9 ms·

In Retrospect: The Selfish Gene

86 points by Hooke 11y ago

gstn 11y ago
A groundbreaking book to me, both for the genetics as well as the concept of the meme. Brilliant.
danieltillett 11y ago
The selfish gene is one of the few books if you read it with an enquiring mind it will change you forever. I first read it 30 years ago now (amazing how time flies) and it still affects the way I see the world.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  It definitely had an effect on me. To elaborate... prior to reading TSG, I thought of myself as an atheist, but I held open a (very) small amount of willingness to consider the idea of some sort of creator, mainly because I'd not heard a convincing counter to the "irreducible complexity" idea. After reading TSG, I felt convinced that there is a reasonable way for, say, the eye, optic nerve, etc., to evolve, that doesn't require the entire thing to appear at once. Once I crossed that hurdle, I felt a lot more confident in publicly declaring myself an "atheist" instead of just saying "agnostic" which always felt like something of a weasel term. Of course, having grown up in the "Bible Belt" and having many family members who are devout Christians, this led to some interesting, erm, "discussions" over the years. I also appreciated TSG for introducing me to things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and the works of Robert Axelrod, Robert Trivers, etc. and ideas like "kin altruism", "reciprocal altruism", etc. A lot of things make more sense after reading that book.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - lttlrck 11y ago
    Climbing Mount Improbable had much the same affect on me. However it is worth noting that Dawkins himself is not certain God does not exist. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Dawkins-I-cant-be-sure-God-does-not-exist.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Daw...
  - lazyant 11y ago
    While philosophically or in theory agnosticism and atheism are separate things, I found personally in practice that they are pretty much equivalent.
- emmelaich 11y ago
  Same; it was utterly convincing and revolutionary for me. I'm still perplexed by those who saw it as an argument for selfishness. I watched a TV interview of Dawkins about 10 years back where one of the interviewer's first questions was along these lines. It must be so frustrating for him. Dawkins says he regrets the title, but perhaps the perceived controversy also helped its fame.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I tend to agree that the title helped drive the book’s success. Every time some idiot in the media confused the title of the book with the content more people read the book. I think if he had called the book the immortal gene it would not have got the same level of readership.
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Agreed...Certain brilliant works, read at just the right moment in our lives, align with our intuition, validates the information we've gathered and parsed to that point, and propels us forward with confidence... I read Edward O. Wilsons' "On Human Nature" the year it was published (1978)...I just happened to stumble upon it in a bookstore...a wonderful read which prompted me to wonder,"What other thinkers are out there that I don't know about?" This was two years after Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene"...I was unaware of the book, or Dawkins in general, for at least a decade...when I discovered it I devoured it... It had the effect of further cementing the philosophy of living my previous inquiries had led me to... I've discovered no benefit to putting a label on myself, whether that be atheist, agnostic, or theist...early on I discovered others held tightly to their views and were usually very unlikely to change them...discussions were interesting and invigorating, but ultimately fruitless... What I most appreciate about the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson is that they are quite serious thinkers...they encourage us to "go with the best available evidence"...there's no better advice... There's ample evidence that we humans are finite beings, and IMHO we don't much like the idea of that, i.e., we want answers as to why we exist at all...and we're often unwilling to embrace "the best available evidence"... Further, I think that those who cannot accept that we appear to be finite beings misunderstand the concept of "infinity"...it extends backwards, forwards, in any direction our human linguistic invention of the concept of "time" might include...infinity implies limitless possibilities... I'll continue to proceed with my life based on what "the best available evidence" suggests...if new and compelling evidence is uncovered I'm willing to turn on a dime...
- tim333 11y ago
  I found it slightly depressing. Dawkins is smart but a bit bleak and humorless. Give me a Feynman type any day. To take a memorable quote from the book: "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." It's not technically accurate. Genes are not selfish - they are inanimate chemicals and they don't do programming. Dawkins is obviously being poetic but you could write less bleak poetry. Some Feynman for comparison: "It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man [...] It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders." Jollier and doesn't resort to anthropomorphising molecules.
  - jameshart 11y ago
    Dawkins's style is more poetic. I don't think it's worse for it. In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins writes about a tree shedding its seeds to the wind, and he talks about it 'raining information'. That's an image that has stuck with me. His coining of the term 'meme' is precisely the same kind of metaphoric play.
