Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
> > > If I am wrong in this it is because I am highly sympathetic to the uses of > the gene-centered theory. Thus I think that ideological lines are very > important to draw and I also think that the ideological lines an be drawn > without losing the theory. I want to make something clear about this last paragraph of the previous post. What I am sympathetic with is the narrow scientific theory that takes the gene level of evolutionary selection as its starting point. The reason I think it is necessary to "draw ideological lines" [a little too much Althusser in this expression] is to distinguish the narrow theory from the supposed sociological and philosophical implications. Also, I am not arguing that biological evolution will change in its basic understandings. Though it is possible that we may find that the mechanisms are not exactly what we thought they were, and that there is simply a lot more "noise" or "junk" that we can't account for on the level phenotype expression. The hard-core Darwinian philosophers, such as Dennett, truly believe that they can explain everything, from psychological disabilities to human institutions, to individual intentions, with same type of evolutionary "selfish meme" theory. Thus we now have biological evolutionary theories of literature, music, gift-exchange, ... among other projects. It reminds me of the application of game theory and economic theory to everything including our "exchanges" with "the Gods." Jerry ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
Interesting. Many biologists, if not most of them, claim that the Darwinian basis of biology will never change. Yet they claim that science is based on tests. But if science is only as valid as the last supportive test then there cannot be special claims made for neo-Darwinism. Paddy Hackett 1 April, 2006 Quote from Ralph Dumain "Furthermore, the metaphorical, analogical extensions of scientific ideas in this case are even more egregious than the mystifications by some physicists of their own science, as these mystifications are philosophical and not intrinsic to the science, while the pseudoscientific pretensions of Dawkins and co. compromise the scientific claims themselves. " 1. If you have the time I would be interested if you can expand on why you think the extensions, mystification, social claims, of Dawkins are intrinsic or might compromise the science. 2. I am not quite sure about your first claim about physics. It seems to me that historically, there were certain "metaphysical" (loosely speaking) claims made by physics that seemed then to be intrinsic to science-itself, that were later found to be without foundation. (Claims about continuity, reduction, etc.) For instance I just read Arnold Thackray's very interesting book *Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter-Theory and the Development of Chemistry*. One of the main arguments of that book is that the more philosophical and pseudoscientific extensions of Newtonian theory all but strangled chemistry and took scientists who were not trained in the established Newtonian orthodoxy to take chemistry seriously. Further, to extend this, Chemistry, continued to be suspected of being unscientific by many physicists until Linus Pauling showed in his sketch of quantum chemistry, that it was the Newtonians who had mischaracterized the problem by propounding what can be now seen as metaphysical conditions for proof. It seems to me, just looking at the science that Dawkins and Company lay claim to, (though again I would look at the less popular writings of George Williams for claims that are scientifically, broad but socially more limited) they are making some of the same mistakes as the Newtonians. They simply believe without question, that science is not science without both theoretical reduction and realist reduction. They also believe that their model of scientific theory *must* explain all other similar phenomena with a theory that is similar (if not exactly the same) as the gene-centric model. The intellectual mistakes seem to me to be very similar to the extensions of physicists to other areas. The problem is that when we talk about genes and evolution we are not only talking about ants, orchids, aphids, and lizards, but about human beings. Thus the ideological consequences are directly felt in arguments about the possibilities of human individuals and societies. So if the kind of gene-centered notions are extended in the exact same manner as Newtonian matter-theory was extended the consequences are not only felt by the squelching of certain kinds of scientific and philosophical thinking, but also as a problem of where to draw the political lines. If I am wrong in this it is because I am highly sympathetic to the uses of the gene-centered theory. Thus I think that ideological lines are very important to draw and I also think that the ideological lines an be drawn without losing the theory. Jerry Monaco ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
1 April, 2006 Quote from Ralph Dumain "Furthermore, the metaphorical, analogical extensions of scientific ideas in this case are even more egregious than the mystifications by some physicists of their own science, as these mystifications are philosophical and not intrinsic to the science, while the pseudoscientific pretensions of Dawkins and co. compromise the scientific claims themselves. " 1. If you have the time I would be interested if you can expand on why you think the extensions, mystification, social claims, of Dawkins are intrinsic or might compromise the science. 