Eh. I read a bunch of his books years ago and was never tempted to reach this conclusion. YMMV. — Srap Tasmaner

Eh, Mary Midgley quotes him:

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in our genes is ruthless selfishness.

Happens a lot. Ruthless competition is not the only thing that happens in evolution. Love, or if you prefer, sex plays the central role.

This is pan-adaptationism. Sexual selection, also formulated by Darwin, is also a contributor to evolution. — Kenosha Kid

Of course, Darwin was a genius. But it's no adaptation to nothing, it's a flourish, an embellishment of life, an emerging phenomenon that was selected on easthetical grounds among a variety of possibilities.

There's no 'settling on DNA' that I can see. The research on how all this initially started is focussing on RNA as the driving force behind the begining of life. I guess that makes RNA the most selfish of all them polymers...

Joke aside, the problem about the selfish gene theory (or metaphor, whatever) is that it puts the world upside down. It tells people they are machines who serve 'selfish genes'. It's attributing to life at it's elemental level some "will", and vice versa, denying this will (and it's selfishness) to human beings, where it belongs. People do bad things, and genes are just machines, not vice versa.

It's not even new. It's called finalism, and it's considered a thought crime among biologists. Dawkins' big idea is akin to 'élan vital' of Bergson, or to the 'struggle for life' of Haeckel: just another outdated misunderstanding of Darwinism.

I always took "selfish" here as a reference to blind, mechanical replication, and that's all. — Srap Tasmaner

DNA doesn't even replicate itself. It's just the software, and it needs some hardware. Proteins do that, enzymes, etc. A whole machinery of them. DNA is just a cookbook for proteins. It gets copied (and read, regulated, repaired, and many other things) by some of the very proteins it's coding for. So you could say: DNA is coding its own duplication by proteins, but you can also see it as proteins needing to write down their own recipes on some cookbook, and selfishly making copies of their cookbook along the way...

If one likes to personify polymers, why stop at DNA?

It's more the assumption that elements of human society must necessarily have explanations in the context of adaptation. — frank

I don't know. I find 'adaptation' a vaguish term for a few reasons. One is: adaptation to what? The environment is usually not static so a species has to 'adapt' to a range of conditions, threats, opportunities, themselves constantly fluctuating. This means that a species may be adapted to it's past environment but not it's present one. And still survive for quite a while. So adaptation is relative.

Another point is that, when you see a male peacock show off his tail, it's hard to fathom what it is adapted to... The male peacock tail was selected because it pleased the ladies of the species. It's no adaptation to nothing out there. At best a beautiful tail implies the male can feed itself decently enough to maintain the huge piece, and may perhaps become a better provider for its female... but it'd be an even better provider without this huge tail slowing it down...

Assuming that it must is the bad science part. — frank

The bad science part is to assume that it's simple. For instance, there is probably some genetic basis for character traits, but there's no one-to-one relationship between genes and character traits. "The genes of love" or "the genes of selfishness" are gross simplifications of far more complex realities.

Some day I expect a biologist will find the gene for attributing complex social behaviors to simple genetic causes. ;-)

The metaphorical selfishness of genes is used to explain, and prove - against all experience - the universality of human selfishness, from which the metaphor is taken. An argument form worthy of a creationist. — unenlightened

Or of a pessimistic, egoist reader of Darwin, such as Ernst Haeckel, who tweaked Darwinism to "evolutionary racism". Not saying that Dawkins is racist but he shares with Haeckel a very aggressive understanding of natural selection. One in which only the ruthless survive.

Politically, this view supports rightist economic policies, generally speaking. E.g. Pareto.

But the data is more complex. Social species abound, including among mammals like us. All mammal societies involve both competition and collaboration. To reduce evolution to competition is simplistic, and to argue that all instances of altruism are in fact forms of selfishness is jaundiced.

It's like La Rochefoucauld arguing that all altruism is a way to pump up and conserve self-esteem (which he called self-love, amour propre). You could just as well say it more positively: we try to avoid evil and do some good because we want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror... because we judge ourselves, rightly so, and we don't like the feeling of remorse. Feeling good about yourself after having helped someone is not a bad feeling per se (with moderation). The "selfishness" of it is in the eye of the beholder.

Later:

Why, finally, does all this matter? There are many aspects of it which I cannot go into now, and I concentrate on the moral consequences which Dawkins and Mackie draw. Egoism, when it is not just vacuous, is a moral doctrine. It has, as Mackie sees, always a practical point to urge. Aristotle used it to tell us to attend to our own personal and intellectual development. Hobbes used it to urge citizens to treat their government as accountable to them generally, and particularly to make them resist religious wars.

