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This article of his I found particularly profound: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-poi

This article of his I found particularly profound: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-hav... > Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is? For anyone who was influenced by Dawkins in high school it's a breath of fresh air, our world doesn't have to be bound to dogmatic religion or even dogmatic selfishness.

bonoboTP 6y ago
I suggest re-reading The Selfish Gene and not getting caught up too much at the title, but actually paying attention to the content (as a high schooler it may not be easy to grok, especially if your school taught evolution wrong, even teachers often don't understand it). Dawkins never says people are always selfish by necessity. He says genes (not individual organisms) propagate as if they were selfish, but this is just a metaphor, if the metaphor disturbs you you can ignore it, the actual content of the evolutionary reasoning does not require using words like selfish. Also, that quote on playing just dodges the question. Why is what we call "play" so pleasurable to animals? "Because they enjoy it" is not an answer. Why don't animals do other things for pleasure? And there are very good evolutionary arguments, but that's not the point now.
- naravara 6y ago
  He covers all that in the article.
joycian 6y ago
I never got that feeling from Dawkins? Could you explain?
- marricks 6y ago
  Passage below is where he really mentions Dawkins: > The epitome of this line of thought came with militant atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene—a work that insisted all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes that, for some reason no one could quite explain, acted like “successful Chicago gangsters,” ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves. Such descriptions were typically qualified by remarks like, “Of course, this is just a metaphor, genes don’t really want or do anything.” But in reality, the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed. As a result, the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth. It goes on to discuss an alternative to the neo-Darwinist view and brings back to the core thesis of the piece, play. I'd really just massacre the thesis if I summarized it so if you find that interesting or disagree I'd really read his piece I linked above!
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Classic misunderstanding and caricature of the Darwinian argument and Dawkins' book. For one, he conflates genes and organisms. > all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes Either this is just physicalism (which is quite well accepted among most scientists) or assumes the straw Darwinist is a genetic determinist and denies environmental effects, which is misleading. > ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves When Darwinists say something approaching this, they are talking about genes and not people and indeed it is merely a metaphor. > that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior No, quite the opposite. It's not about rational motives, the whole point is there is no intelligence behind it, no "intelligent design" no reasoning. The whole thing emerges from natural selection and the fact that gene proportions will change from generation to generation and this process is not fully random: some genes succeed more than others through the properties they lend to organisms. Again, let's not conflate social Darwinism as an ideology with Darwinian evolutionary theory, of which Dawkins' book is merely a popularizer. Also, at the time of writing The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wasn't so obsessed with being a militant atheist as in the last ~15 years or so. The Selfish Gene is a pretty uncontroversial in a scientific sense, but it's quite unfortunate in its title and many people don't want to put in the mental effort of thinking about evolutionary mechanisms. It's the type of thinking we use for math puzzles or a hacking, and it's unpleasant to most people so they jump back to arguing about politics and "surely they actually mean XYZ, let's not bother engaging with the actual words in the book..." And just on the side, I don't particularly like Dawkins as a person, I find his books on atheism quite dull and weak-manning religion, his tweets annoying and provocative in a cringe-inducing way, and his intellectual output over the last decade disappointing overall. Doesn't mean I feel the need to caricature the scientific arguments.

bonoboTP 6y ago

I suggest re-reading The Selfish Gene and not getting caught up too much at the title, but actually paying attention to the content (as a high schooler it may not be easy to grok, especially if your school taught evolution wrong, even teachers often don't understand it). Dawkins never says people are always selfish by necessity. He says genes (not individual organisms) propagate as if they were selfish, but this is just a metaphor, if the metaphor disturbs you you can ignore it, the actual content of the evolutionary reasoning does not require using words like selfish. Also, that quote on playing just dodges the question. Why is what we call "play" so pleasurable to animals? "Because they enjoy it" is not an answer. Why don't animals do other things for pleasure? And there are very good evolutionary arguments, but that's not the point now.

naravara 6y ago
He covers all that in the article.

joycian 6y ago

I never got that feeling from Dawkins? Could you explain?

marricks 6y ago
Passage below is where he really mentions Dawkins: > The epitome of this line of thought came with militant atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene—a work that insisted all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes that, for some reason no one could quite explain, acted like “successful Chicago gangsters,” ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves. Such descriptions were typically qualified by remarks like, “Of course, this is just a metaphor, genes don’t really want or do anything.” But in reality, the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed. As a result, the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth. It goes on to discuss an alternative to the neo-Darwinist view and brings back to the core thesis of the piece, play. I'd really just massacre the thesis if I summarized it so if you find that interesting or disagree I'd really read his piece I linked above!
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Classic misunderstanding and caricature of the Darwinian argument and Dawkins' book. For one, he conflates genes and organisms. > all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes Either this is just physicalism (which is quite well accepted among most scientists) or assumes the straw Darwinist is a genetic determinist and denies environmental effects, which is misleading. > ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves When Darwinists say something approaching this, they are talking about genes and not people and indeed it is merely a metaphor. > that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior No, quite the opposite. It's not about rational motives, the whole point is there is no intelligence behind it, no "intelligent design" no reasoning. The whole thing emerges from natural selection and the fact that gene proportions will change from generation to generation and this process is not fully random: some genes succeed more than others through the properties they lend to organisms. Again, let's not conflate social Darwinism as an ideology with Darwinian evolutionary theory, of which Dawkins' book is merely a popularizer. Also, at the time of writing The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wasn't so obsessed with being a militant atheist as in the last ~15 years or so. The Selfish Gene is a pretty uncontroversial in a scientific sense, but it's quite unfortunate in its title and many people don't want to put in the mental effort of thinking about evolutionary mechanisms. It's the type of thinking we use for math puzzles or a hacking, and it's unpleasant to most people so they jump back to arguing about politics and "surely they actually mean XYZ, let's not bother engaging with the actual words in the book..." And just on the side, I don't particularly like Dawkins as a person, I find his books on atheism quite dull and weak-manning religion, his tweets annoying and provocative in a cringe-inducing way, and his intellectual output over the last decade disappointing overall. Doesn't mean I feel the need to caricature the scientific arguments.