2. I am not quite sure about your first claim about physics. It seems to me that historically, there were certain "metaphysical" (loosely speaking) claims made by physics that seemed then to be intrinsic to science-itself, that were later found to be without foundation. (Claims about continuity, reduction, etc.) For instance I just read Arnold Thackray's very interesting book *Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter-Theory and the Development of Chemistry*. One of the main arguments of that book is that the more philosophical and pseudoscientific extensions of Newtonian theory all but strangled chemistry and took scientists who were not trained in the established Newtonian orthodoxy to take chemistry seriously. Further, to extend this, Chemistry, continued to be suspected of being unscientific by many physicists until Linus Pauling showed in his sketch of quantum chemistry, that it was the Newtonians who had mischaracterized the problem by propounding what can be now seen as metaphysical conditions for proof. It seems to me, just looking at the science that Dawkins and Company lay claim to, (though again I would look at the less popular writings of George Williams for claims that are scientifically, broad but socially more limited) they are making some of the same mistakes as the Newtonians. They simply believe without question, that science is not science without both theoretical reduction and realist reduction. They also believe that their model of scientific theory *must* explain all other similar phenomena with a theory that is similar (if not exactly the same) as the gene-centric model. The intellectual mistakes seem to me to be very similar to the extensions of physicists to other areas. The problem is that when we talk about genes and evolution we are not only talking about ants, orchids, aphids, and lizards, but about human beings. Thus the ideological consequences are directly felt in arguments about the possibilities of human individuals and societies. So if the kind of gene-centered notions are extended in the exact same manner as Newtonian matter-theory was extended the consequences are not only felt by the squelching of certain kinds of scientific and philosophical thinking, but also as a problem of where to draw the political lines. If I am wrong in this it is because I am highly sympathetic to the uses of the gene-centered theory. Thus I think that ideological lines are very important to draw and I also think that the ideological lines an be drawn without losing the theory. Jerry Monaco ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
Thanks for the scientific clarification. While all this helps, I note nevertheless a few key passages: But, frankly, I think his politics are irrelevant. He was purposely provocative in his original book. And since then he has done little to limit the ideological consequences of his view. Unlike, Chomsky he dose not accept the notion that science is narrow and that the explanations he provides may simply be a contender for "best" theory of evolutionary selection. In similar fashion Dawkins has aided and promoted the unwarranted ideological use of what should be a limited theory. He has developed what might be called a "Social Reductionist Selfish Gene Theory", which, as far as I can see, has no good scientific application. Dennett has picked up this Selfish Meme theory and has beaten it death. Who knows, in the future we may find that there is some applications for the notion of memes but I doubt it will be in the form that Dennett has developed. Finally in general all the arguments of drawing social conclusions from evolutionary biology by turning it into "Social Darwinism" can be used against the "Social Selfish Gene" notion. There is no indication that we can know anything about individual human "intentions" or human social institutions, by assuming that the main or only level of evolutionary selection is at the molecular level. I wasn't concerned about the overt politics of Dawkins or Dennett or any of these schnorrers, but about the overall implications of their pseudoscientific obscurantism. Furthermore, the metaphorical, analogical extensions of scientific ideas in this case are even more egregious than the mystifications by some physicists of their own science, as these mystifications are philosophical and not intrinsic to the science, while the pseudoscientific pretensions of Dawkins and co. compromise the scientific claims themselves. Secondly, Dawkins has been peddling this crap for over three decades. Why can't these people learn something new, deepen their perspective? They won't because at bottom they are ideologists. Dennett's recent performance in a local bookstore was so shameful, I can't believe he dared to show his face in public. He should be hounded out of the philosophy profession. It's truly alarming that it is people like these holding down the fort against irrationalism and religious obscurantism, because they compromise their own efforts as panderers of mystification themselves. Even secular humanist mystification is mystification. Such willful naivete in the teeth of a civilization in crisis indicates that it's sinking even faster than we thought. At 12:13 PM 3/29/2006 -0500, Jerry Monaco wrote: Ralph, First of all let me say that I have listened to the audio and I read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" many years ago, when S.J. Gould was writing his critiques of the ideas in the book. The debates around the book "The Selfish Gene" are unfortunate, because they often detract from the real scientific contribution surrounding the notion of genes as the level of evolutionary selection. Most of these debates derive from the ideological extensions of the selfish gene hypothesis, promoted by Dawkins-himself and the bulldog Dennett. Disentangling the ideological extensions and reactions from the actual scientific contribution is not easy for the layman. This is mostly because many of the writers who are best known for their popularization of the ideas around the "selfish gene" want to make a grand theory of the notion and apply it to all aspects of human thought. But isn't this attempt made with all good theories and models? Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, set theory, information theory, game theory, and in ancient times, geometry, have all seemed so powerful that human's tried to apply the larger patterns derived from the theories and/or models to many other phenomena where they don't apply at all. In as much as the notion of the "selfish gene" is a scientific theory it provides a good explanation over a very limited set of phenomena. What we are talking about here is how to conceive of evolutionary mechanisms. At most the idea provides us with an explanation for what level evolutionary change takes place. In short the view of George Williams, author of *Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought*, (Dawkin's book was both a popularization and extension of Williams thought) and Dawkins centers on the molecular level of selection. The mechanisms of evolutionary biology will maintain for bacteria, sponges, fish, ants, lizards, and humans. This much is as uncontroversial as saying that the laws of physics apply as much to the human brain as it does to the orbit of the earth around the sun. (For instance whatever communication there is between my brain and my foot will not exceed the speed of light. Whether this fact explains much about how I wal
