The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author
by Richard Dawkins
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard DawkinsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-25
ISBN: 0199291152
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author
Book Review: Muddled morass with trademark PC plagiarism
Summary: 3 Stars
** THIS IS A VERY LONG REVIEW!***
I've watched Richard Dawkins speak several times; at one such event, he was asked: "Which came first - the chicken or the egg?" and he dodged the issue: "The egg - if by that we mean the self replicating mechanism. - the chicken, the body, is the temporary receptacle of the information... that's the essence of modern neo-Darwinism." Presumably, neither came first.
It took me years to grasp Dawkins's starting-point. If, like Dawkins, you assume that replication came first, it's natural to adopt a Dawkins-style view. But, speaking as a multi-celled organism, I had assumed more or less unconsciously that proto-life may have come first, into which replication somehow intruded. So far as I can tell, none of this is yet decidable; most evidence must have gone long since, disappearing as food or fertiliser.
Anyway ... Dawkins calls it 'neo-Darwinism', because the detail of genes in evolution was unknown to Darwin. (And one might add: Alfred Russel Wallace's priority is unknown to Dawkins).
By the 1990s, automatic gene sequencing (based on DNA of course) by machine became easy, with the results all supposedly put online. Dawkins is not a practising scientist in that sense; and the observations of animals - for example, accounts of rather weird parasites and the behaviurs they cause in their victims, are mostly taken from other peoples' patient observations. His professorship was (is?) specifically in promoting public awareness of science, e.g. in 1991/2 Royal Institution lectures, and countless others His manner is very polite. He tends to say the right thing: he even said he was given 'a new respect' for the profession of TV filmmakers, after a 1985 TV programme on evolution.
Dawkins lists many general influences, along with individual papers. Niko Tinbergen (1953, 'Social Behaviour in Animals'). W D Hamilton and G C Williams on 'social ethology'. R L Trivers (1970s books on 'reciprocal altruism', 'parental investment', 'parent offspring conflict', 'social insects'). V.C.Wynne-Edwards, e.g. 1962 popularised by Robert Ardrey in The Social Contract of 1970. John Maynard Smith on game theory (simple grids with simple outcomes of actions - which assume there's some common measurement of outcome). Later titles (postdating his first edition) include cultural transmission - as in 'memes'.
One has to wonder how much of this is talked up, after the fashion of early popular writers on biology. For example, Dawkins quotes such things as the 'Utter selfishness of the Ik of Uganda', as described by Colin Turnbull, and the gentle altruism of Margaret Mead's Arapesh. He doesn't seem to know about Mead's exposure as a fraud - just one example suggesting he takes sources rather too much at face value.
Dawkins writes well, in the sense of describing individual modules of the world; it's pulling things together in an overview that's problematical. I'll try to identify some of these serious problems....
[1] MEANINGS OF WORDS
As many people have pointed out, there are problems with meanings. Let's look at 'evolution', 'selfish', 'gene' and 'altruism', and 'meme'.
The peculiarity of biological evolution is that its mechanism is built into the organism itself. Organisms are so remote from unliving matter, that they only exist because of ancestors - they don't spontaneously generate. 'Evolution' is the change in the totality of life forms from one time period to the next. But this is NOT the same as the 'evolution of ideas' or 'evolution of language' or 'social evolution'. Of course the verbal issue has been with us since at least the 19th century.
Assuming that genes generally operate at a low level - as surely most or all they have to, in order to code the fantastic complications of living things - most of the influences listed by Dawkins aren't anything do do with evolution or genes: he, or at least the reader, can hardly help confusing 'evolution' with things like 'social evolution', meaning change which in some way depends on what happened before. I don't think the issue is ever made clear.
Dawkins points out many times that 'selfish gene' - 'thinking of the individual [gene] as though it had a conscious purpose .. is just a figure of speech. A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes.' There can't be many authors who admit their book's title is misleading!
