High school Karens
Um.
Some parents are concerned that their daughter might miss out on a scholarship. They might miss out on playing for this team or that team. [long pause] Boy, that doesn’t sound like community, that sounds like selfishness, I’m sorry to label it that way but that sounds like what it is to me.
And it’s not selfish at all for a boy who claims to be a girl to take away a girl’s chance at a scholarship, no no no no no, that’s pure altruism. It’s almost saintly.
“Girls will miss out on scholarships.” “Do you have a girl in the school who plays sports?” “Yes.” “You’re being selfish.”
“Girls will miss out on scholarships.” “Do you have a girl in the school who plays sports?” “No.” “What do you care, then? It doesn’t affect you.”
From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel today:
Wisconsin Assembly passes transgender girls high school sports ban
What can you say but that when they’re right, they’re right regardless of one’s political party:
Some of the imbalance is due to men getting preferential treatment when it comes to sport because it’s not ladylike for women to sweat, and of course men still do get preferential treatment. Title IX still was a significant step for women in sport and to allow men to compete as if they were women is unfair to women.
Being a parent requires a level of selfishness… Might I recommend The Selfish Gene?
No, Blood Knight, please do not recommend ‘The Selfish Gene’. Dawkins’ meme – for it does not begin to be a theory: it has no evidence to back it up, has been shown to be both wrong and nonsensical by an extremely distinguished scientist, Denis Noble (who has spent his career actually doing science, and not just writing about it), as well as by the philosopher Mary Midgley, among many others. And Dawkins, who obviously chose the meme, since it sounded like a daringly pessimistic bit of ‘hard science’ (which appeals to a certain kind of mind) actually said some time after the appearance of the book that he could have entitled the book ‘The Cooperative Gene’. Well, why didn’t he? I suspect it was because he knew it encourage sales to have a nice hard-headed title. His meme has been taken up by followers of Ayn Rand on the libertarian right since it may be used to justify their ideology.
@Tim Harris #3
Rand would have approved of the title, not because genes are ethically selfish, but because it helped sell the book.
And a boy competing against girls because then he has a much better chance of being awarded a scholarship intended for a girl athlete? That’s not selfishness?
A boy deciding to compete against girls, because if he competes against boys, he might miss out on a boys’ scholarship? That’s not selfishness?
How can he not know what’s on the other side of that selfishness coin (wooden nickel) he’s trying to circulate here? How can he be THAT obtuse?
So being disenfranchised is selfish. That sounds like victim blaming.
Considine is a special ed teacher. I wonder what he would think about kids identifying as disabled or handicapped in order to obtain resources reserved for kids who have actual special ed needs.
I gave up competitive sports to become trans. Said no trans person ever.
@Tim Harris,
Mary Midgley didn’t show that what Dawkins wrote in “The Selfish Gene” was wrong.
Mary Midgley didn’t understood what Dawkins meant with that phrase and only showed that her interpretation of that frase was wrong, not what Dawkins actually wrote.
@4:
This is utterly wrong. The Gene Level account of evolution summarised in that book is now an accepted and mainstream understanding of evolution (of course it’s not the whole story, evolution is complex so there’s also a lot else to say).
What Midgley and others get wrong is that Dawkins called it the Selfish Gene not the Selfish Human. Genes are “selfish”, that is, acting to propogate themselves, because the genes profilerating in the gene pool will be those that have best propogated themselves.
And yes, it could have been called the “cooperative gene”, because cooperating is often the best way of furthering ones self interests! Genes act cooperatively because they are selfish (and if that sounds contradictory, read beyond the book’s title).
Hence humans are sociable and cooperative because genes are selfish (in the above sense).
So this explains where our sociable and cooperative nature came from and why it evolved! It is an essential part of understanding ourselves!
The book will far outlast its critics, especially ones like Midgley and others whose understanding does not go beyond a misinterpretation of the title.
I wonder if either Axxyaan or (predictably) Coel have read the book, and its claim that:
‘Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”
And yet, Dawkins asserts, we ‘lumbering robots’, manipulated by our genes, have the power, by some Cartesian magic, one supposes, ‘to defy the selfish genes of our birth’.
Note that the use of ‘selfish’ clearly means ‘selfish’ in its usual, everyday sense and not in the strained interpretation Coel defensively attempts, and is contrasted with human beings’ apparent power to transcend the ‘selfishness’ of the genes. Denis Noble, who is a practicing scientist, remarks in his two books about genetics (‘The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes’ & ‘Dance to the Tune of Life’) on the limitations and ambiguity of metaphor and the way it can deceive both writers & readers.
Midgley’s understanding does go beyond ‘a misunderstanding of the title’. The reason why Dawkins was so furious about the review of his book by ‘a person named Mary Midgley’ was because it hit a large nail on its head. She has written at length on the matter in a book entitled ‘The Solitary Self: Darwin & the Selfish Gene’. I suggest that you both extend your reading a little.
