CH. 1-The Selfish Gene

but sexual desire involves so many aspects that are massively superflous (and infact can in many ways be a hinderance on) to the act of reproduction. Infact just as our big brains might have evolved because of success in hunting and yet allowed the creation of music, so the orgasm evolved because of it's sucess in reproduction, it also creates a surplus, that surplus is our "sexuality". Therefore our sexual desire is as much a side effect as music.

My point is that our big brain (which is, of course, a product of our genes) allows us to learn stuff, and that the content of what our brain learns has little or nothing to do with our genes, and everything to do with culture and environment - it is only the ability to learn which is genetic.

So our big brain (caused by genes) allows us to learn things (nothing to do with genes) which may cause us to behave in ways which go against instinctual urges such as sex drive, hunger etc. (caused by genes).

So our big brain, whilst a product of evolution, allows us to learn things which allow us to behave in ways contrary to our more basic behavioural instincts ie to 'go against our genes'. Animals rarely if ever display this ability.

just as our big dicks have the potential to be pleasured in ways not "meant" by the genes.

So our big cocks (caused by genes) allows us to get pleasure from bum sex (nothing to do with genes) which may cause us to behave in ways which go against instinctual urges such as reproduction (caused by genes) except the the instinct only makes sense in terms of pleasure, so your really arguing that.....

"So our big cocks (caused by genes) allows us to get pleasure from bum sex (nothing to do with genes) which may cause us to behave in ways which go against pleasurable urges such as reproduction (caused by genes)."

So our sex drive is as capable of being "against our genes" as is "culture" and "music", ie it makes no sense to say the are against our genes.

I don't think evolution would have selected for a 'surplus' of sexuality - it would have meant too much time was spent trying to have sex, and not enough on hunting for example. Just as it is good to be strong, but evolution wouldn't select for an animal to be stronger than necessary because then it would require more food to sustain all that muscle - you can have too much of a good thing.

I've no idea of the extent to which bum sex is practised in nature, or if it is whether it is done for some genetically useful reason such as dominance displays, but I would think it highly likely that any gene which had the effect of reducing the amount of superfluous bum sex an animal was wasting (from an evolutionary POV) its time and energy on would be very successful in the gene pool.

I would argue that the prevalence of bum sex amongst humans is a good example of us 'going against our genes' in ways that other animals more tied to the whims of evolutionary pressures are unable to. I suppose in this instance you are right, it can't entirely be attributed to our big brain - but that wasn't really central to my point, rather my point is that humans can and do behave in ways that are in conflict with our chances of evolutionary success (such as not fucking our mate's girlfriend, or if we do fuck her, doing her up the arse with our massive cocks) whereas animals cannot 'go against their genes' in this way to any noticeable extent.

I'm going to bed now to dream about massive cocks and bum sex night night xx

A quick comment on "big brains". Big brains are not necessarily an evolutionary advantage. PLenty of hominids have had them and all bar one has gone extinct.

They carry a big evolutionary risk, as a human babies' head can only fit through an adult female's pelvis at an angle, making mortality of both mother and infant more likely. Add in the high cost of childcare (and I don't mean in the modern capitalist sense - that's a different discussion ) and it's not hard to see how other animals could easily out-compete humans. If anything, the question ought to be "how on earth did these freaks manage to survive, with all that's stacked against them?" Hence my "just-so" story as Crhis puts it - in this situation you either have social solidarity or you don't have big brains.

A further brief comment on sexual selection - I think what Magnifico and Revol are arguing only sees half the point. A lot of sexual activity in animals is about showing who is the fittest - which translates in some animals to behaviours that are totally about selecting a mate. Male bower birds build elaborate bowers - the only reason they do it is to attract a mate. There is a huge cost to all the energy they put in, but in evolutionary terms that cost is clearly worth paying. All species have different, sometimes severally different strategies for this, and they are often very complex.

Regards,

Martin

Hey this is a really cool thread. I'm currently a postgrad doing a bit of evolutionary biology, (but don't believe what I say, the modern 'scientist' knows nothing outside of their own technical little project). I wish I got into this thread earlier.

