't read. It's not a charming combination - acquire some rigour in your thinking (for your own sake, if nothing else).
I think you'll find it does more to address your concerns here than you're expecting. It even includes a decent amount of game theoretic discussion with a view towards explaining cooperative and noncooperative behaviors as well as a more general notion of an evolutionarily stable strategy.
TSG hypothesis is that evolution happens at the level of genes (or memes, or whatever the replicant unit is). Not individuals, not groups, but genes. The individual level and group level evolutionary effects we see emerge from this, since a gene's prospects become intertwined with those of its neighbours. It is not well-described as a western, individualistic view. The 'selfish' is misleading if the negative value of the word is taken literally. Genes have no agency. The neo-darwinian view is simple but subtle, and is not well taught in schools. TSG is a great introduction to this way of thinking.
Assuming you have not, if and when you read it you will find that there are no easy holes to poke. Dawkins doesn't just defend the gene, he derives it and then explains how it is the unit of persistence and why it is the persistence that matters.
The still mainstream evolutionary biology it describes does not require any particular relationship between genotype and phenotype, just that one exists. Polygenic traits are just as well described by it as simple Mendelian traits. It also accommodates a range of factors like plasticity, epistasis, and gene by environment interactions that complicate the relationship between genotype and phenotype.
Additionally, your understanding of "selfish" as genes which produce defectors in cooperative scenarios is incorrect. "Selfish" is a metaphor to describe the fact that to be favoured by selection genes must contribute to a phenotype that increases their own propagation (to the degree that they are not constrained from doing so, and issues like linkage and pleiotropy aside).
We are/were both raised in, and still live in, the "Bible Belt" as well. I've studied most world religions, have read quite a bit in that arena from the esoteric like "A Course in Miracles", "The Book of Urantia", Meister Eckhart, much of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Tao Te Ching, etc etc to formalized things like William James's the variety of religious experience.
I've had my own, I would say spiritual rather than religious, experiences that are deeply personal and beyond the rationale of atheists. I have seen firsthand how introspection and quiet-minded observation can provide insight and intuition.
However, I also I went to science magnet schools starting in pre-school, work in IT, and am quite a rational pragmatic individual.
I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life. How is this topic any different? There's always Pascal's Wager ;)
Please don't!
Yeah, I know what you mean. I am an atheist, but not what I call a "militant atheist", or a "Dawkins / Hitchens acolyte". I believe (or dis-believe) what I believe, but I'm not worried about getting in other people's faces and contesting things with them. The only time I care what other people believe is when you get into situations where people try to use the hammer that is government, to force their religious beliefs on people who don't share those beliefs.
I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term".
Yeah, I could have worded that better. I'd say it was a "weasel term" for me to call myself agnostic, as I really was an atheist all along. I just wasn't quite confident enough to really state it firmly, and also I think I thought that saying "agnostic" instead of "atheist" was less likely to provoke conflict (again, living in the Bible Belt, with lots of friends and family who are very religious).
I have nothing against the term agnostic in general, I just realized I was using it to avoid the issue.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/27/believers-atheists-wor...
As for Pascal's Wager, what if God rewards atheists and sends believers to Hell?
Culturally speaking, leprechauns, unicorns and Darth Vader have no relation to "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and other such deep questions. I really think that's all it is.
God rewards atheists who are good and do good things.
Other forms of Christianity may disagree with that.
It's because those things would by definition be within our universe and thus probably testable. However a deity that controls our universe may be outside it, thus leaving us with no way to test for him, despite his control.
In hacker analogy, would a Sim character in a VM be able to be completely sure that you (god) don't exist?
To "not believe in god" is rational based on available evidence. To "believe there is no god" is an act of faith in itself because it (very likely) cannot be tested.
At least IMHO.
I certainly don't view agnosticism as a weasel term either. I cannot be certain there is no god any more than I could be certain there is one (and note by god I'm not referring to the man with the beard and the pearly gates and all that.... something that I think can easily get lost in conversation on this topic). I think it's honest to just say "I don't know".
I have a friend who's in the process of discovering his own atheism and while atheism is not a religion, I can clearly see the similarity in passion. I was likely the same back when I was exploring it at first.
Have heard lots about The Selfish Gene but never actually sat down and read it.... should really do so. Is there a more modern version to read these days, or is TSG timelessly applicable?
The question begs another though and I think this is what you're really trying to ask: Why is belief in God given special consideration apart from beliefs in things like Thor, Santa, Unicorns, FSM, other works of fiction?
Am I right in this assertion?
EDIT: If this is the case, my answer is similar to one I gave above: Religion is 'special' because it was woven into society long before we developed the scientific understandings that we have now.
Why, for example, that despite professing to uphold the gene-centric evolutionary understanding humans, who are otherwise flesh and blood bodies, can't help but think inside the restrictive box of self/ identities .... while granting authority to select set of identities - not just clergy men, but authorities in various forms.
Modern social justice movements are another example of this authority-complex, wherein victim-disciples "pray" to the Government-God to "bless" them with advantages and "fight" against the privileged-evils. Does not anyone recognize a familiar pattern?
Belief in a supernatural being (God) is but a symptom of something much more sinister about humanity. It is one thing to question a belief, but entirely another thing to question the need to believe itself.
