By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club
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I'm making this a new post because I can't for the life of
me find the thing I am commenting on.
The search box on the Blog doesn't seem to work for me at
all.
I don't suppose I could persuade you guys to subscribe to
the archive list
(at:
http://rbjones.com/mailman/listinfo/jlsblogs_rbjones.com)
so that we can conduct an off-blog discussion just by
REPLYing to blog posts? I seem to spend more time looking
for messages than replying to them!
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I suppose I should repond quicker!
Sorry for the glacial pace, I have too many balls in the air
right now.
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On Friday 26 Feb 2010 18:09, Lawrence J. Kramer wrote:
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> I don't think Dawkins, speaking carefully, would say
> that his "central thesis" is a tautology,
.
Well unfortunately that is what he in fact does say in "The
Selfish Gene", perhaps he doesn't really mean it!
Furthermore, this is not an isolated oddity, for he says
something similar in "The Extended Phenotype". The central
thesis of that book is not the same, but goes to some
considerable length to assure us and to convince us that the
central thesis of that book is not a "scientific theory"
(particularly, is not a testable empirical theory).
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> but that, in
> addition to something everybody knows - that evolution
> happens at the genetic level - one need only apply
> tautological statements to extract some pretty cool
> stuff.
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Perhaps he should have explained what he way trying to do
in that way.
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However, that he does not is symptomatic of his principle
ailment. He is a dogmatic rationalist. He actually likes
to think he is proceding deductively from some fecund
principle which is not open to doubt. Furthermore, he
exhibits throughout the tell-tale sign of this kind of
over-extended rationalism, which is that he thinks that he
can prove that something must be the case even when
counterexamples stare us in the face every day.
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He is also, I might add, the staunchest proponent of the
idea that scientific institutions should be treated as
authoritative.
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If you have read Isaiah Berlin, and understand his
conception of the enlightenment and the romantic reaction
against it, then you may understand Dawkins as being a
modern representative of that arrogant intellectual
presumption against which Rosseau reacted.
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The fallacy of that position in relation to evolution is the
idea that nature and evolution are so simple that one can
understand the implications of the basic facts of genetics
and reproduction to be able to say definitively what cannot
ensue from them.
This is a particularly pernicious reductionism because of
its apparently justifying conclusions which are so
fundamental to human nature and morality.
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Even if we accept the materialist idea of a TOE, we do not
suppose that from such a theory we will in practice be able
to deduce the properties of materials, we accept that we
have to test the materials to discover their properties.
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Similarly, even if we accept that evolution proceeds by the
effects of selection upon the genome, we do not have to
accept that in practice we can understand what has or will
happen by thinking of selection only at that level.
Also note that the idea that the selection is "natural" is
rather bogus, for the most significant factor is usually not
survival but reproduction, and in that we do not replicate
maximally but selectively. Most significant factor in the
chances of replication of a gene are its effect on choice of
mate, and this is so heavily affected by social factors that
the prediction of evolution by considerations occurring at
the genetic level is more like astrology than science.
.
What this has to do with Grice I don't know, but I am
intending to do some philosophical analysis of evolutionary
"theory" in my "HOT philosophy" project, and though Grice
did not figure in my original conception of that project, I
am now wondering whether he should have a place.
So I may be up for more discussion of evolution and Grice in
the future, and will come back with some ideas on the Grice
connection soon.
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Roger Jones
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I agree with Roger: my version of TSG's message is better than Dawkins's!
ReplyDeleteDawkins has something interesting to say, whether or not he says it correctly. I'm fine with criticism of the man so long as they are not offered as ad hominem arguments against the useful aspects of his work.
I do disagree with Roger's notion of what "natural" selection encompasses. Sexual selection is part of natural selection, at least as I believe Darwinians see it. And the social organization of the creatures resulting from a gene's expression - including humans - is part of the "environment" in which the gene finds itself. Our capaicity for eugenics is a result of natural selection, and our practice of it is an instance of natural selection: a population of creatures with intelligence and self-awareness will include members who will try to engineer its collective future and will survive or not depending on the environment that effort encounters and/or produces.
Where I think Dawkins goes wrong, substantively, and perhaps because he equates reductionism with determinism, is in thinking that a gene's environment cannot become so chaotic as to render prediction impossible, and, therefore, sphexishness maladaptive. It's like that old greeting card line "If you love something, let it go..." At some point, the best "strategy" for the genome is not to encode but to enable, and when that happens, the variables multiply exponentially, and it becomes very difficult to predict outcomes.
Still, some surprisingly rational things happen among humans in stressful times, including some statistically predictable changes in social organization. They're just not a sure thing, and so there are always anecdotal counterexamples. Just how much those prove, however, is unclear.