Nietzsche, non-political and often surprisingly close to Aristotle, did on his egoist days preach self-sufficiency and self-fulfilment as a counterblast to the self-forgetful and self-despising elements in Christianity. But he is only a part-time egoist. Any attempts to use him as a signpost here would, as usual, be frustrated by his equal readiness to denounce bourgeois caution and exalt suicidal courage, or 'love of the remotest'. He hated prudent bargaining. His egoism is confused, too, by contributions from his personal terror of love and human contact. Still, against the wilder excesses of Christianity he certainly had a point, and he was able to make it without any reference to genes.

Is there any way in which reference to genes could become relevant to disputes about it? Dawkins makes the connection as follows:

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in our genes is ruthless selfishness. . . Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish (pp. 2-3, my italics).

He contends, that is, that the appearance of 'a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals' including ourselves, is only a deceptive phantom. The underlying reality, as he often says, is not any other individual motivation either, but the selfishness of the genes. Yet he just as often talks as if this established that the individual motivation were different from what it appears to be—as here, 'we are born selfish'. .... And he has arrived at his notion of gene-motivation by dramatizing the notion of competition. Even as drama, this fancy is gratuitous. All that can be known about our genes from the fact that they have survived is that they are strong. If people insist on personification, the right parallel would no doubt be with a situation in which a
number of travellers had, independently, crossed a terrible desert. It might happen that in doing so they had unknowingly often removed resources which would have saved the lives of others—but this could tell us nothing about their characters unless they had known that they were doing so, and scraps of nuclear tissue are incapable of knowledge. We could be sure only that such travellers were strong, and to make a parallel here we must examine the concept of gene 'strength'.

This strength is not an abstract quality, but is relative to the strains imposed at the time. The fact that people have survived so far shows only that they have had the genetic equipment to meet the challenges they have so far encountered. Human pugnacity had its place in this equipment. But since people are now moving
into a phase of existence when that pugnacity itself becomes one of the main dangers to be faced, new selective pressures are beginning to operate. In this situation telling people that they are essentially Chicago gangsters is not just false and confused, but monstrously irresponsible. It can only mean that their feeble efforts to behave more decently are futile, that their conduct will amount to the same whatever they do, that their own and other people's apparently more decent feelings are false and hypocritical.....

Dawkins, however, claims innocence of all this. He says he is merely issuing a warning that we had better resist our genes and 'upset their designs': Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature . . . Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs .. . (p. 3).

He does not explain who the 'we' are that have somehow so far escaped being pre-formed by these all-powerful forces as to be able to turn against them. He does not even raise the question how we are supposed to conceive the idea of 'building a society in which individuals co-operate generously, and unselfishly towards a common good', if there were no kindly and generous feelings in our emotional make-up.

Songs are us.

What did she say about Nietzsche? Didnt see that. — frank

" The first and slightly more respectable idea is the one which seems chiefly to attract Mr Mackie, because it fits in with traditional egoism. Mackie approvingly cites Dawkins's exposition of it in terms of three imaginary genetic strains in a supposed bird population. They are: Suckers, who help everybody indiscriminately, Cheats, who accept help from everybody and never return it, and Grudgers, who refuse help only to those who have previouslyrefused it to them. These 'strategies' are supposed each to be controlled by a single gene, and the help in question is assumed to be essential for survival.

In this absurdly abstract and genetically quite impossible situation, Dawkins concludes that Cheats and Grudgers would exterminate Suckers, and Grudgers might well do best of all. Mackie comments with satisfaction that 'a grudger is rather like you and me' (p. 410), and reproves Socrates and Christ for supporting Suckers in telling us to return good for evil. 'As Dawkins points out', he goes on, 'the presence of Suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy . . . This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche's view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type' (p. 464)... "

That's XTC? I had them pegged as metal. This is downright jazzy.

On the same image of transcendence (and love) as a hot air balloon (sorry for the French, but Souchon's song mean a lot to me):


Without this fondness for a person
The beloved
Without the wings it gives you
To be loved
We stay at mud level (or "flush with the daisies" ?)
At mud level

Without this attraction that hovers
Over the world
Of which we are all addicted
Everyone
We stay at mud level

The desire to fly, so legitimate
Goes through being intimate

Without the words of jealousy
The fights
Handkerchiefs thrown from starting trains
At the station
We stay at mud level

If love is a hot air balloon
Life a short journey to take
Let's go up above the towns and countryside
Under the effect of our propane kisses
Light hearted
Light hearted aboard the baskets
Lovers fly in the sky
Leaving below the heavy hearts
Of those without love

Life without love and its delights
What's in it?
It's like a plane without a propeller
Useless
It stays at mud level

If love is a hot air balloon etc.

Without the cherished words of love
Adorable
Left over on the voice mails
Of cellphones
Without the balloons in our cradles
That flew away
Without the breasts of Sophie Marceau
What do we do?

