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A review by savaging
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
3.0
First: I admit that I enjoyed reading this book. Maybe even a misogynist and islamophobe like Dicky Dawkins here can sometimes have good things to say about biology.
And also I had one small breakthrough: obviously it makes no sense to think of myself and most of my favorite people as “survival machines for genes,” because we’re by and large miserable failures at reproducing, and are more inclined to support the offspring of another species than even our own kin. But Dawkins suggests: we could instead be survival machines for memes, ideas which infect our minds like viruses and use our voices and writings to disseminate themselves. Touche, Richard, Touche.
But here's what bothered me:
Dawkins’s masterwork rests on the tautological argument that what-persists is what persists. “Genes” stick around, so they’re the things that survive.
This book was written forty years ago (which, we can hope, is why there’s so much talk of “Man”), and we still haven’t figured out what we mean by “gene.” Dawkins tried to decentralize our idea of “who” was in charge by demoting the individual in favor of the gene -- which is smart. But new recognition of how other components of cells function, organize, replicate themselves, as well as our newborn understanding of epigenetics and epistasis, makes me feel like he hasn’t gone far enough in his decentralization. We’re not minions of DNA strands -- the question of “who is in charge” is far more complex than that, and could be told from a variety of angles. (I’m personally hoping someone writes The Selfish Cytoplasm.)
The “selfish gene” is actually a platonic idea of a gene. The “gene” is an idealization. Actual DNA is remade, recycled, reshuffled, sloughs itself off in dead cells -- if he’s looking for something constant, he can only rest with this gestalt of a system. The idea of self-replicating DNA. This is why it’s so easy for him to eventually cross over into the categories of “memes.” Like we can all be said to share some “thing” when we share a political leaning, or a religion, or a ditty in our heads. He can reify "ideas" because he's already forced to admit that "gene" itself is an idea.
And about the pseudo-solidity of memes: I can’t help but assume that his willingness to reduce an idea or a belief to “a structure in the nervous system” -- which is shared by all infected persons -- feeds his dogmatic atheism and racist ethnocentrism. If you think, for example, that “Islam” is A Singular Thing, you’re more likely to either be a fundamentalist Muslim, or to call for it to be wiped out like ebola. A more nuanced, flexible, nebulous idea of what "a" religion means is, might be the only way humans can live with each other.
But before Dawkins explicitly takes on human culture with the somewhat dodgy concept of memes, he does something much worse, which is to skip and blend from biology to anthropology. He puts forward zoological observations within metaphors that encourage us to see them in human culture, which naturalizes systems of oppression.
Speaking of how selfish genes build group altruism, he says stupid things like “Money is the formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism,” suggesting that our economic system has primarily natural roots in an evolutionarily-stable genetic tendency. When he’s talking about evolutionarily fit strategies, he makes the disgusting jump to the welfare state, pointing out that people can continue to have babies they can’t afford because those babies won’t starve, in the efficient way that the natural world would take care of ‘the problem.’ 1) This labels money within capitalism as the same thing as biological resources, naturalizing a very unnatural thing. 2) It equates wealth with some kind of genetic fitness -- Dawkins says he supports the idea of a welfare state, but it follows from his argument that ending the welfare state would breed a society where there aren’t any poor people, because “rich guy” genes would take over the gene pool. It would make more sense to point out that our unnatural culture allows botanically illiterate CEOs to still have babies instead of starve as they would in the 'wild.'
Dawkins graciously concludes that we shouldn’t blame these parents, since they’re surely too ignorant to know any better. Instead he blames religious leaders who preach against contraception. I am an exuberant fan of contraception -- but that has nothing to do with class. Wealthy babies slurp up far more resources than do the food stamps of the poor. Religion isn’t a phenomenon just of the working class -- and neither is ignorance. The welfare state exists because we recognize we have an extremely unfair (and, for what it’s worth, highly ‘unnatural’) way of dividing up socially-produced resources, and it makes us queasy to think people will have to die for a dumb system.
He talks about gender-based strategies in a highly essentializing way. Which might work for other species -- but evolutionary psychologists like Stevey Pinker have picked him up and giddily trumpeted around the pseudoscience of how a population of “coy” females (rather than “fast”) encourages “faithful” males (rather than “philandering”). In the discussion on gender, I found it interesting that rape -- a fairly obvious strategy for 'selfish genes' to replicate themselves -- is never mentioned. This might just be because Dawkins doesn't believe it exists.
He also suggests a biological grounding for racism, as an extension of the idea of kin-based altruism.