Refer to the Milgram experiment for the classic study done on Authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Let me try and make a point. When Steve Jobs founded Apple he also had founded a religion that worshiped technology. Apple had a certain cult following of Apple users wanting to belong to Apple's culture and way of life. Steve Jobs wanted a different company than IBM and other corporations, he wanted Apple to be different from Microsoft. Steve Jobs was an authority on how computers should work and function. He tried to make easier to use computers with the Lisa and original Macintosh but both failed because they cost a lot and didn't have a lot of apps available for them. After being fired in 1985 or resigning whatever you want to believe, Steve Jobs founded a new company named Next that used Unix instead of starting over from scratch. Steve Jobs tried to create a new religion with a new company. Apple struggled without Steve Jobs, it seemed as if the CEO chair at Apple had an ejector seat. When Steve Jobs was brought back at Apple he turned around the company and got people interested in the new projects they worked on. Apple has this user experience factor that just attracts people to their religion. The iPhones and iPads basically sell themselves and the Macintosh sells itself because it doesn't have the flaws of a Windows PC. Even after Steve Jobs died, Apple still has a religious following to it.
Sure there is a religious experience wired into our genes to worship something and obey some sort of authority. Which is why people follow politicians as authority figures even if they pass laws taking away rights and freedoms and doing domestic spying. It is why some people worship sports stars or musicians or movie makers or even the rich elite.
Atheists for some reason don't seem to have this gene to worship something. Their brains are wired for skepticism and they question authority instead of blindly follow them.
The more math and science one learns, the more likely one is to become an atheist. This is a problem Islam faced when they had their golden age of science and math discoveries. It is what had stopped the golden age out of fear that people would abandon Islam and worship science and math instead. The Catholic Church also faced this and it lead to the dark ages. In fact India, China, and other nations, once they stopped researching math and science, their empires declined.
During the golden age in Europe, people wanted to worship science.
The more science, math, and technology advances the more likely people will abandon religion because they don't need it anymore.
Sure you got Dawkins criticizing religion in many areas, he used to be a Catholic but lost his faith. People see him as an authority and want to follow him as well. He has written great books on biology and is very smart.
People want to follow some authority figure and be like them, they want leaders to tell them how to live their lives and what the meaning of life is to them. Be it a God, a politician, a business person, a sports figure, a musician, a singer, an atheist, whatever people want to follow someone they think has it all figured out. I think this is some part of evolution and in our genes but not everyone has this in their genes. It goes back a long way when people formed tribes for survival. Perhaps before religion was developed. Every tribe has a leader who is an authority figure. For religions that leader happened to be a God or in the case of Buddhism a human being who discovered enlightenment and the end to suffering.
Even if there was no belief in a God or Gods, there still would be a religion worshiping something else.
The rich elite worship money and power for example, and most have stopped practicing their religions in order to spend more time to manage their businesses.
The poor who can't find a good paying job, turn to religion for hope and help. There exists a fellowship of people they can get support and advice from.
I don't know if any of this makes sense to you. But religion plays a role in humanity and has played a role in evolution as well. Over time people have followed a religion because of some basic need for hope and understanding. As technology and medical science advances people leave religion because they feel they don't need it anymore as problems are solved by technology and medical science.
The human race goes through a social evolution as well, changes to society that don't always agree with religious views.
However, speaking of brainwashing, this capability seems to cease functioning when people are regularly pushed to follow arbitrary standards they don't really understand with the use of carrot-and-stick methods. Possibly something related to the "unused muscle" effect. And such carrot-and-stick training happens a lot in the West.
I have no clue if a large society of more independent people would be stable and able to remain a society of independent people indefinitely. It seems that US was an experiment in creating such state, but then it ended up flooded with Christian immigrants and by the beginning of the 20th century they have already outlawed anything even remotely connected to freedom of choice and fun which at the same time isn't strictly required for survival, from alcohol and weed through prostitution and oral/anal sex ("sodomy laws" are still a thing in US) up to owning real weapons (who cares about assault rifles when the gov can bomb a whole city from drones).
I don't know if the big monotheistic religions with their insistence on beating everyone into submission are the original reason for such state of affairs, or if they are just an external sign of something deeper and unavoidable. Maybe there are free societies somewhere in other parts of the world, but I don't know them. My experience is limited to WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and here Milgram Effect is indeed the king.
Genes don't "choose" to mutate any more than they "are selfish"
I'm having a tough time with this part; the information is clearly NOT immortal. It changes.
[ btw, looks like dang got here before you did ; thanks, dude ]
The term "immortal" in this context means that it lives far longer than individual organisms. A gene will typically remain unchanged for many, many generations of ephemeral individuals. We can talk about "a gene" while talking about the same thing in multiple individuals in the same generation and in multiple generations. It's a piece of binary information.
Of course, eventually, a gene may vanish because no individuals survive that carry it (e.g. due to competition from other genes, or because the entire species vanishes in some catastrophe).
True, but to the extent that they "are selfish", it definitely is true that they choose to mutate, or in less metaphorical terms the mutation rate of a given section of the genome is subject to selection.
For complex organisms, you can view this as the genes with high mutation rates "taking one for the team".