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
Ralph, First of all let me say that I have listened to the audio and I read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" many years ago, when S.J. Gould was writing his critiques of the ideas in the book. The debates around the book "The Selfish Gene" are unfortunate, because they often detract from the real scientific contribution surrounding the notion of genes as the level of evolutionary selection. Most of these debates derive from the ideological extensions of the selfish gene hypothesis, promoted by Dawkins-himself and the bulldog Dennett. Disentangling the ideological extensions and reactions from the actual scientific contribution is not easy for the layman. This is mostly because many of the writers who are best known for their popularization of the ideas around the "selfish gene" want to make a grand theory of the notion and apply it to all aspects of human thought. But isn't this attempt made with all good theories and models? Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, set theory, information theory, game theory, and in ancient times, geometry, have all seemed so powerful that human's tried to apply the larger patterns derived from the theories and/or models to many other phenomena where they don't apply at all. In as much as the notion of the "selfish gene" is a scientific theory it provides a good explanation over a very limited set of phenomena. What we are talking about here is how to conceive of evolutionary mechanisms. At most the idea provides us with an explanation for what level evolutionary change takes place. In short the view of George Williams, author of *Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought*, (Dawkin's book was both a popularization and extension of Williams thought) and Dawkins centers on the molecular level of selection. The mechanisms of evolutionary biology will maintain for bacteria, sponges, fish, ants, lizards, and humans. This much is as uncontroversial as saying that the laws of physics apply as much to the human brain as it does to the orbit of the earth around the sun. (For instance whatever communication there is between my brain and my foot will not exceed the speed of light. Whether this fact explains much about how I walk is doubtful.) Also, what science can provide, is simply the best theories and the best theories tend to abstract from the many facets of the actual world. Personally I think that S.J. Gould was largely correct in his neo-Darwinist point of view that natural selection is multi-leveled - i.e. it takes place mainly at the level of the individual, but also the level of the population-group, and at the molecular level, i.e. the gene. But unfortunately, the best theory of evolutionary mechanism has not been developed at the level of the individual or at the level of the population group. It is highly interesting that all well worked out theoretical explanations of group and individual selection can be easily transformed into a gene-centered selectionist theory of evolution. This does not mean that such a theory has to be wholly correct. It only means that a gene-centered theory of evolution is, perhaps easier to develop because of its reductionist simplicity. Gene-centered evolutionary theories provide ready-made models that can be tested whereas theories that focus on the level of group selection and even individual selection are harder to model and harder to test. This may simply indicate a certain limit of scientific understanding. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that the best theoretical explanation for the mechanisms of evolutionary selection is at the level of genes. And let us also concede that this question is simply a matter of testing the theory and seeing how much the theory explains. If the theory explains phenomena that was previously unexplainable and isolates phenomena that previously had gone unnoticed, then the theory is successful. That is all that we can ask of a theory. In other words, the question of the level of evolutionary selection is (very loosely) an "empirical" question. In fact, looking at evolutionary selection at the molecular level does tend to offer explanations for phenomena that was previously unrecognized as phenomena and it tends to explain phenomena that had been explained in more complicated ways before hand. The notions of genetic variation, genetic drift, gene flow, and statistical models of evolutionary theory simply make more sense if evolution is viewed as operating at the level of genes. These were all notions that were developed during the course of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory with Mendelian theory and before the notion of a gene-centered view of evolution was proposed. But proposing the idea that species developed in order to provide stable "containers" for genes seemed to draw out what was implicit in the mathematical theories in the first place. Reducing the mechanism of evolutionary selection
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [fwd]
I haven't yet checked out the audio file or transcript, but these very
introductory words lie at the heart of the problem:
"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their
preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a
long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are
their survival machines."
