[lit-ideas] Re: FW: The Selfish Gene 30th Anniversary
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 14:22:21 +0100 (BST)
This is the 30th anniversary of the first publication of the (seminal) work
?The Selfish Gene? and I?ve been reading a selection of ?Reflections by
scientists, writers, and philosophers? on the book ? entitled ?Richard
Dawkins ? How A Scientist Changed The Way We Think? (I was almost awaiting a
further subtitle ? ?Since Dawkins The Way We Now Think Is That Scientist Is
An Egotist?).
The book raises many issues:- especially the general importance of Darwinism
to philosophy? So one question (we?ve been here before I know) ? what are
people?s views on this? (I tend to think it of great importance ? as Helena
Cronin writes ?I started in philosophy, where Darwinism was persistently
maligned. Surveying the science, I rapidly concluded that the philosophers
were profoundly wrong. The Selfish Gene became my staunchest guide. Here was
a Darwinian world that was gene-centred, adaptationist; this had to be how
natural selection worked?). Daniel Dennett writes that, ?The Selfish Gene
delighted me from beginning to end, instructing and correcting me on dozens
of hundreds of important points and confirming my inchoate sense that
evolution by natural selection was the key to solving most of the
philosophical problems I was interested in.? (In contrast some feel a great
deal of academic philosophy is pre-Darwinian in approach.)
Has Darwinism anything to do with philosophy and literature? I think so but
not everyone obviously does. A specific aspect of the above question is what
parallels are there (if any) between organic and cultural evolution? Is it
tenable to say, for example, that while organic evolution is Darwinian and
selectionist that cultural evolution is Lamarckian and instructivist (e.g.
inductivist)? If not, and we must be Darwinian in our understanding of human
cultural evolution, how do we go about this ? what kinds of problems does it
set and what kinds of explanation and insight are we looking to investigate?
(For this much is clear enough ? even if cultural evolution is Darwinian and
selectionist, the gene is not the unit of selection as it is in organic
evolution and to say a ?meme? is the unit of selection seems to me
problematic from the point of view of seeing theories as attempts to solve
problems).
One of the great things about Darwinism (and The Selfish Gene for explaining
this) is how it tackles and answers many problems where facts of nature might
seem to contradict it. Here?s one puzzle. Reproductive sex ratios tend often
to be 1:1 (50% females for 50% males). But since males could fertilise many
females, this seems anti-Darwinian. That is, consider two species (say, fish)
which each typically have 100 offspring and where one male could fertilise as
many fish as available. Species 1 has the 1:1 ratio. Species 2 has a 1:99
ratio. Species 1 will produce only 50 reproducing females per hundred, each
producing only 50 more females per hundred. Species 2 will produce 99
reproducing females per hundred, each producing 99 reproducing females. And
so on. You do the maths. It would seem that Species 2 will proliferate much
more than Species 1. It might therefore seem that a 1:99 ratio is much more
advantageous in evolutionary terms since it clearly maximises the
reproductive output of the species. So is there a Darwinian answer to this
conundrum or is this yet more evidence of the Creator (who, stuff Darwin, put
one special partner there for each of us, Adam&Eve style)? You decide. (But
think of The Selfish Gene and you might get the answer, and by The Selfish
Gene is meant two key underlying ideas ? gene selection and game-theory).
[The answer, due to Fisher, and so extremely logical it was not tested until
the 1990s, is sketched below at*].
But that?s just the fish talkin?. What has this stuff got to do with humans?
Here?s another one. You give participants photographs of what they think are
real people but where the photographs have been manipulated so that they look
slightly like the participants themselves. You then ask the participants (who
are unaware of the manipulation) to rate the people in the photographs on (a)
their trustworthiness (b) their sex appeal. What might you expect to find?
(Again think of The Selfish Gene).
Alan Grafen writes on ?The Intellectual Contribution? it made. ?The Selfish
Gene was a work of immense scientific creativity in 1976, providing the
conceptual foundations and unifying framework of modern Darwinian biology,
and remains unsurpassed, whether by word or by mathematics, to this day.?
As to the potential impact of the book on philosophy, Daniel C. Dennett
writes ?I have seen enough philosophy students enthusiastically tell me how
they were transformed by reading the book to judge that it pulls its weight
and then some, so yes, I put Dawkin?s book alongside classics by such
non-philosophers as Turing and Kuhn as essential thinking tools for any
student of philosophy. In addition to everything else they will learn from
it, they will discover that it is actually possible to write arguments that
are both rigorous and a joy to read. That discovery, if enough philosophers
took it to heart, could transform our discipline.?
Donal
Available at all good book shops
Where you can enter the spirit of the thing and nick it
*The answer will be indicated below, look away now if you want to keep
puzzling on..
A 1:99 ratio is not evolutionarily stable whereas 1:1 ratio is. Fish with a
1:99 ratio would be vulnerable to any mutation to a lesser ratio (for
example, to 1:1) because that would give the ?1:1 mutant? 50 males to pass on
genes to 99 females, so that this mutation would proliferate, and as it did
so its sex ratio would proliferate until it reached a point of equilibrium or
stability ? which is 1:1.
Andrew Read comments, ?[Fisher?s] idea is so logically beautiful that no one
bothered to test it until the 1990s: it simply had to be true (it was).?
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