Dawkins is careful to define a 'gene' 'as a unit of convenience, a length of chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. This allows for whole chunks of chromosomes to be selected, which allows the meaning of 'gene' to be stretched out.
Another issue is long-term changes in genes; since new alleles can form e.g. by mutation, it seems possible many genes are unstable in the long term. In fact, no genes from the origin of life can have persisted to the present day. This suggests genes may not be as permanent as Dawkins implies.
On 'altruism' - here's a typical passage: 'Recently there has been a reaction against racialism and patriotism, and a tendency to substitute the whole human species..' and 'The muddle in human ethics over the level at which altruism is desirable - family, nation, race, species, or all living things..' Dawkins never makes it clear what 'altruism' is. Just a set of well-meaning phrases? Propaganda? The suggestion people should be nice to each other? Genuine action of some sort? The word is often used in a sense which is entirely hypocritical - trying to persuade people to have costs offloaded onto them, as in pop-star fronted begging. It is significant that Dawkins, following others, considers 'altruism', 'lies' and 'deceit' in various forms at a simple level, such as nesting birds, but not hypocrisy and lies at the serious, global, political level; this of course is part of the unmentionable material of 'correctness' which allows politicians and others to bemoan mass starvation etc without foind anything about it.
Near the end of 'The Selfish Gene' is an elaborate account of 'memes', and this makes sense as a logical progression, since these having nothing physically to do with genes at all. I saw Susan Blackmore speak on memes, and was struck by her trivial examples - a bit of Beethoven's Fifth, a pop song, an ad jingle, a baseball cap worn backwards. In short, a 'meme' is usually something remembered, but not important enough to be worth considering as an 'idea'. The entire process of learning a 'meme' and interpreting it, relying on a lifetime's memory of language to internalise it, is complicated; it only seems simple because we're used to it. Dawkins's more complex examples of e.g. faith, fear of hell fire, and also injunction to never ask for evidence, may have 'deep psychological impact', but rely on lots of repetition at school or whatever. There's some suggestive matter on 'memes' jostling for survival, but that's it.
[2] GENES WITH MAGICAL POWERS
Much of this book assumes there's a gene 'for' something - penis length is one example. I don't think Dawkins ever considers what limits can be expected from genes. There must for example be some sort of determinant of skeleton size and shape; but does every part of it have to be defined in detail? Would each finger and toenail need to be specified? Every blood cell? Surely not. His penis example sounds like a bit of sex put in to excite the punters.
A good example is a supposed gene to spread 'altruism'. Altruism in any of the normal senses means assessing some situation, and weighing up all the likely consequences of an action on more than one person (or other life form). This is an elaborate intellectual exercise involving the entire perceptual and memory system; how can there possibly be a gene for it?
Another example is survival. No organism in the world is descended from an ancestor that sampled death to see what it was like. How can fear of death be genetically determined? Such 'fear' certainly must exist - the human verbalised form isn't necessary - no doubt through avoidance of discomfort and so on; but at some point there must be some perception that something unpleasant to the organism may happen. How can there be a gene for that?
Dawkins gets around this: 'it can be perfectly proper to speak of a 'gene for
behaviour so-and-so' even if we haven't the faintest idea of the ... causes leading from gene to behaviour.' But this is in a discussion on certain bees cleaning up larval cells in their hives, obviosuly a very stereotyped behaviour, nothing like something as abstarct as 'altruism'.
[3] DETERMINISM AND INTELLIGENCE
'A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes' illustrates Dawkins in behaviouristic mode. It's true that animals (like children) are highly egocentric and don't think much about the past, the future, or the universe. But it seems perfectly possible that animal brains are a lot better than Dawkins thinks when he brushes e.g. dog behaviour which he thinks only mimics purposive activity, such as looking for food. Animals are handicapped in the sense of lacking efficient mouth/tongue/ear elaborations. But I'd guess even though mute, animal brains are efficient and active. Since nobody knows what the brain does, apart from clearly being at the centre of nerves and senses, the point is difficult to to argue. It seems realistic to argue that genes define a body's plan and send out in the world to do its best. I'm not sure animals such as dogs are as brainless as Dawkins assumes.
