tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post1993299461636706550..comments2024-02-28T02:22:20.886-08:00Comments on homunculus: Who are you calling selfish?Philip Ballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-64566053707048275722013-12-12T10:26:33.475-08:002013-12-12T10:26:33.475-08:00Thank you again! Pointing out the allele focus is ...Thank you again! Pointing out the <i>allele</i> focus is great and insightful! I'm sure Dawkins would accept that idea.<br /><br />The liberal point you make isn't tangential. Dawkins' message is largely that it works well for genes when we as individual organisms are NOT so selfish but actually cooperate well in society. He used the selfish gene idea to dismiss the idea of inherently selfish individual organisms!<br /><br />Anyway, to wrap this all up, here's Dawkins himself from the 30th anniversary ed:<br /><br /><b>Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975,<br />through the mediation of my friend Desmond Morris I showed the<br />partially completed book to Tom Maschler, doyen of London pub-<br />lishers, and we discussed it in his room at Jonathan Cape. He liked the<br />book but not the title. 'Selfish', he said, was a 'down word'. Why not<br />call it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an 'up' word, the immor-<br />tality of genetic information was a central theme of the book, and<br />'immortal gene' had almost the same intriguing ring as 'selfish gene'<br />(neither of us, I think, noticed the resonance with Oscar Wilde's The<br />Selfish Giant). I now think Maschler may have been right. Many crit-<br />ics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discov-<br />ered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the<br />Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own,<br />without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate<br />impression of its contents. Nowadays, an American publisher would<br />in any case have insisted on a subtitle.<br />The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Em-<br />phasize 'selfish' and you will think the book is about selfishness,<br />whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The cor-<br />rect word of the title to stress is 'gene' and let me explain why. A<br />central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually<br />selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as<br />a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or<br />less by definition, 'selfish'. Altruism might well be favoured at other<br />levels. Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might<br />expect individual organisms to behave altruistically 'for the good of the<br />species'. They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation,<br />or restrain their hunting behaviour to conserve the species' future<br />stocks of prey. It was such widely disseminated misunderstandings of<br />Darwinism that originally provoked me to write the book.<br />... I can readily see how the<br />title could be misunderstood, and this is one reason why I should per-<br />haps have gone for The Immortal Gene. The Altruistic Vehicle would<br />have been another possibility. Perhaps it would have been too enigmatic<br />but, at all events, the apparent dispute between the gene and the<br />organism as rival units of natural selection is resolved. ...<br />Another good alternative to <i>The Selfish Gene</i> would have been <i>The<br />Cooperative Gene</i>. It sounds paradoxically opposite, but a central part of the book argues for a form of cooperation among self-interested<br />genes. </b><br /><br />It certainly seems silly to make a ruckus by willfully misunderstanding an authors intentions that have been already clearly spelled out by the author himself on reflection.<br /><br />Probably the best bet now might be "The Immortal Allele". Dawkins would probably be fine with that. So it does seem to me that in the end this is just about communication, and there's no actual controversy.<br /><br />Thanks for your time clarifying!Aaron Wolfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04670838392000704327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-85629254662602707062013-12-12T05:11:28.801-08:002013-12-12T05:11:28.801-08:00Aaron,
"Immortal" would of course be ope...Aaron,<br />"Immortal" would of course be open to criticism too, but it would have been immeasurably better.<br /><br />One of the key reasons why I don’t like the “selfish gene”, which I haven’t alluded to already, is that it encourages the idea of the Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest going on among genes just as it does among organisms. All these genes are fighting it out, and the fittest thrive. But that’s nonsense, of course. The competition is not amongst genes, but amongst alleles of a particular gene – all that a gene is ‘competing with’ is different versions of itself. If Dawkins had called it “the selfish allele”, I’d have somewhat less of a problem. And the distinction is not semantic, it’s crucial. Of course, genetic innovation does occur, but then a new gene doesn’t spread at the expense of others, so it’s not clear what there is for a gene to be selfish about. Dawkins of course knows this, and never implies otherwise in what he actually writes – but that’s precisely why I find it odd that so lucid and committed a communicator wants to shackle himself to an actively misleading metaphor. <br /><br />This is also why it makes far more sense to speak of selfish genes only in the sense of Crick and Orgel’s repetitive, non-functional genetic elements. There selfish replication and ‘contamination’ of the genome really does eventually threaten to happen at the expense of other genes (and the repetitive elements themselves), because it can weaken the host organism. For lefty liberals like me, this is a nice metaphor for how true selfishness undermines rather than invigorates the society that hosts it. But that’s just a story.<br />Philip Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-90736896570502606382013-12-11T08:30:25.119-08:002013-12-11T08:30:25.119-08:00Thanks for clarifying!
