Dawkins the Atomistic Monist: Selfish Gene, Chap 3

In the third chapter, called "Immortal Coils," we are inserted into a debate about the "unit of selection" in natural selection, which Dawkins is kind enough to spare us the details. Mainly, it seems, we don't need to think about other positions (he's "dispatched" one position - group selection - in the first chapter). However, Dawkins' argument "is an argument which some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with [!], so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!" (26) Actually, he doesn't really labor his point at all. He spends just a few paragraphs justifying his insistence that "genes" are the unit of selection in natural selection.

Dawkins is an advocate of "gene selectionism" (although in the Extended Phenotype he allow for selection at the level of the ogranism, i.e. that they can be explained at multiple levels). This is the notion that the gene is the thing that natural selection works on. The involves an argument about what genes are, and an argument about what is needed in order for natural selection to be the case. What I will show is that Dawkins really begs the question of the unit of selection, and that his is not the only (or the best view) for the "unit of selection."

First, his definition of a gene: "I am using the word gene to mean a genetic unit which is small enough to last for a large number of generations and to be distributed around in the form of many copies" (34). Second, what is needed for natural selection to work: "Natural selection in its most fundamental form means the differential survival of entities. Some entities live and others die but, in order for this selective death to have any impact on the world, an additional condition must be met. Each entity must exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the entities must be potentially capable of surviving - in the form of copies - for a significant period of evolutionary time" (35). Dawkins does ackowledge that "what I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot really help being right! (35)," but then he goes right back and says, "what I have done is to define a gene as a unit which, to a high degree, approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness" (35). This ideal is needed because of his assumption of what is needed for natural selection. In philosophical parlance, you might call this a vicious circle, i.e. using your assumptions to define a thing that confirms your assumptions. The fact that Dawkins admits he's doing something like this, and then going on to some pretty unqualified statements, is just bizarre.

But let's think about his assumption of what's needed for natural selection. I'm gonig to examine this from the more specific to the more general, i.e. what's needed qua Darwin's theory (and other scientist's view of what's needed), to Dawkins' general philosophical presuppositions.

1. What's needed for natural selection?
Dawkins says you need a few things: first is differential survival. A lot of scientists, apparently, use the phrase "differential reproductive success" (an updated version of "survival of the fittest"), but Dawkins' doesn't. Instead of "reproduction" he uses the phrase survival of entities, presubably so this leaves open the idea that "did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication" (46), is really derivative from "straightforward" replication (although, given David Hull's distinction between replicators and interactors, it was never that "straightforward").

Be that as it may, what is needed for natural selection is (a) an entity that displays a variation, (b) the selection of one of these variations, (c) lots of "copies" of the entity. Richard Lewontin calls these three ideas "variation, selection, and transmission" (Sober and Lewontin, 158). This seems like pretty much the same thing, except for (c). Dawkins says that you need something that will replicate itself faithfully, over long generations, something almost "immortal" (which is what he says of genes, 36), instead of individuals, which are "too large and too temporary" to "qualify as a significant unit of natural selection" (36). Genes last a really long time, according to Dawkins, and again, "approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness" (35). For Dawkins, you need to have some stable substrate underneath all that change, like the Arsitotelean subject, and organisms are too ephermeral.

Now, there are some serious questions with this argument. First of all, why is it that classical Darwinian theory holds that the individual organism is the unit of selection? Clearly this is because despite what the genes do, the organism is what "survives or dies." Selection pressure is on the phenotype, and while the genotype is hugely important, selection just does not happen at that level. What it takes is for an organism to be put out there in an environment, where the pressure is displayed, and this pressure will weed out some individuals and not others (although this is not all - there is random genetic drift, as well as non-adaptive phenotypic traits that eventually get used later on, or not).

