The Human Question

Selfish gene theory, if I'm not mistaken, is a theory because it can explain things.  And one of the things that I believe it explains is why we'd risk our lives for one member our immediate family, or possibly many members of our remote family, and are more likely to make this sacrifice for someone whom we are less closely related to.  It's all about preserving our gene type or its most similar version. If this were a reliable explanation, then we'd rather save the life of a plant (say, a rice bush) than we would the life of an Exta tererestrial intelligence.

I'm repeating myself here. RD is making room for, if you will, phenotypic altruism, while explaining that as the result of selfishness (the latter allows his account to a Darwinian-sounding. Only problem is that gene behavior is not well-described as selfish.  It's self-diffusive, which is a kind of generosity, albeit of a narrow kind (I must generate more of my own kind) Just as "natural selection" is a modified metaphor taken from human agency, so too is the selfish gene.

It seems to me that Richard Dawkins' talk of the selfish gene is an attempt both to acknowledge that we act in a manner that--viewed from a first-person perspective-- transcends selfishness but at the same time give a kind of primacy to selfishness in explaining how noble motivations arise from a metaphorically selfish gene.  But isn't it a sign of desperation that he has to resort to metaphor in order to maintain the primacy of selfishness?

RD thinks he can explain unselfish behavior simply by appealing to the metaphor of the selfish-gene.  It's supposed to explain why we FEEL like acting generously.  But how do mutations or whatever cause us to be able to come to JUDGE that such an action is to be done?

One really, really interesting point RD makes is that the purpose of selfish-gene theory is to provide an explanation for unselfish behavior.  He really does recognize such behavior, and that it has unselfish motivation.  But it's axiomatic for him that selfishness is at the bottom of things.  So he locates selfishness in the gene.  Of course this is a metaphor.  So I'm not sure what his real point is, except that something analogous to selfishness is going on.  But what could that be?  Isn't this magical thinking?

The hypothesis that we act naturally so as to preserve genotype is very consistent with the data. For example, the way men are more likely to be attracted to many partners and women more likely to just one... and other ways as well that escape my mind... but lots of them are so-called altruistic behaviors. RD distinguishes between the motivation we're aware of and the past processes that explain the origin of that motivation. Good point. But I'm afraid some folks don't keep this distinction in mind when they talk as if evolutionary advantage (what I call genotype preservation) explained everything. It is a mistake to take as demonstrated the claim that the behaviors in question are genuinely explained by genotype preservation. In fact, in order for it to be a scientific theory, one has to put forward an experiment with a predication of some sort (a retrodiction will do). Not seeking to disprove utterly this hypothesis, and not being a scientist, I propose the follo...