I think the Dawkinist paradigm (I haven't actually read Dawkins, I've mainly read Ridley and the Evo. Psy. literature which stem from Dawkins) is fundamentally flawed in that it takes a general theory, i.e. evolution, and recreates specific scenarios. Now, although evolution is a general theory, specific evolutionary stories can be constructed with the appropriate experimentation, although this is actually extremely rare. Most professional evolutionary studies nowadays are simply the construction of the relationship of animals, which is based on genes and anatomy. All most no evolutionary biologists are willing to try and make a story about a specific trait - current stories about the origins of walking, flying, etc. are quite debatable (even though on the surface there appears to be a consensus sometimes).

Now whatever Dawkin's said about altruism, his disciples certainly try and convince everyone that its the result of adaptive selection. Maybe, maybe not. There is no evidence either way. So why are they so dogmatic? Well their whole paradigm of adaptive altruism is based on game theory, Prisoner's dilemma, etc., which are based on an altruistic algorithm, i.e. adding up costs and benefits of caring about someone else. Sound familiar? All these theories stem from market loving economists trying to understand how markets evolved to be so perfect. I think the possibillity that Dawkinism is just an expression of cultural hegemony has to be seriously entertained. Its no secret that middle-class scientists have historically predominately expressed the current ideological fad. Is Dawkinism the latest insidious case? Hard to prove, but ...

I don't hink the role of empathy and sympathy can really be addresed properly. Their argument is that empathy and sympathy are the adaptive expression of the altruistic algorithm. But where's the proof? Their faith in the algorithm is not fact based, opening up the charge of ideologising. Human brains are super complex, why can't empathy and sympathy be offshoots of greater understanding of the world, which itself has probably been selected for. Dogmatic committment to either explanation will, given lack of evidence, be ideological.

I haven't dealt with the genetic determinism that the Dawkinist outlook presupposes or its manifestations. But quickly, the real test of a theory is what research does it inspire? As far as human research goes, the discipline of evolutionary psycology is a complete bunch of hacks. For animals, there's a decent body of research on sociobiology that indicates kin-selection is useful for studying animal communities.

So what's Dawkinism got to do with communism. I don't like it coz its based on reducing solidarity to costs and benefits. Maybe Marxist parties should pick it up.

What's the evidence for exctinction? Can't the different hominid 'species' just be spatio-temporal variation within an evolving clade? Remember that based on chimp-human genetic differences, the average genetic distance between hominid taxa is about the same as that between current human geographic populations so interbreeding isn't out of the question, quite the reverse.

A lot of sexual activity in animals is about showing who is the fittest

Can't it just be species recognition to avoid maladaptive hybridisation, i.e if I was a female satin-bower, a male satins-bower's bower may just be the communication means by which I don't mate with the closely related and co-local regent bower bird.

Genes do NOT create organs. Genes and DNA do not even create proteins in any direct or complete sense. This is nonsense. You have made genes into something they are not, which is little Zurich Gnomes.

And then you jump, as if this were obvious, from the false statement that Genes create organs to genes controlling behaviour in a very determinist sense.

Chris

Devrim,

To finish my comments on chapter 1, I find it funny that Devrim specifically says that there is nothing controversial. Allow me to highlight some controversial issues and statements:

p. 1
“My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.”

This terminology is by its very nature anthropomorphic. Dawkins indeed does try to define those terms in a specific usage, and that is fine as it goes, but it is very clear to me that he himself is constantly floating back and forth between their ethical usage and the scientific usage he attempts to ascribe to them.

p. 2
Dawkins states clearly that evolution is not about the group (species), it is “about the individual (gene)”. Dawkins says this because he knows it will be controversial, the very opposite of what Devrim ascribes to Dawkins’ comments. Dawkins himself takes direct aim at people like Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel prize-winning biologist and former teacher of his. And this is an idea that remains a point of contention for at least two reasons:
1. Evolution and selection at the level of groups is still defended on scientific grounds. For an example of this, see SJ Gould’s massive, magisterial work on evolution and its mechanisms, in which he defended multiple layers at which selection act.
2. Dawkins specifically treats the gene as the individual or an identity of gene and individual. This would be less of a problem if it were not clear that Dawkins constantly blurs that line, so often as he rejects the idea that selective pressures operate at the level of the gene, not the whole organism. This is certainly a much contested point.

