The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene

By Richard Dawkins

Excerpts and Comments

By Rami E. Cremesti

“ We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”

With this radical statement, Dawkins opened his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene” whose second edition appeared in 1989), is now regarded as a work of radical extremism. There are two ways of looking at natural selection: The gene’s angle and that of the individual. The book extolls the gene’s-eye view of evolution.

Chapter 1: Why Are People

“ Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over thee thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin”.

Dawkins is indirectly stating his belief that the “Telos” of our existence, the “why” is the selfish self-preservation of our genes.

“My purpose [in this book] is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. It will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law that I call gene selfishness.”

“ The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our ruthlessly selfish genes”.

“There are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals”.

Dawkins is bothered by the fact that “Universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.” (pathetic wretch)

Dawkins is aware of the moral/social implications of his theory. “But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it from being true. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty in which to live. Be warned, that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” (Dawkins’s pathetic alternative to Love, as a universal concept).

“Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people”.

“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes around the sun.”

Following is Dawkins’s account of the origin of life. He admits that it is “speculative” yet he asserts that it is “probably not too far from the truth”.

“We do not know what chemical raw materials were abundant on earth before the coming of life, but among the plausible possibilities are water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia: all simple compounds compounds known to be present on at least some of the other planets in our solar system. Chemist have tried to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. They have put these simple substances in a flask and supplied a source of energy such as UV light or electric sparks – artificial simulation of primordial lightning/UV light. After a few weeks of this, something interesting is usually found inside the flask: a weak brown soup containing a large number of molecules more complex than the ones originally put in. In particular, amino acids have been found – the building block of proteins, one of the two great classes of biological molecules. More recently, laboratory simulations of the chemical conditions of earth before the coming of life have yielded organic substances called purines and pyrimidines. These are the building blocks of the genetic molecule, DNA itself.

Processes analogous to these must have given rise to the ‘primeval soup’ which biologists and chemists believe constituted the seas three to four thousand million year ago. The organic substances became locally concentrated, perhaps in drying scum round the shores, or in tiny suspended droplets. Under further influence of energy such as UV light from the sun, they combined into larger molecules. Nowadays large organic molecules would not last long enough to be noticed: they would be quickly absorbed and broken down by bacteria or other living creatures. But bacteria and the rest of us are late comers, and in these days large organic molecules could drift unmolested through the thickening broth.

At some point, a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We call it the Replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest of the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. This may seem a very unlikely sort of accident to happen, but it had hundreds of millions of years to occur. And it had to occur only once. As soon as the replicator was born, it must have spread its copies rapidly throughout the seas, until the smaller building block molecules (on whci it ‘feeds’ to replicate itself) became a scarce resource.

Now we arrive at a large population of identical (or almost identical) replicas. Mistakes will have happened in the replication process. But it is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible. Probably the original replicators were far more erratic, but in any case we may be sure that mistakes were made and these mistakes were cumulative.

As mis-copyings were made and propagated, the primeval soup became filled by a population not of identical replicas, but of several varieties of replicating molecules, all ‘descended’ from the same ancestor. However, some replicators would have been more numerous than others. Some varieties would have been inherently more stable than others: Certain molecules, once formed, would be less likely than others to break up again. They might also have a greater speed and accuracy of replication. The replicators with the best combination of longevity, replication speed and accuracy of replication would get “naturally selected”.

Eventually, the replicators that survived were the ones that built survival mamchines for themselves to live in. The first survival machines probably consisted of mothing more than a protective coat, but making a living got steadily harder as new rivals arose with better and more effective survival machines. Survival machines got bigger and more elaborate, and the process was cumulative and progressive.

First I begin with three quotes from the book:

“Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? …all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely” GG Simpson quoted for support of Dawkins’s Selfish Gene Theory (it’s not difficult, after one reads this, to find out that the book is “widely regarded as a work of radical extremism”)

“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes around the sun.”

Following is Dawkins’s account of the origin of life. He admits that it is “speculative” yet he asserts that it is “probably not too far from the truth”.

“We do not know what chemical raw materials were abundant on earth before the coming of life, but among the plausible possibilities are water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia: all simple compounds compounds known to be present on at least some of the other planets in our solar system. Chemists have tried to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. They have put these simple substances in a flask and supplied a source of energy such as UV light or electric sparks – artificial simulation of primordial lightning/UV light. After a few weeks of this, something interesting is usually found inside the flask: a weak brown soup containing a large number of molecules more complex than the ones originally put in. In particular, amino acids have been found – the building block of proteins, one of the two great classes of biological molecules. More recently, laboratory simulations of the chemical conditions of earth before the coming of life have yielded organic substances called purines and pyrimidines. These are the building blocks of the genetic molecule, DNA itself.

The next step: How did plants and animals come to exist ? how did the leap from the primordial “soup” to walking talking animals eating off of trees and hunting other animals occur ?

When the organic food (which had been slowly built up under the energetic influence of centuries of sunlight [and chaotic synthesis]) in the primordial soup ran out, the replicators’ easy life came to an end. A major branch of survival machines, now called plants, started to use sunlight directly themselves to build up complex molecules from simple ones, re-enacting at much higher speed the synthetic processes of the original soup. Another branch, now known as animals, ‘discovered’ how to exploit the chemical labors of the plants, either by eating them, or by eating other animals. Both main branches of survival machines evolved more and more ingenious tricks to increase their efficiency in their various ways of life, and new ways of life were continually opened up. Sub-branches and sub-sub branches evolved each one excelling in a particular specialized way of making a living: in the sea, on the ground, in the air, underground, up trees, inside other living bodies, etc. This sub-branching has given rise to the immense diversity of animals and plants which so impress us today.