slazaro 11y ago
The first chapter alone blew my mind the first time I read it around ten years ago. I read this book once every couple years and it's always thought provoking.
edanm 11y ago
Great article! Here's a question: What other books that were written for a popular audience (or that achieved a largely popular audience) also served as works that affected science itself? E.g. the article talks about The Selfish Gene being both a pop-sci book, but also a book that profoundly changed the field of Evolution. Are there other good examples?
- gordon_freeman 11y ago
  On the origin of species by Charles Darwin
  - benjoffe 11y ago
    The article also mentions that so I'm guessing the questioner is looking for other examples.
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    That's an interesting one, but was it written for a popular audience? (Maybe it was; I don't know.) In terms of achieving a popular audience, "Relativity: The special and general theory" may be in the same league as Darwin.
    - lolc 11y ago
      I read Origin of Species before The Selfish Gene and I enjoyed it a lot. I actually knew enough about evolution to follow all arguments easily. This is not surprising given that Darwin tried to introduce the idea to an audience that was largely alien to the concept. I think what I liked most about the book is the (clearly labeled) speculations. He was already anticipating a lot.
- thatcat 11y ago
  I took a course on scientific writing as literature. My favorite authors were Oliver Sacks, David Quamman, Tom Wolfe, R. Seltzer, and Loren Eisley. syllabus http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/51786/PEER_stage2_10.1177%252F0963662505048198.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/51786/PEER_stag...
tosseraccount 11y ago
If selfishness is driving genes, why do they mutate?
- lowmagnet 11y ago
  See the note in the article about the use of the phrase immortal instead of selfish. Simply, selfish was a poor word choice, not a literal statement of the action of genes. Genes don't "choose" to mutate any more than they "are selfish"
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    "the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal" I'm having a tough time with this part; the information is clearly NOT immortal. It changes. [ btw, looks like dang got here before you did ; thanks, dude ]
    - svachalek 11y ago
      If you increment the number 3, you get 4, but 3 has not changed -- it's still and always will be 3.
      - lowmagnet 11y ago
        I love this, and will use it in the future to explain a few things to people who believe in the essential immutability of the being (such as ourselves) versus the invariants of the universe.
    - azakai 11y ago
      No one claims that genes will live forever and even beyond the heat death of the universe. The term "immortal" in this context means that it lives far longer than individual organisms. A gene will typically remain unchanged for many, many generations of ephemeral individuals. We can talk about "a gene" while talking about the same thing in multiple individuals in the same generation and in multiple generations. It's a piece of binary information. Of course, eventually, a gene may vanish because no individuals survive that carry it (e.g. due to competition from other genes, or because the entire species vanishes in some catastrophe).
hyperion2010 11y ago
I know the TSG gets lots of attention and lots of people seem to take it as the fundamental word on how evolution works. This is simply not true. TSG presents the rather limited view of a geneticist thinking about genes and is directly at odds with other understandings of how evolution works such as genes as followers [0]. I often have a visceral reaction to such individualistic and incredibly western views of how evolution proceeds because they seem to be wilfully blind to the fact that for 99+% of the time evolution does not operate at the level of individuals, in fact, if you are in one of those rare events where individuals DO matter your likelihood of extinction is incredibly high and as a species you really don't want to be there. If the perspective offered in TSG has a place anywhere in evolution it is long before there were multicellular organisms or perhaps even cells. I was inspired to this rant the other day when watching a video of tortoises flipping each other over [1]. Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result. No amount of kin selection can prevent this if there is not already a significant latent potential in the organism's behavioral repertoire to cooperate (flip). The notion that a single gene is somehow in control is a complete and utter fiction, SNPs are not robust ways to build behaviors or even to create phenotypic diversity. The variation that leads one tortoise to flip the other over is likely the product of thousands of genes and is far more continuous than a simple 'flipping gene.' In fact, if you see flipping behavior at all it is extremely likely that the developmental program and the genome of the organism as a whole is structured such that the behavior will arise repeatedly in different individuals as a result of a number of different minor changes in gene expression. If a flower grows, its is more likely to be the case that the ground is good for growing flowers than that the flower suddenly innovated. tl;dr If you want your tortoises to flip, you're going to need more than one gene and you can't think about evolution on an individual basis. 0. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257223 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257223, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Jablonka2/publication/226572469_Genes_as_Followers_in_Evolution__A_Post-synthesis_Synthesis/links/552806e90cf29b22c9ba0641.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Jablonka2/publicati... 1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tortoise+flip https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tortoise+flip