“The argument of this book is that we… are machines created by our genes.”
Well, that is no mere throwaway line. It is the argument of the book. However, since the idea that “DNA makes proteins” is already a false statement, it is hard to see how we can take seriously the idea that we are machines create by our genes.

And this is exactly the Cartesian conception of men, as machines, with an internal spark animating their machinic material existence.

“This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour.”
This is clearly a mixing of the two uses of selfish, where the first is his “scientific” usage and the second is the ethical usage. How can this not be ambiguous? How can the “scientific” selfishness of genes (where “selfish” is in fact clearly a vivid metaphor and not meant literally) “give rise to selfishness” in the individual? The usage is so ambiguous I suppose that you could argue that it gives rise to selfish behaviour in Dawkins’ sense, but then why in the next sentence should unselfish or altruistic behaviour be referred to as a “special” case with a “limited” scope?

Following this is the phrase:
“Universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.”
Not only is this again ambiguous, in the sense that Dawkins will reserve the right to declare that since he is not a genetic determinist and merely misunderstood, but it is clearly aimed at a certain 60’s sensibility and as will become clear on page 8, at a selfish working class.

p. 3
“Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may at least have the chance to upset their designs…”
Genes are clearly here being ascribed control, consciousness and selfishness in the ethical sense. Every time Dawkins claims metaphor, it is clear that he is also not in control of his metaphor but the other way around. And I suspect I know why, but more on that later.

p. 8
Now, aside from the liberal politics of his comment on the working class, what is really at issue is that he once again uses selfish in the ethical sense.

But I do not find this accidental. Following the work of Philip Mirowski (esp. the essay How Positivism Made Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in America at http://galileo.fcien.edu.uy/How_Positivism_Made_Pact.htm), I find that Dawkins mirrors excellently the transition from the corporatist notion of science and nature that in fact dominated the language and metaphors of science, which included the notion of group speciation and selection. Dawkins in fact echoes the beginnings of the neo-liberal ideology that begins to develop (and which is in fact in full swing as a response to the collectivism of the 60’s and the failure of Cold War corporatism) and he reflects very clearly the opposition to group selection, the transformation of the individual into the unit of social life against the corporate body or even the nation.

Now this is clearly only the briefest sketch, but frankly it provides a framework in which the relationship between his particular ideas (and scientific ideas have no more autonomy in this society than any others), their appeal, the political scolding of the selfish British workers, his concerns with the competition between unions as non-altruistic, and the developments of the particular ideological framework of individualism and altruism as both impersonal and at the level of the family.

This is certainly a grand claim, but with enough time and energy I am quite confident it could be developed properly.

Now, the anarchist brethren I understanding taking no interest in the idea that it is not enough to show that humans make religion and god and not the other way around is not as important as showing why this religion and that god arose in this period and under these social relations, but I expect a little something else from erstwhile Marxists, esp. unorthodox Left Communists.

As I have emphasized, I think that Dawkins is not merely a brilliant writer, but that he captures the zeitgeist of a capital trying to escape from both company corporatism and union corporatism and this is why these things loom so large in his first chapter, and are expressed through the critique of group selection. In fact, the move away from physics and Big Science in the 1960’s and 70’s sees the replacement of physics by biology as the paradigmatic science. This is fitting as post-modernism already makes a fetish of the body and the corporeal and the move away from large-scale industry to other technologies also involves great hopes in both biotechnology as a new industry (and computers as the model of both the brain and of transformation, hence genes as programs) and as a means of providing new methods of social control.

p.11
“The gene is the unit of selection.”
This is in fact highly contested and it is the final move away from the idea that it is even the organism that is the unit of selection (after all, for Dawkins organisms do not live long enough, while genes are transmitted across many generations.)