Second, Dawkins' claim that genes are "immortal" is not true. If we take genes to be a material entity, they are obviously connected with the life-cycle of the organism. When the organism dies, clearly the genes go with them. Lewontin's definition makes more sense. The "transmission" for him has to do with parents and offspring (and according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, that's really all that's required for transmission - you don't need a stronger "exact-copy" replicator). This makes complete sense. Say you have a population with a certain gene pool. Even though "discrete individuals" (in Dawkins' terminology) are needed for natural selection, as long as there is something that is inherited, there will be enough likeness between the parent and the offspring to "select." Also, remember we're dealing with evolutionary time too - meaning thousands, millions of years. The genes that are passed on, while a hybrid, are finite (since the gene pool is finite), and are even more limited depending on population sizes and locality.

Third, as Stephen Jay Gould says (and he's not the best to bring in here, since the profession row between the two), gene selectionism engages in a "confusion of bookkeeping with causality." Genes certain do record all the changes that selection does, but that doesn't mean genes are the cause of these changes (although they may be - it depends). In other words, there is not necessarily causation when there is correlation.

2. The Monistic Atomist
I haven't really dealt with a lot of substance of this chapter, but what really interests me is Dawkins philosophical perspective. On the one hand, he seems to think that the "ideal" is discrete particulates as the thing that is actually "real," in the sense of what changes. This is an atomist position (even if, as he repeatedly points out, saying what a gene is is a continuum - a unit of genetic material, like a group of DNA on a chromosome, etc), because it sets up what you would need in an explanation as a simple part. In other words, in the order of explanation, Dawkins thinks that we get to a good explanation of what a thing is when we get to its smallest unit.

But inspite of this atomism - which is a form of reductism - Dawkins is also, oddly enough, a monist. This is, in my view, his sense of genes as "immortal coils." The reason they are is because instead of really treating genes as "atoms" (which really do never die - because they always remain the exact same), the material of genes certain does turn over, but it's the "information" that stays the same. This information is a reification - that is, an artifact that is treated as the thing itself. In other words, the "information" (or the coding process) is a result of the material, not the other way around. Dawkins treats it the opposite way. This information because the "one substance," in a strange sense, because its the thing that's hanging around, despite the fact that the material is no longer existence (because the gene is in a hierarchy of the organism) once the organism dies. Genes thus become the one explanation for everything, sort of like other great monistic principles ("Fire" for the Stoics, "Spirit" for vulgarized Hegelians, etc.).

I find both atomism and monist completely problematic. When can you say you've given a full account of a thing? In science, this is when you can give satisfactory explanation for is material and efficient causes, and then predict with relative accuracy (make mathematical models and such) how things would work in the future. The second half I have no idea how to do, and I must rely on scientists to figure out the math (and there has been a lot of criticism on that front against gene selectionism). I do think that, even in my in-expert mind, the Dawkins paradigm would woefully fail the first use of science. In a world as diverse as ours, in the many ways things have to be in the world, reducing them all to the genetic level is such a restriction in one's view of the world it seems laughable. Why would you want to do that? Dawkins this its the "astonishing" truth (ix). But I'm pretty skeptical of thinkers touting their own "discovery" of "astonishing" truths.

Master and Machine: Dawkins, chapter 2

The second chapter of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene gives us an eagle-eye view of the subject matter, and a genealogical speculation. My procedure will be the same as the first post: first a look at his basic thesis, and then a philosophical critique.

Dawkins makes a very important point early in the chapter that Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” is “really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable” (13). This is surely right, and as Evelyn Fox-Keller has pointed out (in her excellent Century of the Gene), species stability is the real hot topic in genetics and other biological sciences these days. In other words, the real question is not “how do things change” but how, given change, what conditions make it possible for a thing to stay the same – or similar – in other words, to survive. For Dawkins, the history of this emergence of stability can be written in terms of Darwinian natural selection from its earliest conception, that primeval soup after the big bang.