- msteinert 11y ago
  > Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result. I believe Dawkins would argue this doesn't result in an evolutionarily stable strategy. Refer to chapter 10 of the Selfish Gene, I think it directly answers the concerns you have.
jostmey 11y ago
When I first picked up the book I was not ready for it---I hated it. It took about ten years for me to read the book, and by the time I finished my view of biology/evolution was forever changed.
- ap3 11y ago
  What did you hate about it?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I can’t speak for the OP, but my experience with giving the book to people who say they hated it, is that for some people it questions too many of their basic assumptions about the world. They can’t rationally argue against the content so they are left with irrational hate.
    - id 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance at work
  - JayHost 11y ago
    Another explanation. After reading and accepting the ideas the person can't say. -"God has a plan for me" or "I'm on a mission from god" To see life positively one has to interpret things like -"I'm so lucky my ID created me" into -"I'm lucky to be in this small habitual space in the galaxy where the sun shines and I don't have to fear death on a daily basis." Reviews insist it's depressing but I don't think so. I'm not going to personally go shouting at people to "accept the truth". An atheist version of a Jehovas Witness is quite similarly obnoxious.
  - roberto 11y ago
    I remember asking a friend who was majoring in biology if he read it, and he said "of course not, it's bullshit". When I wondered why he said "the book defends that evolution happens at the gene level, instead of the individual". I said that, yeah, that was the whole point of the book, and why it was awesome. So I guess some people don't like to question their assumptions about the world, like danieltillett said.
estefan 11y ago
Ridley's The Red Queen was a fascinating follow up after having read this. They both completely changed my world view.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Yeah, The Red Queen was great. Some other good related titles are Sperm Wars, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and The Mating Mind.
waspleg 11y ago
My best friend is a devout atheist and he likes to quote dawkins and hitchens and other high priests of his religion. I use these terms purposefully. He's every bit as fervent as any hell fire and brimstone Baptist. We are/were both raised in, and still live in, the "Bible Belt" as well. I've studied most world religions, have read quite a bit in that arena from the esoteric like "A Course in Miracles", "The Book of Urantia", Meister Eckhart, much of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Tao Te Ching, etc etc to formalized things like William James's the variety of religious experience. I've had my own, I would say spiritual rather than religious, experiences that are deeply personal and beyond the rationale of atheists. I have seen firsthand how introspection and quiet-minded observation can provide insight and intuition. However, I also I went to science magnet schools starting in pre-school, work in IT, and am quite a rational pragmatic individual. I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life. How is this topic any different? There's always Pascal's Wager ;)
- danieltillett 11y ago
  You do know that Pascal’s Wager is logically flawed [1]? 1 http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager
  - 77pt77 11y ago
    > rationalwiki Please don't!
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Sure it is not the best, but do you have a better link? Still doesn’t change that Pascal’s Wages is fundamentally flawed.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  My best friend is a devout atheist and he likes to quote dawkins and hitchens and other high priests of his religion. I use these terms purposefully. He's every bit as fervent as any hell fire and brimstone Baptist. Yeah, I know what you mean. I am an atheist, but not what I call a "militant atheist", or a "Dawkins / Hitchens acolyte". I believe (or dis-believe) what I believe, but I'm not worried about getting in other people's faces and contesting things with them. The only time I care what other people believe is when you get into situations where people try to use the hammer that is government, to force their religious beliefs on people who don't share those beliefs. I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Yeah, I could have worded that better. I'd say it was a "weasel term" for me to call myself agnostic, as I really was an atheist all along. I just wasn't quite confident enough to really state it firmly, and also I think I thought that saying "agnostic" instead of "atheist" was less likely to provoke conflict (again, living in the Bible Belt, with lots of friends and family who are very religious). I have nothing against the term agnostic in general, I just realized I was using it to avoid the issue.
sridca 11y ago