Perhaps you could explain what Denis Noble misunderstands about ‘The Selfish Gene’ when he points out that there is no experiment whereby you could show that genes are, indeed, selfish – or otherwise; or when he remarks on how this metaphor has ‘fuelled gene-determinism’, and how it has been taken up by right-wing groups – the sort of people who suppose that Ayn Rand is a serious thinker & libertarianism a serious political philosophy – for it appeals to those who like nice, big, simple ideas that suit, or can be made to seem to support, their prejudices.
Noble, by the way, ‘held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology.( And, until recently at least, he was President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences.) He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960.’
Or perhaps you could address Noble’s claim that “the paradigms for genetic causality in biological systems are seriously confused” and that “The metaphors that served us well during the molecular biological phase of recent decades have limited or even misleading impacts in the multilevel world of systems biology. New paradigms are needed if we are to succeed in unravelling multifactorial genetic causation at higher levels of physiological function and so to explain the phenomena that genetics was originally about.” (I have taken these quotations from Wikipedia, since I haven’t the time to go through the two books now and look for them.)
No, Coel, the claims of ‘The Selfish Gene’ are far from being the whole story. Science, fortunately, is not monolithic and nobody, not even Richard Dawkins, is immune from criticism or has the last word. Things are changing. It is good to go beyond your comfort zone.
I also recommend ‘How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race & Reality’ by the geneticist Adam Rutherford.
I should also add that Dawkins has admitted that there is no conceivable experiment that might demonstrate that genes are ‘selfish’ (in whatever sense you wish to take it).
Here is a note from Noble’s ‘Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity’: ‘Richard Dawkin originally thought that ‘selfish’ was not a metaphor but to be interpreted literally: Dawkins, R. (1981) In Defence of Selfish Genes Philosophy 56:556-573. The reason is worth quoting in full: “That was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular way favoured by biologists.” But a metaphor does not cease to be a metaphor simply because one defines a word to mean something other than its normal meaning. Indeed, it is the function of a metaphor to do precisely this.’ (‘precisely’ italicised in original)
And there is, on page 138, this: ‘in fact it can be shown that, in the case of some of the central concepts of Neo-Darwinism, such as ‘selfish genes’ or ‘genetic programme’, no biological experiment could possibly distinguish even between completely opposite conceptual interpretations of the same experimental findings. The concepts therefore form a biased interpretive veneer that can hide those discoveries in a web of interpretation.’
Seems a bit much of a reaction for the idea that a parent prioritizing their offspring’s welfare over that of others is a natural and evolutionarily beneficial tendency. Can’t imagine Rand and other libertarians would be all that keen on the book’s implications about free will (not that Dawkins is necessarily a hard determinist).
My point was that in context they’re making an insult out of something anodyne. I’ve got no beef with banning men and boys from women’s sports.
I’ll just add that in The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins addressed some of the criticism of The Selfish Gene, both potential and actual. Jeremy Stangroom wrote an interesting and agreeable article about it 20 years ago (wow, has it been 20 years?!) stiil available here –>
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/8288EE0767B0370B6E6839CA557A9C17/S1477175600000506a.pdf/misunderstanding-richard-dawkins.pdf
@Tim:
Sure have.
Nope, you suppose wrongly; it’s not by “Cartesian magic”. But genetic interests are not necessarily our interests. So we can indeed “defy the selfish genes”. Evolution is not an intelligent process with foresight, so what it does is cobble together a bundle of heuristics. How those heuristics then play out in a novel environment might not be in the genes’ interests.
For example, a heuristic of “rich, fatty food is yummy, eat lots” might be in genes’ interests on the African savanna of yesteryear when starvation was an ever-present threat, but not in anyone’s interests in a world of abundant food in supermarkets.
So, us having different interests than our genes and “defying” them is no more puzzling than the idea that we could build an AI device that then behaved in unexpected ways that we didn’t plan or like.
Nope, wrong. The definition of “selfish” that I gave is the technical meaning as used in that field, and as used in the book. Its resemblence to the common-language use is indeed metaphorical, but the technical usage is not.
Correct. And he still does. And it is. In the technical sense (as above) it *is* literal. That’s what your next quote says: Dawkins: “I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular way favoured by biologists”.
I see that you give no quote. If you quoted it in context you might see that the “selfishness” of genes in the technical sense of the term follows pretty tautologically from the logic of evolution, in that the gene is the thing that is replicated. The book is then about the playing out of this concept, the consequences for evolution of the replication of genes.
Again, you and Noble are confusing the technical usage of the word (where it is literal and precise and accurate) with that word’s resemblance to the common-language concept (which is indeed metaphorical).
Nope, it utterly missed. She just did not understand it. She made the same confusion of technical meaning with metaphor that you are making.
More than that, she — like many people — is utterly confused over the is/ought distinction and the naturalistic fallacy. She thinks that the only reason somebody could be arguing that X is the case is that they are pushing X as normative, that X ought to be the case, that they like X being the case. This confusion is because that’s how so many “academics” operate in non-scientific fields. If you read Dawkins in that frame of mind you’ll go wrong, as she did.