To justify this, Dawkins appeals to the idea of molecule stability. Molecules, like hemoglobin, are extraordinarily stable, and if you have a stable molecule (because of its structure), it “will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones” (14). So, the basic Darwinian concept of natural selection – which, in Darwin, starts mid-stream, in already complex forms of life – for Dawkins can at least be understood in even the earliest forms of life.

I really do wonder what other biologists make of this argument, and Dawkins doesn’t present much evidence beyond this logical construct. Because stability is the goal (Dawkins uses this type of language), things that are more stable tend to stick around, as opposed to less stable stuff. This of course doesn’t account for the complexity of humans, but this complexity is “where Darwin’s theory, in its most general form, comes to the rescue. Darwin’s theory takes over from where the story of the slow building up of molecules leaves off” (15).

And so Dawkins takes on a “necessarily speculative” journey, with the caveat that “the simplified account I shall give is probably not too far from the truth” (15). The beginning of this story is standard. The primeval chemical soup leads to the building blocks of life, and this means molecules. The innovation (I think – Dawkins cites absolutely no one, so it’s really hard to know, as a science outsider, if this is a common view, or who first thought of it. I find this annoying.) comes in the idea of “replicator.”

Now the concept of “replicator,” and indeed the concept of unit of selection, apparently has been debated quite a bit in the scientific literature. I found a few articles describing this debate (see Samir Okasha on this), and it seems that Dawkins doesn’t really take into account other views, like Hull’s replicator/interactor distinction, or Lewontin’s criticism. But in any case, he presents replicators as having essentially two functions: they re-create the structure of the molecule they copy; and transmit the differences or variations (‘errors,’ in Dawkins-talk) to the next generation.

Dawkins’ replicators have three characteristics: (a) longevity (selected for); (b) fecundity (the rate of production); (c) accuracy (18-19). Finally, these three aspects will be selected for in competition. Those molecules that show the least of these attributes will not survival; those that show the most, will (although Dawkins does not talk about possible variations among these three categories).

As far as molecules or bacteria are concerned, it is clearly right that this would be all that we are dealing with. In their cases, the “replicator” will be one to one in the copying processes. But it’s hard to imagine this is possible at much higher levels of complexity. What about the environment? What about the fact that genes, say, depend just as much on the organism as a whole as the organism as a whole on the genes?

This comes to Dawkins’ philosophical assumptions. At the end of the chapter, he has a few zingers. After describing a process of proto-carnivorous behavior (where higher level molecules started increasing their own stability and decreasing other’s stability (20) – nice business model, surely), Dawkins mentions how some molecules must have “discovered how to protect themselves…This may have been how the first living cells appeared” (21). Then we get the result: these protections morph into something else. “The replicators which survived were the ones which built survival machines for themselves to live in” (21). The protective coat becomes the machine that houses the replicator that goes on to a blockbuster role in humans. The replicators did not stay in these small houses of chemical or protein walls; they made colonies, and developed new robots. Eventually they get really complex: “they are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence…they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines” (21).

So here we get the first part of his thesis, that we are survival machines. This is certainly an extraordinary statement, but of course, Dawkins tells us (rather sheepishly) "this is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others" (ix). Well, I for one am astonished. What I am so astonished by is how utterly unbelievable this thesis is. Just think about this notion: a replicator, the gene, is the basic "unit of selection." But what about the rest of the organism? Does Dawkins really expect us to swallow the idea that there is no two-and-fro between the genes and organism, the organism and its group, and the organism/group and its environment? His very explanatory tool for variation - monks transcribing the gospels - is a perfect example of this multi-level unit of selection. Monks mis-transcribed for hundreds of reasons - that one was particularly tired that day; the Carolingian script made the old Latin script even more foreign each time; wars, pestilence, and a whole bunch more stuff. If you said it was all the monk's fault for these errors would just be simplistic.