While it has become fashionable and easy to cease believing in God, humans are wont to continue believing in Authority. Why, for example, that despite professing to uphold the gene-centric evolutionary understanding humans, who are otherwise flesh and blood bodies, can't help but think inside the restrictive box of self/ identities .... while granting authority to select set of identities - not just clergy men, but authorities in various forms. Modern social justice movements are another example of this authority-complex, wherein victim-disciples "pray" to the Government-God to "bless" them with advantages and "fight" against the privileged-evils. Does not anyone recognize a familiar pattern? Belief in a supernatural being (God) is but a symptom of something much more sinister about humanity. It is one thing to question a belief, but entirely another thing to question the need to believe itself. Refer to the Milgram experiment for the classic study done on Authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
- dominotw 11y ago
  Religion != God.
  - sridca 11y ago
    I renamed the one mention of "Religion" in my post to "Belief in a supernatural being". This is such a trivial edit anyway ... do you have anything substantial to contribute towards the key point I've made in my comment above?
    - orionblastar 11y ago
      There exists religions that do not believe in a God like Buddhism. Buddha was just a human being who reached enlightenment and taught how to reach it. He was not a God or super natural.
      - sridca 11y ago
        Be that as it may ... as existence of religions without Gods is a tangential point, do you have anything substantial to contribute towards the key point I've made in my (mysteriously downvoted) original comment further above?
dominotw 11y ago
Dawkins and Jiddu Krishnamurthi changed the way I see/experience life, the way I see culture, my sense of morality, forever.
lisper 11y ago
If TSG has a flaw it is IMHO that Dawkins did not fully have the courage of his convictions. When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes. This idea has a lot of explanatory power. We humans are hosts not just for genes, but for memes as well, in a sort of symbiotic relationship. Sometimes the interests of our genes and our memes align, such as when we invent antiseptics and antibiotics. Other times they conflict, such as when we invent birth control. The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes
- danharaj 11y ago
  I wonder how the whigs figure into this grand vision.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes Cue all of the younger folks who will be confused, because they're sure "meme" == picture with two comedic captions.
- azakai 11y ago
  I think he was right to not focus too much on the "meme" concept he invented, because it is quite different from genes, scientifically (which is what he cares about). 1. The crucial thing with genes is that they are "binary", you either get a gene from a parent, or not. Mutations happen, but they produce new genes. Genes are "immortal" (exist for many, many generations in identical form). Memes, on the other hand, are not binary in this way. Ideas constantly change, and we can't reduce them to a binary code. 2. The rules of genetic competition are complex, but we have a good framework: natural selection and sexual selection. However, to explain memetic competition, we need to talk about psychology and sociology and so forth (in addition to biology). There are already fields doing that, from psychology and sociology to literature and religious studies, mostly in a non-scientific way, because we have yet to find a good scientific one. 3. For those reasons, "memetics" never succeeded as an academic discipline. The field has not succeeded in providing useful theories to be tested that tell us quantative things we don't already know. Of course, at the same time the insights you mention are true. But they are not anywhere near as powerful as the concept of genes. They are mostly useful as an analogy, and to open people's minds, but not scientifically.
rsync 11y ago
All of these years later, I still find it fascinating that the man who brought us the notion of the evolutionarily stable strategy, and who spelled out why it would be a fools errand to try to work against the ESS ... spends his free time railing against all of the dimwits he sees going to church. He should read his own book.
- tim333 11y ago
  He can maybe nudge the equilibrium over a bit. I'm not sure he rails at the dimwits so much as religious teachings and their legal acceptance which may get somewhere. I mean: "If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death" "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" are largely depreciated so these things can happen. Maybe death to infidels and apostates will go next.
- yomritoyj 11y ago
  It was Maynard-Smith and not Dawkins who introduced ESS.
  - sbardle 11y ago
    Contrary to popular belief, Dawkins has never produced original research. He is a popular science writer, who synthesises recent discoveries in the field of evolutionary biology into an understandable narrative for the layperson (albeit with extensive commentary on the non-existence of God).
    - garthferengi 11y ago
      I'm not sure why you'd think that, it's clearly false. Dawkins publication record is easily available (it's even on Wikipedia) and he has most definitely published original research.
twoy 11y ago
The Extended Phenotype:The Long Reach of the Gene, another author's book is also very interesting. Althought the book might include too expert knowledge, the core idea is simple as such it can be explained in the book's title. To think what the idea implies caltivate our view of world.