We stay
We stay

In the process of self organization we have to make decisions, and ultimately the decisions we make have either painful or pleasurable consequences, and wherever possible we tend to choose the decisions that have pleasurable consequences rather then the most responsible / altruistic ones. — Pop

And yet sometimes the most successful behavior from a Darwinian stand point is cooperative and altruistic.

The Kid's real problem is with indeterminacy, which seems to give him a lot of trouble, so he is looking for a determinist interpretation of QM. Call that Newtonian nostalgia if you will. Apparently one such interpretation would involve the postulation of an infinite number of parallel universes. My limited understanding of it is that if one flips a coin, two universes get created, one in which the result was tail and the other where it was head.

I think that's pushing risk aversion a little too far.

I also did...

I did give one.

2 entries from me:

Physicalism is incompatible with morality because if a human being is just a set of atoms like any other, why consider her life inherently more valuable than her death? If humans are just machines, they should be disposable like machines are, once the cost of their maintenance exceeds their utility.

Physicalism is compatible with morality because morality is but the codification of our species social, collaborative instincts, which were shaped by Darwinian evolution, itself compatible with physicalism.

We also have no evidence that the apostles were very rational people. — Philosophim

Jesus himself calls them dunces more than once in the gospels. But then, he selected his apostoles pretty much at random, so what did he expect?

l suppose the reason why complex numbers are good at calculating sinusoidal functions is that they are good at modeling rotations. An alternative current is created by the rotation of a dynamo, reason for which it's sinusoidal. Maybe that's the reason they are used in the wave function as well: it's a wave after all so Fourier's methods must apply?

Well, if complex numbers are nothing more than a mode of computation, there's no reason to worry about their use in the wave function.

If complex numbers fit the bill better than real numbers to describe a particular phenomenon, maybe it means something...

he is drifting away from seriously seeking a deal. — Punshhh

Assuming he ever was seriously seeking a deal.

Nah. Emergence is one thing, not two different things. And a lot of it looks 'strong' because then the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and acts as a cause.

I suspect this is what you cannot get: the capacity of structures to be causal. For you, causes are all elemental, for some strange reason.

Which is why I'm pressing the issue; if nature doesn't care how we represent it, why would whether something could be physical or not vary with an isomorphism of structures? Why would a criterion to decide whether a structure is physical decide differently depending upon which representation of a structure you choose? — fdrake

Note that electric impedance is a complex variable. So there exist classic physical variables described by complex numbers.

So the dictionary weakly emerges from the behavior of the scrabble tiles, which as I said is fine by me. — Pfhorrest

Yes.

The whole point is that many 'weak emergences' add up to a 'strong emergence'. There's just one form of emergence, continuously emerging. And yes, it leads to structures that are far more than the sum of their parts, in the sense that a living organism's behaviors cannot be understood at the lower, elemental level, e.g. in terms of its atoms trying to eat or copulate with other atoms. These behaviors only make sense at the level of organization at which they appear: at the level of a living organism in a competitive environment.

Where did the dictionary come from? That’s where the magic happens. It’s not just building up from things inherent in the tiles, bottom-up: something other than the behavior of the tiles is exteriorly imposed on them from the top down. — Pfhorrest

Good question. The Scrabble game is only a metaphor. In the reality of how matter emerged from the Big Biggy, and how life could (must?) have emerged from inanimate matter, it's a bit more complicated. As you righty pointed out, the rules themselves are emerging too, progressively, as the game evolves. For instance, predation.

The objective behavior of predation (one living organism using another as a source of rich metabolites) could only emerge after the reduction of CO2 into biomass was made a large scale reality by photosynthetic blue algae and other primitive life forms, because before that, there was not enough biomass out there to eat from. But once it appeared as an objective behavior (circa 1 Gya) -- and we must assume that it did appear through random mutations à la Scrabble game -- then predation soon became a rule: eat or be eaten, because it is a great shortcut to energy acquisition so it was very successful... This rule shaped living organisms further, for instance with capacities to catch and escape being progressively selected. Hence mobility as a survival strategy, hence animals (animals are by definition mobile predators of other animals or of plants), hence senses and brains (being able to move from A to B is more useful when you can 'see' what's in B than when you can't 'see' it), hence minds.

I posit that we and quite a few other animal species have minds because we eat other lifeforms, something which requires mobility and a capacity to spot other lifeforms. Plants don't have minds because they eat carbon dioxide and sun rays, which requires immobility to save energy. And no, rocks don't have minds either.

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world's asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am

I said, watch what you say or they'll be calling you a radical
Liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable
Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!
Oh, take it take it yeah

But at night, when all the world's asleep
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man
Won't you please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am, who I am, who I am, who I am
'Cause I was feeling so logical
D-d-digital
One, two, three, five
Oh, oh, oh, oh
It's getting unbelievable

Does "you're another" count as a philosophical argument?