However, all of this involves definite notions of culture (which Dawkins will not discuss, at least until the concluding chapter, which implies that his notions of culture will be present throughout the text implicitly otherwise the concluding chapter will be rather non-sensical) and of the relationship of genes, organism, and environment.

We shall see how these unfold, but it is certainly clear to me that Dawkins makes MANY controversial statements over which one cannot simply gloss.

Chris

Genes contain the instructions for making organs. How else are the structures of complex organs passed from generation to generation? Magic? This is all I was arguing, and all that was necessary to assume in the context of the discussion in question. I'm so sorry I didn't go into minute detail about the exact processes by which the instructions encoded in DNA are translated into living organs, or the various factors which may act upon the embryo during their development. I don't see how it's any different from you saying:-

Where you are clearly saying that genes are responsible for Beethoven's organs. So why the aggression?

I said genes are responsible for some behavioural instincts, such as mothers being protective of their young. Do you deny this? If so, then we disagree, fair enough, If not, then please don't start misepresenting me like you have been everybody else.

I would be interested to read some excerpts or quotes where Gould argued this, do you have any links or anything? I find Dawkins' arguments against group selectionism very convincing, but I'm no expert.

I didn't find Dawkins to be at all ambiguous on this point - it seems clear to me that he is arguing that natural selection occurs always at the level of the gene. He explains (in a way that was certainly very clear to me) that this will usually be indistinguisheable from natural selection working at the level of the individual, since the gene usually reproduces in the same way as the individual. However, sometimes viewing the individual as the unit of selection will be misleading eg in the case of 'kin altruism'. I agree that when this was written it was controversial. I am not knowledgeable enough about all the current debates to say whether it is still controversial today, but my impression was that it is pretty widely accepted.

Please explain the way in which humans are not created by genes, given that you have accepted that genes were responsible for Beethoven being human, his body structure etc. I suspect you may be arguing a semantic point.

With regard to your criticisms of Dawkins' liberal politics, yes you are right he is some kind of social democrat I think, and he does 'scold' the British working class in a way that we should obviously condemn. I guess the reason I see his theories as encouraging for libertarian communists despite this is that he does view social solidarity etc. as possible and desireable, he just has shit politics to go with it. So he used the fact that humans have created the welfare state in the UK as an example that some kind of 'universal altruism' is possible amongst humans. Now we would disagree with the example he uses, but his argument could equally well be applied to some kind of libertarian communist form or organisation. The important thing is that he is arguing that this is possible, despite the fact that we have within us genes which have become common in our gene pool by predisposing us towards selfish behaviour. I actually think that Dawkins' views are very humanist in this sense, and not at all the mechanical determinism that you make out. He strongly believes that we can make our own destiny, and thinks it is wonderful that we are not simply slaves to natural selection.

Going back to my discussion with revol, I guess you are right in that it could be interpreted as being incorrect to view any of our behviours as 'going against our genes' for the reasons you point out. However I do think that Dawkins has a significant point here, if it were phrased differently. I think the significance is that humans are far more free to behave in ways which do not maximise our survival and reproduction than animals are, because more of what effects our behaviour comes from our environment and less comes from natural instinct than in the case or animals. So because so much of our behaviour is a result of external influences it is not passed from generation to generation and so is not subject to natural selection. This allows us to engage in activities which, if they were genetic, would be naturally selected against and would dissappear, such as celibacy, hunger strikes, social solidarity and a striving against the odds for an ideal such as libertarian communism. No animal has ever chosen to do any of these activities, and I think that is significant. Whether or not it is correct or useful to describe this as 'going against our genes' (and you have made a convincing argument that it isn't) it is still, IMO, important. Perhaps it could be described as 'becoming more independent of natural selection pressures'. (if anyone thinks that revol and I derailed the thread with this discussion, I'd like to point out that Dawkins does address this in chapter 1, one of the chapters we have been discussing

Glad you found us, I'm sure you'll have lots of interesting stuff to say 8)

Most of us on this thread don't interpret Dawkins as advocating genetic determinism, quite the opposite in fact, although redtwister seems to. Why not join in the reading group (we've only read a few pages so far) and decide for yourself?