86 points by Hooke 11y ago

gstn 11y ago

A groundbreaking book to me, both for the genetics as well as the concept of the meme. Brilliant.

The selfish gene is one of the few books if you read it with an enquiring mind it will change you forever. I first read it 30 years ago now (amazing how time flies) and it still affects the way I see the world.

mindcrime 11y ago
It definitely had an effect on me. To elaborate... prior to reading TSG, I thought of myself as an atheist, but I held open a (very) small amount of willingness to consider the idea of some sort of creator, mainly because I'd not heard a convincing counter to the "irreducible complexity" idea. After reading TSG, I felt convinced that there is a reasonable way for, say, the eye, optic nerve, etc., to evolve, that doesn't require the entire thing to appear at once. Once I crossed that hurdle, I felt a lot more confident in publicly declaring myself an "atheist" instead of just saying "agnostic" which always felt like something of a weasel term. Of course, having grown up in the "Bible Belt" and having many family members who are devout Christians, this led to some interesting, erm, "discussions" over the years. I also appreciated TSG for introducing me to things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and the works of Robert Axelrod, Robert Trivers, etc. and ideas like "kin altruism", "reciprocal altruism", etc. A lot of things make more sense after reading that book.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lttlrck 11y ago
  Climbing Mount Improbable had much the same affect on me. However it is worth noting that Dawkins himself is not certain God does not exist. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Dawkins-I-cant-be-sure-God-does-not-exist.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Daw...
- lazyant 11y ago
  While philosophically or in theory agnosticism and atheism are separate things, I found personally in practice that they are pretty much equivalent.
emmelaich 11y ago
Same; it was utterly convincing and revolutionary for me. I'm still perplexed by those who saw it as an argument for selfishness. I watched a TV interview of Dawkins about 10 years back where one of the interviewer's first questions was along these lines. It must be so frustrating for him. Dawkins says he regrets the title, but perhaps the perceived controversy also helped its fame.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I tend to agree that the title helped drive the book’s success. Every time some idiot in the media confused the title of the book with the content more people read the book. I think if he had called the book the immortal gene it would not have got the same level of readership.
Outdoorsman 11y ago
Agreed...Certain brilliant works, read at just the right moment in our lives, align with our intuition, validates the information we've gathered and parsed to that point, and propels us forward with confidence... I read Edward O. Wilsons' "On Human Nature" the year it was published (1978)...I just happened to stumble upon it in a bookstore...a wonderful read which prompted me to wonder,"What other thinkers are out there that I don't know about?" This was two years after Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene"...I was unaware of the book, or Dawkins in general, for at least a decade...when I discovered it I devoured it... It had the effect of further cementing the philosophy of living my previous inquiries had led me to... I've discovered no benefit to putting a label on myself, whether that be atheist, agnostic, or theist...early on I discovered others held tightly to their views and were usually very unlikely to change them...discussions were interesting and invigorating, but ultimately fruitless... What I most appreciate about the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson is that they are quite serious thinkers...they encourage us to "go with the best available evidence"...there's no better advice... There's ample evidence that we humans are finite beings, and IMHO we don't much like the idea of that, i.e., we want answers as to why we exist at all...and we're often unwilling to embrace "the best available evidence"... Further, I think that those who cannot accept that we appear to be finite beings misunderstand the concept of "infinity"...it extends backwards, forwards, in any direction our human linguistic invention of the concept of "time" might include...infinity implies limitless possibilities... I'll continue to proceed with my life based on what "the best available evidence" suggests...if new and compelling evidence is uncovered I'm willing to turn on a dime...
tim333 11y ago
I found it slightly depressing. Dawkins is smart but a bit bleak and humorless. Give me a Feynman type any day. To take a memorable quote from the book: "We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." It's not technically accurate. Genes are not selfish - they are inanimate chemicals and they don't do programming. Dawkins is obviously being poetic but you could write less bleak poetry. Some Feynman for comparison: "It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man [...] It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders." Jollier and doesn't resort to anthropomorphising molecules.
- jameshart 11y ago
  Dawkins's style is more poetic. I don't think it's worse for it. In the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins writes about a tree shedding its seeds to the wind, and he talks about it 'raining information'. That's an image that has stuck with me. His coining of the term 'meme' is precisely the same kind of metaphoric play.

slazaro 11y ago

The first chapter alone blew my mind the first time I read it around ten years ago. I read this book once every couple years and it's always thought provoking.