And so Dawkins seems to be. His entire history may be correct (even if speculative), but I find the entire explanation like a simple just so story - like his use of the idea of "affinity" to explain how molecules originally started to replicate. What is "affinity"? What is the relationship between copy and copies? Did the molecules desire one another? Did they fit like puzzle-pieces? Did some force-field push them together? One or none of these may be the case, but Dawkins doesn't say.

But the central problem I see is his use of the machine metaphor. A machine is a thing that an agent makes in order to increase efficiency in some manner. It can be simple or complex, but the basic principle is that there is an input and an output, and the something outside the machine has to put something inside the machine, the machine itself being an inert thing, like a substrate. Humans "create" these machines like genes "create" humans. But at the same time, even in machines with human masters alter the way humans live, how they relate to their world, what they conceive as worthwhile and what they think is ok to do (think about "push-button war" vs. nomadic, hand-to-hand combat). In Dawkins' hands, this sounds completely one-way, as if molecules are using the "shell" (the Ghost in the Shell, as it were) of humans.

Now, if there were only a metaphor - ok. But then you would enrich this account with other metaphors, and you could delimit your subject by qualifying your assertions. Dawkins never does this (except once - when he says it's a "fallacy...to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable [by human behavior]" (3). Well, he doesn't actually point out which fallacy this is, and he doesn't seem to really back this up - at least not yet). It seems as if Dawkins would have to be using "machine" as a metaphor, but he speaks in a much more literal way, so it's hard to discern.

In the end, I found myself wonder what this is, if not an alteration of the old Platonic notion of the dualism of the soul and body. What is changed is the "soul" - it becomes "replicators," the genes themselves - the subject of his next chapter. But the body stays its old self- a hull, something to be cast off in the eternal life of the gene....

The Free Market Comes to Biology: Reading Richard Dawkins

I've attempted in the past to blog through a particular work as a "commentary", and I've been pretty unsuccessful at it. I've decided that instead of a commentary, I will attempt to do a number of essays as a way of reading a particular work. And so, my inaugural attempt: Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene."

I've only read Dawkins' rather pathetic attempt at religious critique in the "God Delusion," so I thought it would only be fair to actually read his science stuff, very carefully and seriously. I will still be antagonistic to it; that's inevitable with such a character as Dawkins, and I'm not sure he would necessarily mind (at least he reads people that way). So I open up my reading with some thoughts on his first chapter, "Why People."

I shall do this in three movements: first, a discussion of his basic thesis; second, a discussion of his assumptions concerning science and inquiry.

Dawkins, near the beginning of his Preface, says "we are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" (ix.). This is the general thesis of the book, and he specifies this in a few different ways. First, he says, "my purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism" (1). Second, "the argument of this books is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes" (2). How is he justified in this? He has a very simple, and "elegant" argument (as scientists are wont to say when using basic logical principles):

a. All animals have evolved by natural selection.

b. Natural selection always entails selfish behavior.

c. Therefore, all animal behavior is selfish. (4)

For number 2 he uses the subjective "should", so its a bit ambiguous whether he's arguing for this, or whether or not there will be exceptions to this.

But there is an exception! Altruism. As he says, "an entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity's welfare at the expense of its own" (4). Consider a worker bee who stings a foe. If the bees stings such foe, it will surely die, since vital organs are connected to the barbed stinger. Clearly this is a problem for proposition (a) above, yet Dawkins is not afraid: "this book will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law which I am calling gene selfishness" (7). No matter how it looks with these cases of sacrifice, there is another principle at work: altruism depends on selfishness.

How is this possible? Doesn't this seem like a blatant contradiction? Well, here Dawkins gets around this by displacing the unit of selection. In an argument with Robert Ardrey's view of "group selection" instead of "individual" selection (Ardrey was a populizor of sociobiology in the late 60's and 70's) - the view that natural selection selects groups rather than individuals - Dawkins slides the individual from the organism selection (individual) to "gene selection" (8). Group selection is not a part of the "orthodox" of evolutionary theory, and so I won't discuss his response to Ardrey. But his argument for the selfishness of individuals goes like this:

a. In any group of altruists, there will most "certainly" be one "rebel" who puts his interests above the rest.

b. This rebel, since he looks out for his interests, will, "by definition", be more likely to produce offspring.

c. The child of this rebel with then "inherit his selfish traits."

d. Eventually, these "selfish traits" will overrun the group.