This could also partly explain why the human brain is so good at learning stuff and is less dependent on 'instinct' than other animals - we are born at a stage which would be considered premature in most mammals, possibly because if our heads got any bigger then women's pelvises would have to be too wide for them to walk on two legs. So we are very dependent babies, and have to learn how to survive in the world, our brains don't really know how to do anything except cry. And yes, this is just a speculative 'just so story', but interesting to consider nonetheless.

just a quickie.

re anal sex. might be interesting to read an interview with joan roughgarden:

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/the_gay_animal_kingdom.php?page=all&p=y

(apologies i was also going to direct people to somewhere that had a long discussion about the book but I've lost the URL. <duh> anyway suffice to say her views are controversial but "of interest")

re chap2.

Can we start with a very short introduction so it doesn't take up so much space at the top of each page please?

Fuuuuck!! I just wrote a nice long post then deleted it by accident. Fuck. That's heartrending.

OK. Here I go AGAIN:

I'm starting to realise that a lack of a good definition of determinism maybe causing some confusion on this thread. From the quotes above, Dawkins is not a strict determinist in that he does not say, eg., that person A has gene 1 and person B has gene 2, therefor they have characteristics A1 and B2. Strict determinists say this.

However, if Dawkins wants to talk about the adaptive evolution of altruism (remember, he's not keen on Bauplane, drift, pleitropy, or co-option of traits)he necessarily presupposes a gene complex that directly affects this trait and that it is visible to selective pressures. Even given that he allows for environmental variation it is key that his theory necessitates a causal link between a gene complex and a given trait, in this case altruism.

Now we know that genes are necessary for brains, and destroying brains destroys behaviours, but it does not follow that specific genes are responsible for a specific behaviour in isolation. In the case of altruism, what if general consciousness is selected for, and altruism is but one manifestation? In this view selection can't act on the variation in altruistic behavior without changing the level of conscioussness of the population. And to talk about selection acting on altruism in a strict, isolated sense would be nonsensical.

Now as said above, Dawkins necessarily pressuposes a bunch of genes that can affect altruism in isolation without addressing any of the caveats with this approach. Thus I put him in the determinist basket, although I've just realised while writing this that this is a really ambiguous term. So we've gotta be quite specific about our definition or try alternative terminology. But until someone can find for me the genes for altruism and then demonstrate fitness effects, I will struggle to take this line of thinking seriously.

BTW, the first post was way better, Fuck!

Read my initial disclaimer. That wasn't modesty. Although, no one picked up on my altruistic algorithm and market logic connection which I just thought of on the spot and thought was pure genius.

there is a tendency to ascribe all altruistic behavior, genetically routed or not, in some kind of veiled self-interest - the whole Homo economicus thesis. In fact i think Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom retreats somewhat from Adam Smith and defines self-interest as basically 'doing what you want to do', which renders it indistinguishable from freedom/autonomy and fairly meaningless in the context of market advocacy. I've got a really interesting book with cross-cultural game theory studies that empirically destroy the Homo economicus thesis; people regularly give to others even at a cost to themselves and even when there are no consequences of selfish behaviour.

But all this is a bit off-topic, sorry.

Definitely not off topic. If it is demonstrated that altruism cannot be reduced to biological enlightened self-interest, it follows that there cannot be reproductive benefits for the practitioner indirectly through relatives genes, and thus no positive selection.

(Sorry, I haven't read Dawkins so should take a back seat on this thread. Its just that it actually relates to my work.)

The book is Henrich et al (2004), Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, Oxford University Press.

Amazon Link

The studies are repeats of experiments among western university students amongst small-scale cultures in various countries, finding broadly similar results. They do however wisely include the caveat "this work has focussed on a far too narrow slice of humanity to allow generalizations about the human species". It does however falsify the selfishness axiom.

I hope i'm not derailing the Dawkins thread - i assume a new chapter 2 one will start soon anyway?