edanm 11y ago

Great article! Here's a question: What other books that were written for a popular audience (or that achieved a largely popular audience) also served as works that affected science itself? E.g. the article talks about The Selfish Gene being both a pop-sci book, but also a book that profoundly changed the field of Evolution. Are there other good examples?

gordon_freeman 11y ago
On the origin of species by Charles Darwin
- benjoffe 11y ago
  The article also mentions that so I'm guessing the questioner is looking for other examples.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  That's an interesting one, but was it written for a popular audience? (Maybe it was; I don't know.) In terms of achieving a popular audience, "Relativity: The special and general theory" may be in the same league as Darwin.
  - lolc 11y ago
    I read Origin of Species before The Selfish Gene and I enjoyed it a lot. I actually knew enough about evolution to follow all arguments easily. This is not surprising given that Darwin tried to introduce the idea to an audience that was largely alien to the concept. I think what I liked most about the book is the (clearly labeled) speculations. He was already anticipating a lot.
thatcat 11y ago
I took a course on scientific writing as literature. My favorite authors were Oliver Sacks, David Quamman, Tom Wolfe, R. Seltzer, and Loren Eisley. syllabus http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/51786/PEER_stage2_10.1177%252F0963662505048198.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y http://www.tara.tcd.ie/bitstream/handle/2262/51786/PEER_stag...

tosseraccount 11y ago

If selfishness is driving genes, why do they mutate?

lowmagnet 11y ago
See the note in the article about the use of the phrase immortal instead of selfish. Simply, selfish was a poor word choice, not a literal statement of the action of genes. Genes don't "choose" to mutate any more than they "are selfish"
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  "the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal" I'm having a tough time with this part; the information is clearly NOT immortal. It changes. [ btw, looks like dang got here before you did ; thanks, dude ]
  - svachalek 11y ago
    If you increment the number 3, you get 4, but 3 has not changed -- it's still and always will be 3.
    - lowmagnet 11y ago
      I love this, and will use it in the future to explain a few things to people who believe in the essential immutability of the being (such as ourselves) versus the invariants of the universe.
  - azakai 11y ago
    No one claims that genes will live forever and even beyond the heat death of the universe. The term "immortal" in this context means that it lives far longer than individual organisms. A gene will typically remain unchanged for many, many generations of ephemeral individuals. We can talk about "a gene" while talking about the same thing in multiple individuals in the same generation and in multiple generations. It's a piece of binary information. Of course, eventually, a gene may vanish because no individuals survive that carry it (e.g. due to competition from other genes, or because the entire species vanishes in some catastrophe).

hyperion2010 11y ago

I know the TSG gets lots of attention and lots of people seem to take it as the fundamental word on how evolution works. This is simply not true. TSG presents the rather limited view of a geneticist thinking about genes and is directly at odds with other understandings of how evolution works such as genes as followers [0]. I often have a visceral reaction to such individualistic and incredibly western views of how evolution proceeds because they seem to be wilfully blind to the fact that for 99+% of the time evolution does not operate at the level of individuals, in fact, if you are in one of those rare events where individuals DO matter your likelihood of extinction is incredibly high and as a species you really don't want to be there. If the perspective offered in TSG has a place anywhere in evolution it is long before there were multicellular organisms or perhaps even cells. I was inspired to this rant the other day when watching a video of tortoises flipping each other over [1]. Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result. No amount of kin selection can prevent this if there is not already a significant latent potential in the organism's behavioral repertoire to cooperate (flip). The notion that a single gene is somehow in control is a complete and utter fiction, SNPs are not robust ways to build behaviors or even to create phenotypic diversity. The variation that leads one tortoise to flip the other over is likely the product of thousands of genes and is far more continuous than a simple 'flipping gene.' In fact, if you see flipping behavior at all it is extremely likely that the developmental program and the genome of the organism as a whole is structured such that the behavior will arise repeatedly in different individuals as a result of a number of different minor changes in gene expression. If a flower grows, its is more likely to be the case that the ground is good for growing flowers than that the flower suddenly innovated. tl;dr If you want your tortoises to flip, you're going to need more than one gene and you can't think about evolution on an individual basis. 0. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257223 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21257223, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Jablonka2/publication/226572469_Genes_as_Followers_in_Evolution__A_Post-synthesis_Synthesis/links/552806e90cf29b22c9ba0641.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Jablonka2/publicati... 1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tortoise+flip https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tortoise+flip

msteinert 11y ago
> Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result. I believe Dawkins would argue this doesn't result in an evolutionarily stable strategy. Refer to chapter 10 of the Selfish Gene, I think it directly answers the concerns you have.

