The Gricean Gene

---- By J. L. S.


Grice wrote:

"_Read_ "Selfish Gene""

this has his bio _not_ crediting the Selfish Kenyan! (in name index).

Popper has it wrong when he says that genes co-operate. I never heard one implicate, though. But then, as they say, the appeal of the implicature is that it's a _soft_ thing.

Anyway, should expand on this at a later stage.

Here some news from Livingston's and Stanley's favourite continent below.

Well, if we are analysing the idea that Grice may have been criticised in Oxford because he was not from 'down the Home counties', we can psycho-babble Dawkins. Call me biographical, but before engaging in how selfish was my gene, I learn, and have not yet done the footnotes, from wiki:

"Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Colony of Kenya, British Empire. ... His father, Clinton John Dawkins, was an agricultural

CIVIL SERVANT

-- cfr. "Passage to India"

"in the British colonial service, in Nyasaland (now Malawi). His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the second world war ... and was based in Kenya,... Both of his parents were interested in natural sciences,"

-- but not really scientists, as some hits had it.

"and they answered Dawkins' questions in scientific terms. ... Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing". Though he began having doubts about the existence of God ... he was persuaded by the argument from design, an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, or design in nature. By his mid-teens, he had instead concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and became nonreligious..."

---

Oddly, I was slightly taken aback by the Grice biographer when she writes, "By ... (insert good date here), Grice had lost all faith". (or words). I found that something that no biographer should touch, unless expressed by the biographee in first person. And for some reason, I detect a gentler spirit in Grice, and as unable to express things like

"By ... I did lose all faith."

So what kind of report is a biographer making?! Etc.

---

JLS


Notes.
"Richard Dawkins was born on Mar. 26, 1941 to Clinton John and Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins in Nairobi, Kenya. Both of his parents were scientists which helped encourage Dawkins' own interest in ...
http://www.woopidoo.com/biography/richard-dawkins/index.htm
Richard Dawkins was born on Mar. 26, 1941 to Clinton John and Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins in Nairobi, Kenya. Dawkins was born in Kenya in 1941 and, although his father moved to England for a time to volunteer for wartime service, raised in East Africa until 1949."