This thing has been heading to 'no deal' since day one. Too many misunderstandings.

The idea of the Scrabble tiles is that a new thing 'a word' has arisen randomly from the casting of the tiles, but this 'thing' is a human construct, — Isaac

The Scrabble metaphor can be pushed a bit further.

Imagine a game with the following rules:

1. Scrabble tiles get thrown randomly on a surface or board. When they land closely enough to one another, they tend to bind with each other to form strings of 2 or more tiles. Let's call these strings "words". When a tile lands far away from others, it just stays as an individual tile, that can also be seen as a "word" composed of only one tile.

2. A selection rule cranks in, by which any "word" created by the procedure above and not listed in a given dictionary is eliminated from the board, dismantled and returned to the status of mere tiles, to be thrown again randomly on the board at stage 3 below. Only the strings of tiles that do correspond to an entry in the dictionary stay on the board. For instance "phenelat" dies, but "elephant" lives.

3. Repeat processes 1 and 2 for a large number of times, say 10^100 times, and you should get a certain finite number of selected "words" (strings of tiles randomly created and yet corresponding to dictionary entries) on the board.

4. The next step is to take the "words" as an input in processes 1 and 2 above; that is to say, to throw whole strings of tiles randomly on the board. Strings that land closely to one another can form "sentences", aka strings of stings of tiles. If a "sentence" syntax is correct as per a given English grammar book, then the sentence stays on the board, but if it is not a correct sentence from a grammatical view point, it gets dismantled: its elements ("words") are returned to the status of mere detached "words", to be thrown again on the board. For instance: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." lives, but "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" dies out of purely grammatical ground.

5. Repeat process 4 a large number of times, say 10^1000000 times, and you should get some "sentences" on the board that happen to be grammatically correct.

6. Now apply another selection process on your random yet grammatically correct sentences: only those sentences that have some sort of meaning (as asserted by a random guy or panel) would live, while nonsensical sentences are eliminated. So "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is eliminated (dismantled into words) but "I can't believe the tediousness of this argument" lives.

7. Now repeat the process at the level of full sentences. Select the strings of sentences that appear to make some sense to an average reader.

At the end of all this you would supposedly get a few randomly produced texts in English that make some sense to an average reader. One could legitimately say that these meaningful texts have "emerged" from the application of the random-cum-selection processes 1 to 7 above. These texts would mean things to a reader that no amount of analysis of the property of individual Scrabble tiles will ever be able to tell you.

Therefore, by a succession of small steps that one could described as "weak emergence", one can arrive at something that could be described as "strong emergence".

That would be dandy, except that "magic" is a very vague term, often applied to things we don't quite understand but seem nevertheless real. The magic of the gap. And this is the case here: Pfhorest's use of the word 'magic' only denotes that he doesn't understand something, and thus rejects it as impossible.

Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence. — Pfhorrest

From your link:

Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts.[11] The whole is other than the sum of its parts. An example from physics of such emergence is water, which appears unpredictable even after an exhaustive study of the properties of its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.

What is so difficult to fathom about "the direct causal action of a system upon its components"? Why do you see that as magic, pray tell?

Relax, this is philosophy. Some people see a difference, others do not. And it is a fact that you statement "strong emergence is definitionally like magic" is false, as per your own quote.

My exact state of mind at the moment, captured by this oh-so-trivial song:

... and I posted one on the Murders, of the Hope of Women. — Mayor of Simpleton

And I liked it a lot.

there's reason to think that something prototypical of human experience still happens to a rock. — Pfhorrest

That's magic thinking alright... :-) And anthropomorphism to boot.

That's not a source for your assertion, which was about 'strong emergence' being "definitionally like magic". Here all you got is a guy who is of the opinion that it looks like magic. The two ideas are different, because nothing in the definition of emergence is magical. This guy Bedau is just a bit puzzled, as we all are, by self-organising systems, that's all. Just because something looks a bit odd to you doesn't mean it's magical.

My take is that the distinction between weak and strong emergence is confusing a quantitative difference for a qualitative one. Many small 'weakly emergent' phenomenon would presumably add up to a 'strongly emergent' phenomenon. That would easily solve your conendrum.

Strong emergence is definitionally "like magic" — Pfhorrest

You have a source for this assertion?

No, but sexual reproduction is not anything more than a complicated process of atoms interacting in the way that atoms do. Nowhere in that process is it required to suddenly invoke some elan vital or such to make the reproduced organism alive like its parents. — Pfhorrest

I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. No precursor, nothing that compares. It only means something at the cellular level. Below that level, it makes no sense at all.

Sometimes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

A river can’t do anything that a bunch of water molecules can’t do, — Pfhorrest

And yet there's such a thing as a dry river.

The way he delivers this. The flow, the tone... kills me.