jostmey 11y ago

When I first picked up the book I was not ready for it---I hated it. It took about ten years for me to read the book, and by the time I finished my view of biology/evolution was forever changed.

ap3 11y ago
What did you hate about it?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I can’t speak for the OP, but my experience with giving the book to people who say they hated it, is that for some people it questions too many of their basic assumptions about the world. They can’t rationally argue against the content so they are left with irrational hate.
  - id 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance at work
- JayHost 11y ago
  Another explanation. After reading and accepting the ideas the person can't say. -"God has a plan for me" or "I'm on a mission from god" To see life positively one has to interpret things like -"I'm so lucky my ID created me" into -"I'm lucky to be in this small habitual space in the galaxy where the sun shines and I don't have to fear death on a daily basis." Reviews insist it's depressing but I don't think so. I'm not going to personally go shouting at people to "accept the truth". An atheist version of a Jehovas Witness is quite similarly obnoxious.
- roberto 11y ago
  I remember asking a friend who was majoring in biology if he read it, and he said "of course not, it's bullshit". When I wondered why he said "the book defends that evolution happens at the gene level, instead of the individual". I said that, yeah, that was the whole point of the book, and why it was awesome. So I guess some people don't like to question their assumptions about the world, like danieltillett said.

estefan 11y ago

Ridley's The Red Queen was a fascinating follow up after having read this. They both completely changed my world view.

mindcrime 11y ago
Yeah, The Red Queen was great. Some other good related titles are Sperm Wars, The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, and The Mating Mind.

waspleg 11y ago

My best friend is a devout atheist and he likes to quote dawkins and hitchens and other high priests of his religion. I use these terms purposefully. He's every bit as fervent as any hell fire and brimstone Baptist. We are/were both raised in, and still live in, the "Bible Belt" as well. I've studied most world religions, have read quite a bit in that arena from the esoteric like "A Course in Miracles", "The Book of Urantia", Meister Eckhart, much of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Tao Te Ching, etc etc to formalized things like William James's the variety of religious experience. I've had my own, I would say spiritual rather than religious, experiences that are deeply personal and beyond the rationale of atheists. I have seen firsthand how introspection and quiet-minded observation can provide insight and intuition. However, I also I went to science magnet schools starting in pre-school, work in IT, and am quite a rational pragmatic individual. I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life. How is this topic any different? There's always Pascal's Wager ;)

danieltillett 11y ago
You do know that Pascal’s Wager is logically flawed [1]? 1 http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pascal's_wager
- 77pt77 11y ago
  > rationalwiki Please don't!
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Sure it is not the best, but do you have a better link? Still doesn’t change that Pascal’s Wages is fundamentally flawed.
mindcrime 11y ago
My best friend is a devout atheist and he likes to quote dawkins and hitchens and other high priests of his religion. I use these terms purposefully. He's every bit as fervent as any hell fire and brimstone Baptist. Yeah, I know what you mean. I am an atheist, but not what I call a "militant atheist", or a "Dawkins / Hitchens acolyte". I believe (or dis-believe) what I believe, but I'm not worried about getting in other people's faces and contesting things with them. The only time I care what other people believe is when you get into situations where people try to use the hammer that is government, to force their religious beliefs on people who don't share those beliefs. I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Yeah, I could have worded that better. I'd say it was a "weasel term" for me to call myself agnostic, as I really was an atheist all along. I just wasn't quite confident enough to really state it firmly, and also I think I thought that saying "agnostic" instead of "atheist" was less likely to provoke conflict (again, living in the Bible Belt, with lots of friends and family who are very religious). I have nothing against the term agnostic in general, I just realized I was using it to avoid the issue.

