Alan Kay’s reading list

Thank you! I believe this is applicable to everything that is related to the dominating senses -see/hear. So i try my hardest to narrow my information overload. I have accepted the fact, that i can't know everything - politics..knowing why situation in iran came to be,why this vocal outburst doesn't happen in other places...to feeling like the dumbest guy after looking into google research papers.

I remember reading a psychological study on musicians and that they can selectively hear their favourite instruments in a piece. Personally as a bass guitarist I can relate, in fact I have a problem listening to music without good bass playing.

I believe this will happen with all artistic talents including reading and writing. The more you read, the more it will increase all of you abilities related to it. I can barely remember any songs on bass because I haven't played since before I moved country, but I'm still highly proficient at playing.

Stephen King once stated that there is no point in writing if you don't read and from my understanding, virtually all writers are well read and it largely doesn't matter what you read, just that you read. Hopefully scientists will come along and prove this sentiment some day as it's almost universally held in writing circles.

So I would say with a certainty to the OP that with a margin of doubt so small that it would be too big to write out here, that you truly are a better person for having read more books. Not only have you likely enlightened yourself to a broader world view, but you have likely also distanced yourself further from the unpunctuated and grammarless masses. Also, this maybe because of the reading, but you seem quite adept at philosophising so kudos.

There are 20 people I admire in this field and the first seven are Alan Kay.

For starters, very early on Dawkins acknowledges the current lack of consensus as to the exact definition of a "gene" (i.e. does it include promoter/enhancer/other regulatory sequences? should each polymorphism count as one gene? or do we group them together? and if so where, in the continuum of small differences between "genes" do we draw the line?). His proposed solution is to take as a gene any combination of genetic elements which gives rise to an expressed trait.

He then expands on this basic definition to describe how it leads to genes which are "selfish". That is, they are interested only in their own continuance, and so the traits they code for will be optimized around this goal. Unfortunately, this is dangerously close to circular logic. You see, the physical traits that appear in organisms rarely have a simple one-to-one correspondence with a particular subset of the genome. Effects such as epistasis, where the action of one gene masks the effect of another, nullify Dawkins' simplistic definition.

Or, if you would have it another way, genes which have epistatic effects would need to be included in with the original "gene" according to Dawkins' definition. Unfortunately, the network effects that give rise to higher plants and animals would eventually necessitate including the entire genome of an organism in one "Dawkins gene", making the unit of selection not the gene, as Dawkins would have it, but the individual.

As for topics which he over-complicates, the first that comes to mind is kin selection. Admittedly, I don't think his over-complication is intentional, but rather his exploration of the topic is hindered by his presumption that genes are selfish. In fact, kin selection can arise in evolving individuals without the need for the concept of a "gene" at all! Rather, any evolving individual which evolves in a mixed population will eventually acquire various kin selection traits.

As I said at the start, I'm not surprised that Dawkins' ideas are so commonly held as true. He is well written, and most of the work that would refute his claims is usually presented in language inaccessible to most laypeople.