See above. He’s confusing the technical usage of the term with its resemblence to the common-language concept.
“Selfish” here means that the genes that act to leave more copies of themselves then leave more copies of themselves and so proliferate. Again, this is pretty much tautological. Again, the book is not so much asserting that genes are “selfish” (in this sense), it is saying that given that they are, now let’s think through the consequences.
That’s supposed to be a reply to my comment: “of course it’s not the whole story, evolution is complex so there’s also a lot else to say”, is it?
As I said, the book will long outlast its critics. Every criticism in your comments is simply a misunderstanding.
@twiliter:
In addition to the link that you gave, another thing worth reading is the intro to the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene. (Which Google books may let you read online.)
In it, Dawkins makes clear that the “selfishness” of genes (in the technical sense) follows directly from Darwinian logic, once one realises that the gene is the replicator:
“The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize ‘selfish’ and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is ‘gene’ and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, ‘selfish’.”
[…]
“Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically ‘for the good of the genes’, for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altruism is only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism.”
[…]
“Let me repeat and expand the rationale for the word ‘selfish’ in the title. The critical question is: Which level in the hierarchy of life will turn out to be the inevitably ‘selfish’ level, at which natural selection acts? The Selfish Species? The Selfish Group? The Selfish Organism? The Selfish Ecosystem? Most of these could be argued, and most have been uncritically assumed by one or another author, but all of them are wrong. Given that the Darwinian message is going to be pithily encapsulated as The Selfish Something, that something turns out to be the gene, for cogent reasons which this book argues.”
One can see from this that criticisms of the sort that Tim makes, following Midgley et al, are just complete misunderstandings.
And while I’m on I may as well also quote this from the 30th anniversary intro:
“Another good alternative to The Selfish Gene would have been The Cooperative Gene. It sounds paradoxically opposite, but a cen- tral part of the book argues for a form of cooperation among self-interested genes. This emphatically does not mean that groups of genes prosper at the expense of their members, or at the expense of other groups. Rather, each gene is seen as pursuing its own self-interested agenda against the background of the other genes in the gene pool—the set of candidates for sexual shuffling within a species. Those other genes are part of the environment in which each gene survives, in the same way as the weather, predators and prey, supporting vegetation and soil bacteria are parts of the environment.”
“Natural selection therefore sees to it that gangs of mutually compatible—which is almost to say cooperating—genes are favoured in the presence of each other. At no time does this evolution of the ‘cooperative gene’ violate the fundamental principle of the selfish gene.”
[…]
“One of the dominant messages of The Selfish Gene (reinforced by the title essay of A Devil’s Chaplain) is that we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale.”
This comment thread is like being suddenly transported back to the height of New Atheism.
Thanks Coel for the recommendation. It’s has been so many years since I read both The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype that they’re definitely worth a revisit. I remember the impact both books had on my thinking back then and since. A fresh intro definitely looks interesting.
twiliter @ 16 – funny thing – Jeremy’s irritation at Midgley’s scornful misunderstanding of Dawkins is the source of the name “Butterflies and Wheels.”
The explanation of the title is on the About page.
I don’t think criticisms that jump from the genetic level to the sociological level are entirely unsound, but it’s never a clear path, given how many subjects evolutionary theory can be applied to. There are many aspects to be taken into account, and it’s easy to overlook some salient data or other. I have a good feel for what Dawkins put forth on the subject and initially found it fascinating, but then again, I didn’t attempt to apply the implications of evolutionary microbiology and apply them to human experience (whether he did or not). I still think it’s an original and elegant bit of thinking. There has been much work done that explains evolutionary theory which is much clearer than an understanding of Dawkins work alone on the subject. Gould and Mayr come to mind for fairly unmuddled overviews of evolution on a more human level, but even the comprehensive and exhaustive theories leave much to yet be explored. I think within the confines of genetics alone, that Dawkins is outstanding at those explanations, and that his explanations are difficult to find coherent alternatives to.
Ophelia @22 This has always been very apropos to me.
And to paraphrase, some days you’re the butterfly, and some days you’re the wheel. ;)
(and most days I feel like I’m the butterfly, lol) Alexander Pope is sublime.
Truth about Pope!
I shall merely say that Dawkins plays around with the ambiguity of his metaphor to the detriment of his argument, and suggest that instead of dismissing Noble, who is a serious practising scientist, people should take the trouble to read his careful arguments, in which he makes very clear that reducing everything to the ‘genetic code’ obscures what is in fact going on and does not provide adequate explanations.
And I’ll just note that plenty of people manage to read Dawkins without any trouble at all discerning what is metaphor and what is not — especially as he spells all this out explicitly.
And no-one is “reducing everything to the ‘genetic code’”. One of the short-cuts to cheap notability is to pick someone well known, strawman the hell out of them, and then declare oneself more insightful.