evolution

Below are excerpts from The Selfish Gene (1976, 2006 paperback) by Richard Dawkins. Before he was a strident and at-times condescending proponent of athiesm, Dawkins was a bright-eyed science writer and an enthusiastic zoologist. His first book, with the unforunate title 'The Selfish Gene', is certainly worth a read, it offers a very readable introduction to the fascinating mechanisms of Darwinian evolution, a process I broadly understood but had spent very little time studying and contemplating the details of.

pg. viii the selfish GENE, from the introduction to the 30th anniversay edition

The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize 'selfish' and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything , it devotes more attention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is 'gene' and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selction. That unit will become, more or less by definition, 'selfish'. Altrusim might well be favoured at other levels. Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might expect individual organisms to behave altruistically 'for the good of the species'. They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation, or restrain their hunting behavior to conserve the species' future stocks of prey. It was such widely disseminated misunderstandings of Darwinism that originally provoked me to write the book.

Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altrusitically 'for the good of the genes', for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altrusim is the only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altrusim. This book explains how it works, together with reciprocation, Darwinian theory's other main generator of altrusim.

pg. xiii 

Unwriting a book is one thing. Unreading it is something else. What are we to make of the following verdict, from a reader in Australia?

Fascinating, but at times I wish I could unread it... On one level, I can share in the sense of wonder Dawkins so evidently sees in the workings of such complex processes... But at the same time, I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade... Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper - trying to believe, but not quite being able to - I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quitea a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.

I have previously described a pair of similar responses from readers:

A foreign publisher of my first book confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message. Others have asked me how I can bear to get up in the mornings. A teacher from a distant country wrote to me reproachfully that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had peruaded her that life was empty and purposeless. He advised her not to show the book to any of her friends, for fear of contaminating them with the same nihilitic pessimism (Unweaving the Rainbow).

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. That is the first thing to say, but the second is almost as important. As I went on to write,

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mitaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.

pg.1 why are people

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from spae ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is 'Have they discovered evolution yet?' Living organism had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the trugh, but it was Darwin who frist put togethr a coherent and tenable account of why we eist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible anseer to the curious child whose question heads this captuer. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep rpbolems: Is there a meaning to life? What are e for? wha is man? after posting the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'

pg. 12 the replicators

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or cmmon enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existene at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, eveni f any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation - rocks, galaxies, ocean waves - are all, to a greator or lesser extentet, stable patterns of atoms. Soap bubbles tend to be spherical because this is a stable configuration for thin films filled with gas. In a spacecraft, water is also stable in spherical globules, but on earth, where ther is gravity, the stable surface for standing water is flat nad horizontal. Salt crystals tend to be cubes because this is a stable way of packing sodium and chloride ions together. In the sun the simplest atoms of all, hydrogen atoms, are fusing to form helium atoms, because in the conditions that prevail there the helium configuration is more stable.Other even more complex atoms are being formed in stars all over the universe, ever since soon after the 'big bang' which, according to the prevailing theory, initiated the universe. This is originally where the elements on our world came from.

(...)

At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. we will call it the Replicator. It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. This may seem a very unlikely sort of accident to happen. So it was. It was exceedingly improbable. In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible. (...) But in our human estimates of what is prbable and what is not, we are not used to dealing hundreds of millions of years.

(...)

pg. 18 'living'

Should we then call the original replicator molecules 'living'? Who cares? I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever lived', and you might say 'No, Newton was', but I hope we would not prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Similarly, the story of the replicator molecules probably happened something like the way I am telling it, regardless of whether we choose to call them 'living'. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether we call the early replicators living or not, they were the ancestors of life, they were our founding fathers.

(...)

pg.19 struggling

There was a struggle for existence among replicator varieties. They did not know they were struggling, or worry about it; the struggle was conducted without any hard feelings, indeed without feelings of any kind.

The process of improvement was cumulative. Ways of increasing stability and of decreasing rivals' stability became more elaborate and more efficient. Some of them may even have 'discovered' how to break up molecules of rival varieties chemically, and to use the building blocks so released for making their own copies. These proto-carnivores simultaneously obtained food and removed competing rivals. Other replicators perhaps discovered how to protect themselves, either chemically, or by building a physical wall of protein around themselves. This may have been how the first living cells appeared. Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existnce. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themsevles to live in. The first survival machines probably consisted of nothing more than a protective coat. But making a living got steadily harder as new rivals arose with better and more effective survival machines. Survival machines got bigger and more elaborate, and the process was cumulative and progressive.

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replciators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past master of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind, and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, theose replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.