Animal behavior has an apparent purposiveness. Dawkins will attempt to show that ALL behavior stems from the genes’ selfishness.

The genes control the behavior of their survival machines, not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer. All they have to do is set it up before hand, then the survival machine is on its own.

Genes solve the problem of making predictions in rather unpredictable environments is to build a capacity for learning. The problem is that learning can be costly due to error (you learn by error but, error can be deadly). Simulation is both safer and faster. Thus the capacity to simulate evolved and it culminated in subjective consciousness. This is a profound mystery admits Dawkins, and he speculates that “perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.

Dawkins offers two possible hypotheses of how the evolution of a capacity to simulate might have led to the development of consciousness:

The first is based on Daniel Dennett’s theory of consciousness. Dennett thinks that the salient feature of the subjective experience of thinking is the serial “one thing after the other” stream of consciousness. He believes that most animals lack this serial experience and use their brains directly in their native, parallel-processing mode. Doubtless the human brain too uses its parallel architecture directly for many of the routine tasks of keeping a complicated survival machine ticking over. But in addition, the human brain evolved a software virtual machine to simulate the illusion of a serial processor. The mind with its serial stream of consciousness is a virtual machine, a ‘user friendly’ way of experiencing the brain. Why we humans need a serial virtual machine, when other species of animals seem quite happy with their unadorned parallel machines could be because there is something fundamentally serial about the more difficult tasks that a wild human is called upon to do.

The Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has developed a tempting hypothesis of how the evolution of a capacity to simulate might have led to consciousness. In his book, The Inner Eye he makes a convincing argument that the highly social animals like us and the chimpanzees have to become expert psychologists. Brains have to juggle with, and simulate many aspects of the world. But most aspects of the world are pretty simple in comparison to brains themselves. A social animal lives in a world of others, a world of potential mates, rivals, partners and enemies. To survive and prosper in such a world, you have to become good at predicting what these other individuals are going to do next. Humphrey believes that this “natural psychological’ skill has become highly evolved in social animals, almost like a “third eye” or other complicated organ. The ‘inner eye’ is the evolved socio-psychological organ, just as the eye is the visual organ. He goes on to argue that the inner eye works by self-inspection. Each animal looks inwards to its own feelings and emotions as a means of understanding the feelings and emotions of others. Thus consciousness evolved…

Genes are master programmers.

A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness. It has long been clear that this must be why altruism by parents toward their young is so common.

Dawkins gives examples from nature and proves that the apparent altruism witnessed in the behavior of certain animals and insects is founded in gene selfishness.

For example, when Thomson gazelle herds spot approaching predators, it’s been observed with great fascination that some gazelles start performing high stotting jumps. This has been regarded for long as suicidal altruism – in other words, it’s been believed that the strotting gazelles “offer” themselves as dinner for the predator so that his hunger may be satisfied and he’d leave the rest of the herd alone after he’s had his meal. However, a different theory was recently formulated by Zahavi to rebuff this concept of altruism. The signal the stotting gazelle is making is directed at the predator and is intended to translate as “ Look how high I can jump, I am obviously such a fit and healthy gazelle, you can’t catch me, you would be much wiser to try and catch my neighbor who is not jumping so high!” According to this theory the display is far from altruistic. In fact, it is very selfish.

Certain bees are also known for attacking potential honey-raiders by stinging them at the price of self-sacrifice – the bees loose vital organs in the sting and most often die. This is quoted by some as another example of altruism which is in contradiction with the Selfish Gene theory. Dawkins, however rebuffs that. He argues that bees are social insects. These insects are highly organized and cooperative. They have a queen, which is the only bee capable of reproduction and the rest are sterile workers divided among different tasks. The community behaves almost as if it were a unit with a nervous system and sense organs of its own. The sterile workers are the analogy of our liver, muscle and nerve cells. All of a worker’s efforts are directed to preserving its genes by caring for relatives rather than its own offspring (which it cannot have). The death of a single sterile worker bee is no more serious to its genes than is the shedding of a leaf in autumn to the genes of the tree.

Dawkins pushes his theory further and suggests that perhaps many of our psychological characteristics – envy, guilt, sympathy, etc. – have been shaped by natural selection for improved ability to cheat, detect cheating and to avoid being thought to be a cheat. It is even possible, he argues further, that man’s swollen brain, and his disposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating and penetrating detection of cheating in others.

Dawkins then formulates another concept to explain the phenomenon of cultural transmission. The evolution of language, knowledge, ideas, etc cannot be explained on the level of the genes. Dawkins formulates the concept of “meme”, which is, in the world of cultural evolution, the equivalent of gene in the world of biological evolution. Dawkins believes that Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. For an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution.

According to Dawkins, there is only one general principle that is true of all life (on earth or in the universe): this is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. He thinks that a new kind of replicator has emerged in the recent history of life on earth… The new soup is the soup of human culture. The new replicator, the smallest unit of cultural transmission, a unit of imitation, is the meme. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches etc. When an idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. And just like there are some criteria that might favor the natural selection of certain genes over others, there are criteria that favor the “replication” of some memes over others. Dawkins uses the meme of God as an example. The reason, he argues, that the concept of God is so widespread is because of its psychological appeal. The same qualities that favor some genes over others apply to the world of memes too: longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity.

“Even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight – our capacity to simulate the future in imagination – could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We alone on earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

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