Note that this is not a merely descriptive characterization, but a
teleological assertion. The first key phrase is 'ultimate rationale'--
implying purpose, not cause. This is not a scientifically legitimate
assertion. The second assertion of note is "we are their survival
machines". This appears to be a factual statement, in that our survival
objective perpetuates our genes, which outlive us. But note, there is an
implied teleology here. Instead of Hegel's weltgeist, the cunning of
history is engineered by genes, who use us as their means of
perpetuation. And while we as conscious beings have the illusion of having
our own purposes, our purposes our really not even our naked survival, but
the naked survival of our genes via the production of offspring. Note that
the phraseology renders any social theory, any theory of human
consciousness or motivation nugatory, by rendering them all epiphenomena of
our genetic survival mechanisms. I suggest this is not scientific
evolutionary psychology at all, but an ideological construct.
The broad basis for evolutionary theory is incontestable, even by liberal
religionists who know science. The theory of evolution must apply also to
the emergence of homo sapiens as a species with all of its cultural and
cognitive capabilities. But once our species emerges and develops a
capacity to survive, what happens then? Is cultural transmission--unique
to our species--explainable as an eternal repetition of the same genetic
mechanisms? Are we and our cultures merely survival machines for our
genes? Is this the correct formulation for the interaction of conscious
human activity in social and cultural configuration with genetic variation
and natural selection processes? I suggest that this characterization is
not science at all, nor has it anything to do with the substance of
evolutionary theory, but rather it is a metaphorical extension of a science
beyond its objective level of competence, concocted as a pretext to explain
something it has no intention of understanding. I also suggest that
Dawkins for one, who is not merely a scientist but a popularizer and
proselytizer for Darwinism, misled his public from the very beginning even
by titling his book THE SELFISH GENE, a distinctively unscientific
anthropomorphism. For a man so dedicated to fighting religion and
superstition tooth and nail, without compromise, he committed an
essentially ideological, duplicitous act, designed to circumvent the hard
scientific task of incorporating sociology, political economy,
anthropology, psychology, and philosophy into a comprehensive integral
theory uniting them with evolutionary biology, and that he and all his
followers, such as Daniel Dennett, peddling the concepts of memes, are
committing a pseudo-scientific fraud. This is yet another instance of what
blockheads scientists and evidently philosophers as well are once they step
outside of a narrow strip of expertise. They also show themselves
ill-equipped to grapple with the social determinants of the religious
superstitions they combat.
At 12:48 PM 3/28/2006 -0500, Ralph Dumain wrote:
THE SELFISH GENE: THIRTY YEARS ON
Thursday 16 March 2006
6.45pm to 8.15pm
The Old Theatre (Old Building, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE)
Speakers: Daniel C Dennett (Tufts), Sir John Krebs, FRS (Zoology, Oxford),
Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, FRS (Oxford); Chair: Melvyn
Bragg; Organiser: Helena Cronin
The toughest ticket in London's West End last week wasn't for a new
mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard.
The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British
radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg ("Start the Week") with the
following opening words:
"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their
preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a
long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are
their survival machines."
The words are from THE SELFISH GENE, by evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary
of the publication of his classic book. .
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