So, it appears from this argument that there are selfish traits, and we can assume these are somehow connected with genes. I'm assuming his next couple of chapters will elucidate this, and we'll see how these notions get cashed out.

This thesis seems rather strange but is straightforward, at least in terms of clarify. If Dawkins is anything, he is clear. But I do find this thesis, on the face of it, extrodinarily reductionistic, in the worst possible way. I'll have to read his chapters on genes before I make any judgment, but to even think that there is one universal law for all of these behaviors is rather simplistic. The world is so extraordinarily complicated and pluralistic, it seems rather restrictive to place everything on the shoulders of one principle.

And this leads to the most interesting thing to me so far - since I'm much more a philosopher at heart. Dawkins opens his chapter "why people" with a panegyric to Darwin as the person who "first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist" (1). Because of this, "we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man" (1). Furthermore, Dawkins quotes G.G. Simpson, who, after posing these questions, says, "the point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that questions before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely" (1). Dawkins doesn't mince words.

Now, from his book "The God Delusion," you get the feeling Dawkins really means what he says (and quotes). But there are two huge problems with his view of Darwin expressed here, one historical, and the other philosophical.

1. Historically speaking, Darwin did not come up with all of this on his own. Not only was there another gentleman, an Alfred Russell Wallace (who Dawkins doesn't mention), but there was a whole host of economic, sociological, and scientific grounds that supported Darwin. He certainly came up with the most coherent vision, but it wasn't done at all in 1859. It was just starting then, and it took a very long time to reach a coherent picture - as all science does. But you cannot forget Darwin's cultural milleau, as if it didn't exist. He was a child of the British Empire during the rise of capitalism - and his theories owe a lot (by Darwin's own admission!) to this.

Now, for Dawkins to talk like this seems a bit crazy to me. I mean, I understand his gross misrepresentation of religion and philosophy in "The God Delusion", since he hates religion anyway (and after that quote from Simpson, I'd be surprise if he actually read anything he critiqued). But here? On his own turf? It seems rather amazing he would be so bombastic and off-kilter about it.

2. Philosophically speaking, its hogwash that Darwin finally gave us an answer to the question "why are there people?" Unless, of course, you mean that in the way one would say "why are their cars," and you talk about the production of a car, from the metals mined to the engine blocks machined, and all in between. But very few people, when they ask the question "why are people," are asking how it happened (although that's bound to be a question often as well). The "why" questions - why "meaning", purpose, and all that, are not scientific questions per se. Science purports to explain causation on the material and efficient levels (i.e., the way something actually moves), not the formal and final levels (the question of meaning and purpose). The last two levels are properly outside that domain, mainly because they aren't testable. And it would just be smuggling teleology back into biology for Dawkins to claim that Darwin allows for that. The "why" question is a teleological question through and through.

Now, the same lack of philosophical IQ Dawkins displayed in "The God Delusion" is displayed precisely here. My real question is why? Why does he have to make claims like this? How can anyone take him serious? Who is he trying to convince? I find it all puzzling.

One last note, and perhaps this explains my question. Dawkins specifically uses the word "orthodox." Most scientists that I've read do not use this word, but rather the phrase "dominant view." This seems to allow for a certain variability in the future, and the possibility that this "view" may not always be dominate. It is interesting then that Dawkins takes a word that means "correct teaching" from religion. It is "correct teaching" that he is advocating. And if that is the case, then it makes sense that he would make such extreme statements about his religion's founder.

Enough for the first chapter. Like I said, I'll be antagonistic. At the same time, there is no reason not to take him seriously.