sridca 11y ago

While it has become fashionable and easy to cease believing in God, humans are wont to continue believing in Authority. Why, for example, that despite professing to uphold the gene-centric evolutionary understanding humans, who are otherwise flesh and blood bodies, can't help but think inside the restrictive box of self/ identities .... while granting authority to select set of identities - not just clergy men, but authorities in various forms. Modern social justice movements are another example of this authority-complex, wherein victim-disciples "pray" to the Government-God to "bless" them with advantages and "fight" against the privileged-evils. Does not anyone recognize a familiar pattern? Belief in a supernatural being (God) is but a symptom of something much more sinister about humanity. It is one thing to question a belief, but entirely another thing to question the need to believe itself. Refer to the Milgram experiment for the classic study done on Authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

dominotw 11y ago
Religion != God.
- sridca 11y ago
  I renamed the one mention of "Religion" in my post to "Belief in a supernatural being". This is such a trivial edit anyway ... do you have anything substantial to contribute towards the key point I've made in my comment above?
  - orionblastar 11y ago
    There exists religions that do not believe in a God like Buddhism. Buddha was just a human being who reached enlightenment and taught how to reach it. He was not a God or super natural.
    - sridca 11y ago
      Be that as it may ... as existence of religions without Gods is a tangential point, do you have anything substantial to contribute towards the key point I've made in my (mysteriously downvoted) original comment further above?

dominotw 11y ago

Dawkins and Jiddu Krishnamurthi changed the way I see/experience life, the way I see culture, my sense of morality, forever.

lisper 11y ago

If TSG has a flaw it is IMHO that Dawkins did not fully have the courage of his convictions. When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes. This idea has a lot of explanatory power. We humans are hosts not just for genes, but for memes as well, in a sort of symbiotic relationship. Sometimes the interests of our genes and our memes align, such as when we invent antiseptics and antibiotics. Other times they conflict, such as when we invent birth control. The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes

danharaj 11y ago
I wonder how the whigs figure into this grand vision.
stcredzero 11y ago
When he introduced the concept of a meme he insisted it was just an allegory, an illustrative thought experiment but nothing more. I think this is wrong. I think memes are every bit as legitimately considered alive as genes Cue all of the younger folks who will be confused, because they're sure "meme" == picture with two comedic captions.
azakai 11y ago
I think he was right to not focus too much on the "meme" concept he invented, because it is quite different from genes, scientifically (which is what he cares about). 1. The crucial thing with genes is that they are "binary", you either get a gene from a parent, or not. Mutations happen, but they produce new genes. Genes are "immortal" (exist for many, many generations in identical form). Memes, on the other hand, are not binary in this way. Ideas constantly change, and we can't reduce them to a binary code. 2. The rules of genetic competition are complex, but we have a good framework: natural selection and sexual selection. However, to explain memetic competition, we need to talk about psychology and sociology and so forth (in addition to biology). There are already fields doing that, from psychology and sociology to literature and religious studies, mostly in a non-scientific way, because we have yet to find a good scientific one. 3. For those reasons, "memetics" never succeeded as an academic discipline. The field has not succeeded in providing useful theories to be tested that tell us quantative things we don't already know. Of course, at the same time the insights you mention are true. But they are not anywhere near as powerful as the concept of genes. They are mostly useful as an analogy, and to open people's minds, but not scientifically.

rsync 11y ago

All of these years later, I still find it fascinating that the man who brought us the notion of the evolutionarily stable strategy, and who spelled out why it would be a fools errand to try to work against the ESS ... spends his free time railing against all of the dimwits he sees going to church. He should read his own book.

tim333 11y ago
He can maybe nudge the equilibrium over a bit. I'm not sure he rails at the dimwits so much as religious teachings and their legal acceptance which may get somewhere. I mean: "If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death" "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" are largely depreciated so these things can happen. Maybe death to infidels and apostates will go next.
yomritoyj 11y ago
It was Maynard-Smith and not Dawkins who introduced ESS.
- sbardle 11y ago
  Contrary to popular belief, Dawkins has never produced original research. He is a popular science writer, who synthesises recent discoveries in the field of evolutionary biology into an understandable narrative for the layperson (albeit with extensive commentary on the non-existence of God).
  - garthferengi 11y ago
    I'm not sure why you'd think that, it's clearly false. Dawkins publication record is easily available (it's even on Wikipedia) and he has most definitely published original research.

twoy 11y ago

The Extended Phenotype:The Long Reach of the Gene, another author's book is also very interesting. Althought the book might include too expert knowledge, the core idea is simple as such it can be explained in the book's title. To think what the idea implies caltivate our view of world.