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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Dawkins' decades-long reductionist insistence on the supremacy of genes is incoherent. Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other organisms in their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and that affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

Beyond that, it's becoming increasingly clear the genes aren't some recipe for making an organism, they're much more like a complicated self-referential computer program for manipulating reality. This genetic reductionism is like refusing to think or talk about computer software as anything but 1s and 0s

Wilson says "Riak is succeeding because of its straightforward scalability" and Dawkins responds "show me which 1s and 0s make it scalable! I see no scalable 1s or 0s. you're wrong"

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> Organisms do not exist in a vacuum, they interact with other organisms in their environment in myriad cooperative and competitive ways, and that affects which organisms survive and reproduce and which do not

What's your point? In what way would Dawkins disagree with this statement?

> they're much more like a complicated self-referential computer program for manipulating reality

What does "manipulating reality" mean? What reality is being manipulated, if not an organism's cells?

I think Dawkins believes that genes are being manipulated not cells. But Dawkins disagrees that this genes (that cascadly manipulate reality) contain information about reality beyond cells, like for example different groups dynamics. While this other guy thinks the opposite. (Thats what i get from his squirels example.

Dawkins has hypothesis that evolution is "blind" process, so if this is true than it would probably collapse.

Is it your understanding that Dawkins and Wilson (or any other reputable scientist) disagree about the information content of genes? If so, can you provide a source for that?

1. yes 2. this article quote: "That’s differential group survival. But you’d never say of any part of a squirrel that it evolved to promote the welfare of the grey squirrel over the red. Wilson wouldn’t say anything so silly about squirrel"

Are you claiming that Wilson would in fact say something like that about squirrels? If so, why? If not, then what scientist agrees with you if neither Dawkins nor his rival Wilson?

More to the point, that quote doesn't refer to the information content of genes at all. You'll certainly agree that it doesn't do so explicitly. Can you find a quote that explicitly says that someone disagrees with Dawkins about the information content of genes? Maybe in the Wikipedia articles for gene selection and kin selection?

no i don't have explicit quote. but this is what it boils down to. What else could it mean?

No, it doesn't boil down to that. They agree on what information can be encoded genetically. They disagree on a detail of the mechanism of evolution: To what extent does selection occur at various "levels" (gene, individual, kin-group, species, etc)?

> This genetic reductionism is like refusing to think or talk about computer software as anything but 1s and 0s

Dawkin's book is called "The Selfish Gene". It is not called "Selfish Adenine" or "Selfish exon".

Your analogy is interesting. Are 'genes' for buffer overflows easily found via binary searches? Would that be a defective gene? Is input sanitisation an example of a beneficial gene being transmitted, via sex of open source and responsible diclosure?

You must understand that Dawkins considers "Evolution" to be the name of God, and himself to be its Prophet.

Don't discredit his work simply because he disagrees with your religious views.

I said nothing about my own religious views - merely that Dawkins long ago abandoned science for his own brand of dogma.

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