[Even tiny animals - flies, spiders - sense danger and run away. How come? Do they think - I see a creature and know that if it contacts me with a large object I may be crushed and die; however by increasing the distance between us, the probability is reduced so I'm more likely to be safe? Can there be a gene which caters for all such situations?]
[4] SEXUAL REPRODUCTION
Throughout this book, Dawkins assumes organisms want to pass on as many genes as possible. And they should (e.g.) be indifferent between all their offspring. (It seems to follow that incest ought to be common). However all this seems based on a mistake.
Why have sexual reproduction? One of its strong points, paradoxically, is precisely that half the genes of each parent are not used. Assume (this is all simplified) the probability of a gene mistake is say .00001. Then the probability of correct copying is .99999. An organism with 100 genes has probability .99999^100 of transcribing correctly. Fairly simple algebra indicates that longer genomes will show errors roughly in proportion to the number of genes. The must come a point where females only will have a significant probability of passing on defective genomes, not reproducing properly. There simple life forms (aphids? worms? bacteria?) where breeding rates are so fast and easy that dead-end lines don't matter. But if women in an asexual world duplicated themselves wrongly, mistakes would build up to the point where costs of defective children would be too great.
If half the genes are thrown away, the result is something like regression to the mean. Parents with large numbers of genetic problems will cause many spontaneous abortions. It's also true that indusputably superior specimens will have little chance of having indisputably superior offspring. Sex supplies stability - essential for complex organisms - there's a sort of stabilising mediocrity. A descendant of (say) William the Conqueror may have none of his genes. This stabilising idea, where a small proportion of embryos are rejected as a quality control mechanism, is omitted by Dawkins. He claims parents should be indifferent between all offspring, even with lethal deformaties which parents presumably would wish to not reappear.
There's some interesting material on why e.g. eggs should become 'large' and sperms small. And why there should be 50:50 males and females, attributed to R A Fisher - who however relied on the fact that modern creatures have 50:50 sperms from which it seems to follow. Does this prove there couldn't be a different arrangement?
[5] GLORIFICATION OF EVOLUTION
There are (at least) seven types of writers on biology. The rather dim Fred Hoyle types, who seem unable to understand that vast ranges of time and space are usually needed for evolution. (I recall someone telling me: "I don't see cats turning into dogs"). And the Fabre type, emphasising repetitious stupidity (e.g. caterpillars that follow a leader - around the rim of a plant pot - for days). And the types (e.g. Bergson, G B Shaw) who have a rather fantastic attitude to evolution, expecting incredible new things to 'emerge'. There are also those who emphasise the incredible wastefulness of the evolutionary process: evolution compared with building houses by trial and error of techniques, leaving the world littered with the remains of innumerable incomplete houses. And the D'Arcy Thompson types ('On Growth and Form') who, as with J B S Haldane, consider lengths, areas, volumes, air pressure, surface tension and so on as influences on organisms. And the encyclopaedist types - H G Wells's 'Outline of Life' was brilliant - Faust mythically sold his soul for reference volumes of this sort.
Dawkins is influenced by all these types, but leans towards marvelling over the diversity of life, and the process of Darwinism, in my view unrealistically. He praises the 'miserly economy' and 'maximal efficiency' of 'survival machines'. A counter-view is that evolution is insanely wasteful, a series of bodges which just about work, but with numerous weak points.
- We saw this in the chapter on aggression. Even though
a 'conspiracy of doves' would be better for ÃÃevery single individualÄÄ than the
evolutionarily stable strategy, natural selection is bound to favour the ESS.
