The answer, at least in Dawkins's case, would be no (at least that's what he would say), since for Dawkins, it's only the replicators (i.e. genes and memes) that are necessarily selfish, not the organisms, including ourselves. In that whole gene-centered view of evolution, which Dawkins popularized in "The Selfish Gene" was initiated with William Hamilton's work in the 1960s, which sought to work out the evolutionary basis for altruism. Since altruism involves the sacrifice of one organism's interests (including possibly its own life) for the sake of other organisms, then it might seem that natural selection ought to weed out altruism as something that decreases the Darwinian fitness of organisms. However, Hamilton argued that to look at the problem from the standpoint of the Darwinian fitness of individual organisms, was to look at it the wrong way. If, instead, we looked at things from the standpoint of the interests of genes, rather than organisms, then altruism is understandable in Darwinian terms. Hamilton, himself, advanced what as known as the kin-selection hypothesis, which attempts to explain why an organism might sacrifice its own interests for the sake of other genetically related organisms. For example, a mother bear might risk her own life to protect the lives of her cubs. But from a gene-centered view, this makes perfect Darwinian sense, since the mother bears actions, ensure that her genes will survive into future generations, even at the expense of her own life.
This, of course, leave altruism, where genetically unrelated organisms are involved, but that case was covered by the work of biologists like Robert Triviers, who advanced the notion of reciprocal altruism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism Genetically unrelated organisms might help each other in cases where acts of assistance from one organism might be reciprocated by acts of assistance from the other organism.
Dawkins, of course, recognized that in advanced organisms like human being, learning and culture play very significant roles in things like social cooperation and altruism. But even that, he believes, can be accommodated within a neo-Darwinian framework, by the addition of the concept of memes, which are units of cultural inheritance, treated as analogous to genes.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists? Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:38:24 -0700 (PDT)
Doesn't this statement kind of contradict the whole of evolutionary psychology, since morality and empathy presumably evolved as a way of perpetuating the selfish gene?
----- Original Message ---- From: Andy <andy274 at gmail.com>
I remember an interview with him where he says (to paraphrase) that it's to humans' credit that we've developed morality and empathy to the point that we can overcome evolutionary pressures and not be slaves of selfish genes. Whether you agree with that point or not, it has a whiff of solidarity.
Calling him a rightist sounds like a new way of expressing being upset with what he says.
-- Andy
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