On Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:26:10 -0700 S Pawlett <epawlett at uniserve.com>
writes:
>Jean-Paul Oulette wrote:
>
>> Sam,
>> I was looking over the titles that you suggested to Marta,
>and was
>> a bit surprised to see Richard Dawkins', "the Selfish Gene" on the
>list.
>> I'm only familiar with his work in biology. Have you read material
>of
>> his on economics or political issues?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jean-Paul
>
>I threw that one in to be provocative. To my knowledge, Dawkins hasn't
>written
>anything on politics or economics though he does use bourgeois
>economics in his
>biology. He did give a ringing jacket endorsement of -The Origins of
>Virtue- by
>Matt Ridley (which I've just finished)-- a pretty libertarian book.
>Ridley argues
>stuff like the state itself causes the problem of the commons. I think
>the
>implications of Dawkins' theory especially his meth individualism and
>genetic
>reductionism is libertarian though he might deny it. As always, I'm
>open to
>challenge.
>
>Sam Pawlett
>
>
It is my understanding that Dawkins is politically a social democrat. I recall reading interviews in which he argued that the welfare state could be justified in terms of reciprocal altruism (which is a key concept in his school's analysis of cooperative forms of behavior). It is certainly true that Dawkins and his likeminded colleagues such as George Williams and John Maynard Smith draw upon bourgeois economics in their work. Actually, Darwinian biologists have been doing this from the very beginning. Marx & Engels noted Darwin's debt to classical political economy, especially the work of Malthus. Dawkins' school is noted for the application of theorems from neoclassical economics to Darwinian biology. In their view genes can be viewed as attempting to maximize their reproductive success, so they can be analyzed as acting in a 'profit' maximizing manner. John Maynard Smith has taken this a step further with the application of game theory. Thus his notion of evolutionarily stable strategies.
BTW the punctuationism of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge can be seen as certain commonalities with Marxism. Like Marxism, evolutionary change is seen as occurring in discrete jumps as opposed to the gradualism of much of conventional Darwinism. Also, Gould and Eldredge in contrast both with conventional Darwinism which posits individual organisms as the main units of selection and the Dawkins- Williams-Maynard Smith school which posits genes as the basic units of natural selection, instead posits a hierarchy of units of selection including genes, organisms, and species. In the Gould-Eldredge view, contradictions can occur between the ways that natural selection operates at these different levels, and this is major source of punctuational evolutionary changes.
Jim Farmelant
>
>
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