[6] GENES WORKING TOGETHER
Dawkins's oarsman example seems very weak. He talks of a typical university boat. But suppose there were 10o,000 rowers - given colossal numbers of genes, replacing one by a better one surely can be expected to make almost no difference. I'd have thought somehting like a factory or city would be a better exmaple, but with almost no job replacement - if one of the workers did the wrong thing, the whole affair could crash.
[7] COMPUTER ANALOGIES
Dawkins loves or loved his Mac (and incidentally believes viruses are simple to write, certainly a mistake). He seems to think the brain is similar to a computer generated display: 'The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. .. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.'
This seems to be a mistake of the same type as in 1930s drawings of the brain showing vision as something projected on a screen. And/or an overestimate of the ease by which the brain is fooled. Surely, in practice, optical illusions are quite rare and need careful design to work. Dawkins hasn't heard the idea that belief in ghosts fell as electric lighting rose.
[8] DISAPPOINTING OMISSIONS
Given an atmosphere of perhaps methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, with ammonia in the sea, and lightning, it's been known since the 1920s that a 'soup' could form - a dilute sea of organic molecules - carbon in almost unique in forming chains of almost any length. Dawkins puts emphasis on amino-acids and proteins, but metal ions, possibly dissolved from minerals by weak nitric/hydrochloric acid, and sulphate ions could be there too. If replicating chemcials appeared, the question is how the hell there could be some coded way for 'instructions' for life to develop from that. One might specualte that a molecule could attract a tiny shell or coating or arrangement of auquatic ions or other molecules, and maybe grow by absorption, and split at some point, carrying primitive instructions to repeat the process. I was disappointed that there's nothing on such possibilities, or indeed certainties.
Dawkins says little on the evolution of insects: at first sight, eggs -> caterpillars -> pupae -> flying insects seems impossible to square with evolution; perhaps more difficult than the eye. There must have been intermediate stages, such as pupae able to move (as in dragonflies), and some predecessor stage to eggs. It's easy to see the advantage of the process - an early stage of eating low-value food, followed by a winged phase of looking about to deposit eggs. But it's less easy to see how it could have taken place. Just as with the chicken and egg.
Another thing I missed was discussion on the very long term (though the 'ESS' = evolutionary stable strategy' incorporates this). Many books with a biological tinge have scenarios such as: one person having more children than another, and feeling they've won an evolutionary battle. Or people with lots of children, supported by social services, described as 'fit'. Or mass murders of specific types (for example, of intellectuals in the USSR) don't have any effects. It's easy to miss the extreme long-term consequences, especially of course with human beings, who tinker with the world more than any other species.
Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' without doubt tapped into some need for understanding of the world. But I don't think, in cool retrospect, its influence was very positive. Many Amazon reviews show people interpreting it as sociobiological praise for selfishness, or as showing that ethical beliefs are meaningless, or worrying over determinism. I remember a woman in a radio programme saying "some men aren't interested in a loving relationship, because they want an heir; I read about it in a book by Richard Dawkins". Maybe they misunderstood it, of course, but the misunderstanding is only possible because the messages are muddled.
The book doesn't help much, even with topics which are explicitly discussed, such as 'fast women' and 'philanderers'. The undiscussed problems include killing, or getting killed, under military command; why people dying on the streets don't just desperately grab at money to survive; overpopulation problems; genetic defects. Nor are political group issues discussed much - tribal and other groups working in secret, propaganda and its meme effects, competitin over resources. The book does have the vitally important underpinning of evolution. But the detail of the book is questionable. Three stars?
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Summary of The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author
Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life.In his internationally bestselling, now classic volume, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature. Bees, for example, will commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, and birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk.
This 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins' fascinating book retains all original material, including the two enlightening chapters added in the second edition. In a new Introduction the author presents his thoughts thirty years after the publication of his first and most famous book, while the inclusion of the two-page original Foreword by brilliant American scientist Robert Trivers shows the enthusiastic reaction of the scientific community at that time. This edition is a celebration of a remarkable exposition of evolutionary thought, a work that has been widely hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, and that continues to stimulate whole new areas of research today.
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