All of this feels like really sloppy science -- a kind of men-are-from-mars pop-psychology that doesn't take into account that there is so much more going on in capitalism, misogyny, and racism than some kind of natural biological response.
And also I had one small breakthrough: obviously it makes no sense to think of myself and most of my favorite people as “survival machines for genes,” because we’re by and large miserable failures at reproducing, and are more inclined to support the offspring of another species than even our own kin. But Dawkins suggests: we could instead be survival machines for memes, ideas which infect our minds like viruses and use our voices and writings to disseminate themselves. Touche, Richard, Touche.
But here's what bothered me:
Dawkins’s masterwork rests on the tautological argument that what-persists is what persists. “Genes” stick around, so they’re the things that survive.
This book was written forty years ago (which, we can hope, is why there’s so much talk of “Man”), and we still haven’t figured out what we mean by “gene.” Dawkins tried to decentralize our idea of “who” was in charge by demoting the individual in favor of the gene -- which is smart. But new recognition of how other components of cells function, organize, replicate themselves, as well as our newborn understanding of epigenetics and epistasis, makes me feel like he hasn’t gone far enough in his decentralization. We’re not minions of DNA strands -- the question of “who is in charge” is far more complex than that, and could be told from a variety of angles. (I’m personally hoping someone writes The Selfish Cytoplasm.)
The “selfish gene” is actually a platonic idea of a gene. The “gene” is an idealization. Actual DNA is remade, recycled, reshuffled, sloughs itself off in dead cells -- if he’s looking for something constant, he can only rest with this gestalt of a system. The idea of self-replicating DNA. This is why it’s so easy for him to eventually cross over into the categories of “memes.” Like we can all be said to share some “thing” when we share a political leaning, or a religion, or a ditty in our heads. He can reify "ideas" because he's already forced to admit that "gene" itself is an idea.
And about the pseudo-solidity of memes: I can’t help but assume that his willingness to reduce an idea or a belief to “a structure in the nervous system” -- which is shared by all infected persons -- feeds his dogmatic atheism and racist ethnocentrism. If you think, for example, that “Islam” is A Singular Thing, you’re more likely to either be a fundamentalist Muslim, or to call for it to be wiped out like ebola. A more nuanced, flexible, nebulous idea of what "a" religion means is, might be the only way humans can live with each other.
But before Dawkins explicitly takes on human culture with the somewhat dodgy concept of memes, he does something much worse, which is to skip and blend from biology to anthropology. He puts forward zoological observations within metaphors that encourage us to see them in human culture, which naturalizes systems of oppression.
Speaking of how selfish genes build group altruism, he says stupid things like “Money is the formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism,” suggesting that our economic system has primarily natural roots in an evolutionarily-stable genetic tendency. When he’s talking about evolutionarily fit strategies, he makes the disgusting jump to the welfare state, pointing out that people can continue to have babies they can’t afford because those babies won’t starve, in the efficient way that the natural world would take care of ‘the problem.’ 1) This labels money within capitalism as the same thing as biological resources, naturalizing a very unnatural thing. 2) It equates wealth with some kind of genetic fitness -- Dawkins says he supports the idea of a welfare state, but it follows from his argument that ending the welfare state would breed a society where there aren’t any poor people, because “rich guy” genes would take over the gene pool. It would make more sense to point out that our unnatural culture allows botanically illiterate CEOs to still have babies instead of starve as they would in the 'wild.'
Dawkins graciously concludes that we shouldn’t blame these parents, since they’re surely too ignorant to know any better. Instead he blames religious leaders who preach against contraception. I am an exuberant fan of contraception -- but that has nothing to do with class. Wealthy babies slurp up far more resources than do the food stamps of the poor. Religion isn’t a phenomenon just of the working class -- and neither is ignorance. The welfare state exists because we recognize we have an extremely unfair (and, for what it’s worth, highly ‘unnatural’) way of dividing up socially-produced resources, and it makes us queasy to think people will have to die for a dumb system.
He talks about gender-based strategies in a highly essentializing way. Which might work for other species -- but evolutionary psychologists like Stevey Pinker have picked him up and giddily trumpeted around the pseudoscience of how a population of “coy” females (rather than “fast”) encourages “faithful” males (rather than “philandering”). In the discussion on gender, I found it interesting that rape -- a fairly obvious strategy for 'selfish genes' to replicate themselves -- is never mentioned. This might just be because Dawkins doesn't believe it exists.
He also suggests a biological grounding for racism, as an extension of the idea of kin-based altruism.
All of this feels like really sloppy science -- a kind of men-are-from-mars pop-psychology that doesn't take into account that there is so much more going on in capitalism, misogyny, and racism than some kind of natural biological response.