[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Mon Mar 29 11:13:36 PDT 2010


farmelantj --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

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CB: Humans have an altruistic/communistic , extra-somatic (non-genetic) characteristic that is unique to the human species: culture. It has been highly adaptive in contrast with competing species.

It's fundamental principle for most of the human species existence has been "altruism" in the "all for one, one for all sense". An individual organism has a better chance of passing on its genes in this altruistic arrangement than in some selfish (bourgeois) organization of society.

The occurence of circumstances in which altruism amounts to self-sacrifice of an individual organism would be very, very rare. Most of the time the altruism inherent in originial human culture is the best selfish strategy, not involving self-sacrifice of life to save others.

Dawkins' relatively recent "discovery" of Memes is a sort of crude version of the concept of "culture" that has been developed in anthropology for over a century. The "units" of culture are symbols or signs, structures as in Levi-Strauss. Dawkins should take some basic cultural anthro courses (smile). Like Jared Diamond, he seems like another biologist who thinks he can jump from one expertise to another without studying the existing discipline of ethnology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnology



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