Again, my reading of Dawki...Thanks for clarifying!<br /><br />Again, my reading of Dawkins is that he would be regretting the "selfish" part of the title if there were a better option. I think the "immortal gene" is what I recall him saying he really liked. As in his latest reply, he wasn't even trying to find an enemy to tear down necessarily. The big point is that qualities and effects of genes determine <i>their</i> survival. So while our ancestors are all gone, their genes live on.<br /><br />My biggest complaint reading the book was that it veered too much toward ascribing intention to the genes. I just read it as a difference of teaching approach though. I never thought for a moment that Dawkins or any other biologist believed in intentional genes really.<br /><br />If anything, "selfish" here seems to mean that gene survival through evolution depends on whatever furthers its own success <i>given the context of its surrounding genes and environment etc.</i>. Whereas a gene that has a mix of qualities that is good for its host organism but bad for its own survival will more likely go away. So although organism survival and gene propagation are often compatible, if there is a case with stark conflict, those genes that favor gene survival over organism survival are the ones that will succeed. So, while this is the exceptional rather than typical case, a gene that causes old individuals to die might help there be more resources for the next of kin. In this sense, the gene is selfish not in comparison to other genes necessarily but in comparison to the individual organism.<br /><br />Yeah, "selfish" really does seem an unfortunate word here. I just think the real point is coming up with a better word rather than attacking the straw gene that nobody really suggests.Aaron Wolfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04670838392000704327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-33944127375653185102013-12-11T06:34:05.196-08:002013-12-11T06:34:05.196-08:00Aaron,
No, I think you are largely quite right: it...Aaron,<br />No, I think you are largely quite right: it's mostly not a scientific issue. (The fact that Crick et al. attached a perfectly good and more specific meaning to selfish genes in the 1980s does mean that this non-specific use of "selfish" muddies the waters, however). The way you put it here implies (I think rightly) that "selfish" doesn't really mean anything much in this context - so why use it (unless you want to suggest that the universe is, at root, a bit nasty?). I'm not sure I know quite what it means to say that the gene is the basic unit of natural selection - it is widely held among biologists that natural selection operates at several different levels, and folks like Larry Moran believe that a lot of what goes on at the level of genes is not about natural selection at all but random drift. Personally I think that the metaphor of selfishness hinders more than it helps - it confuses the issue, and lends itself to interpretations that even Richard Dawkins would find simplistic. But as I said, much of this argument is really about the packaging, not the science inside. Philip Ballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09986655706443117158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26741618.post-27597685117374993122013-12-10T23:33:45.536-08:002013-12-10T23:33:45.536-08:00I don't get this conflict. When I read The Sel...I don't get this conflict. When I read <i>The Selfish Gene</i>, my interpretation was simply that the gene was the basic unit of natural selection. Any way I try to summarize will be simplistic, but my point is that I think it amounts to: Whatever works for continuing evolution works, that's that. The thinking at one time had been focused on <i>species</i> survival and <i>individual</i> organism reproduction. Dawkins' point is simply to focus on species and organisms as vessels for gene propagation.<br /><br />The emphasis, as Dawkins clearly says, is on <i>gene</i> not on <i>selfish</i>. The primary thesis of the selfish-gene metaphor is that it is the genes that drive evolution, not the organisms or the species. It could have been called not only the cooperative gene but also the immortal gene or the eternal gene. Those metaphors would have problems too, of course. All of this is metaphor, is just a thinking tool to relate to the ideas.<br /><br />It seems to me that any focus on the <i>selfish</i> part of the metaphor is just a straw man. The ease of finding that interpretation of the metaphor has always been its greatest weakness, and Dawkins himself has expressed that.<br /><br />Is there really an actual scientific issue here?Aaron Wolfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04670838392000704327noreply@blogger.com