The way I read him, Dawkins is arguing that this is the case in humans. He does go into some ways in which some, limited forms of altruism could have been favoured by natural selection, but he considers most human altruism and co-operation to be the result of natural selection for big brains that are good at learning or 'general consciousness' as you put it, rather than selection for altruism in particular. He speaks of us being able to 'defy' our DNA by using these big brains to behave in ways that do not favour the passing on of our genes, and he considers this to be a wonderful thing, that we can assert our independence from natural selection pressures (this is what revol was taking exception to a few pages back). This is why I don't regard him as being a genetic determinist with regard to human behaviour (though you could argue that he is one with regard to animals.)

I've decided to join in properly and grabbed a copy. I've now read Chs 1 & 2. Are others ready to start a new thread now?

Wow, okay I never replied to any of this...

Genes contain the instructions for making amino acid chains, which then fold into proteins. We have very little idea how we get from these instructions for amino acid chains and proteins to the whole organism. There is, to re-quote Lewontin, no known genes for the nose or for skin color. The assumption is that because genes are responsible for the amino acids, that they are somehow the explanatory principle. We do know that there are specific genes or rather gene complexes for some things, but how we get from the genes to noses rather than snouts is not understood.

Until we do understand it, your view of genes is speculative.

Because Dawkins' et al were not and are not simply claiming that genes are responsible for structure. As I tried to problematize above, to say that it is "genes" that are responsible is itself only short-hand for assuming a lot inbetween. But even if it is genes, Dawkins, et al are not simply claiming that genes determine structural features, phenotypes, but that they actually determine more than structure, they determine behaviour. If they do not, or if one takes Wilson's "90% culture, 10% nature" can someone tell me what we do with that? What falls into the 10%? The 10% that disallows communism and the end of the oppression of women?

If the argument was simply about structure, there wouldn't be an argument. But sociobiology (popular sb at least) started out its career with direct attacks on gender equality, the end of oppression, and the idea that another world is possible. It is not and never was innocent politically.

I have yet to misrepresent anyone in this conversation. I am however prepared to disagree with you on that, especially depending on the species. Genes used by sociobiology are the hope to find a causal mechanism behind instincts, which were always a problem in that there was no explanation for their transmission.

For example, not all mothers are protective of their young (spiders and in fact most insects, which is a hell of a lot of species!) Hell, most living organisms do not have mothers (single-celled organisms, asexual organisms stand out most.)

And if this is biological drive, then a mother who does not care for her child and sacrifice herself for it is a monster, by biological definition.

Well, I don't have any handy quotes. There is the massive Structure of Evolutionary Theory where he argues for six different levels at which natural selection can operate, some well grounded (gene, organism, and i think cell, but I would have to look back) and some less so, some which may be mostly hopeful/fanciful (species.)

I disagree. Dawkins goes back and forth repeatedly. His use of metaphor is constantly blurring this distinction. Please see my notes.

I have done so here and in the subsequent chapters. Genes create amino acid chains and supervise protein production, but do not themselves do the folding. nor is it some simple step from gene to organism. How we go from the amino acide chains to proteins is still up for grabs, as is how we get from proteins to organisms. What is clear is that even if genes has some kind of a blueprint, the architecht does not build the building. That is the perspective of middle class professionals and managers, or that capital "reproduces itself" somehow without the labor of the workers.

I fail to see what is so hard to understand about the idea that genes do not create organisms!

His determinism does not make us slaves to biology. It simply precludes, not merely structural possibilities (we will not fly because we do not have wings, unless we invent them, but structurally, we will never fly based on our physiiology), but radical social change. Some social change was always supported by Dawkins, Wilson, et al. They are mostly not reactionaries, they are good liberals.

As for biology, what about his argument makes communism/anarchy more possible? Do you need a biological security blanket? Would you act differently if you thought it wasn't possible? I just don't see what the biology has to do with it. The argument re: human possibility can never be resolved with a biological argument, nor can communism be secured in that way.

Chris

Well said!

Chris