One one of our social strategies is to deny that we are genetically driven even to the extent that we are so. Such cultural self-delusion is a completely acceptable genomic strategy. Whether or not God is such a delusion, we can probably all point to ideas that were once widespread and are now discredited on social rather than scientific grounds. Racial harmony has become so important that we have adopted a strategy of denying racial traits on the basis of the lack of proof of their existence, even as we maintain a taboo on seeking it. Some very good sociolological stuff in The Bell Curve (essentially a book on sexual selection among certain populations of homo sapiens) was lost because of an allergic reaction to the chapter on race.
How many arguments about the existence of God boil down to "there must be a God, because, if there weren't, that would really suck." Do I not hear in attacks on Dawkins a wish for free will, a complaint that life is meaningless if we are the product of selfish genes? Dawkins may well be wrong, but he cannot be proved wrong by a claim that we would not be happy if he were right. Dawkins would say, I think, that we reject his claims because accepting them would make us unhappy, and we don't want to be unhappy, as that does not conduce to reproduction. No, the Dawkins-denial gene - the thing that gives us the ability to raise the burden of proof on unhappy thoughts - has made us unwilling to accept Dawkins's verion of things. What a piece of work is man!
Perhaps the survival of the shark and roach for so many eons is attributable to their genomes having adopted the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) strategy rather than the riskier one ours has followed. After all, we have apocaplypse myths and post-apocalyptic movies, and they don't. We're the only animal that has to pray because we're the only animal whose genome has adopted a Big Casino approach to survival. There is no basis yet for pronouncing our genome adaptive. The clock got pretty close to midnight, and may yet get there. Perhaps our genes have been insufficiently selfish.
On Tuesday 02 Mar 2010 14:12, Lawrence J. Kramer wrote:
ReplyDelete> I agree with Roger: my version of TSG's message is better
> than Dawkins's!
Unfortunately its not enough for Dawkins.
TSG is taking position against group selection, which goes way beyond the affirmation of gene level selection.
> Dawkins has something interesting to say, whether or not
> he says it correctly. I'm fine with criticism of the man
> so long as they are not offered as ad hominem arguments
> against the useful aspects of his work.
I hope my remarks were not ad hominem, but I am sometimes a little incautious. There is a difficulty in putting forward a very general (and perhaps somewhat forceful) critique without appearing to be against the man. I do have an antipathy and would not have any expectation of being able to have a fruitful discussion with him, because my sense of where he is going wrong is somewhat fundamental and its hard to see him even comprehending it, let alone acceding or doing anything about it. What do you say to someone who thinks he is the champion of the right and rational way of going about things against repression and superstition, when all you see is two dogmatic institutions at loggerheads?
I don't know what you take to be the "useful" aspects of his work, but it seems to me that though there is lots of interesting factual detail, the general theses he puts forward (excepting the brute facts about gene level selection, and we can debate about what they are), are incorrect and amount to mistaken reductionisms.
That he thinks these follow deductively from his basic premises shows him to be reasoning fallaciously.
> I do disagree with Roger's notion of what "natural"
> selection encompasses. Sexual selection is part of
> natural selection,
Yes, it wasn't my intention to dispute that.
The point I intended to make was, that because of the complex and crucial involvement of a socially influence and individually chosen partner selection, the distinction between natural and artificial selection is rendered otiose, and anything you think you should have been able to infer from the selective pressures you can't.
> Where I think Dawkins goes wrong, substantively, and
> perhaps because he equates reductionism with
> determinism, is in thinking that a gene's environment
> cannot become so chaotic as to render prediction
> impossible
I think we agree there. But you perhaps think something is left standing in his argument, whereas I don't.
(I'm thinking here about the crucial negative claims about what can't happen, notably altruism except in special limited cases, and effective selection at levels higher than the gene, "group selection!", these are the principle theses of the book. The genetic mechanisms were not at issue.
Roger Jones
Thanks for the post, Roger Bishop Jones, and to Kramer for his interesting, as always, comment, and to Jones for engaging in further comment. Keep it up! I would point to this lovely distinction Roger makes
ReplyDeleteartificial vs. natural. It is a lovely distinction. Of course wrong. So if you two feel like, use it often, so we can discuss the un-Gricean, un-Grecian, basis for it! At some point, it seems the distinction should make sense, but one wonders. Especially vis a vis Kramer's acute arguments. I would think at a first shot that the isthmus is in sphexishness/antisphexishness, i.e., in Gricean parlance -- the intro by Grandy/Warner to the PGRICE festschrift, google.books "Philosophical Grounds of Rationality" seems appropriate -- I may provide the link in further comment. Grandy/Warner rely on some unpublished work by Grice to the effect that
--- The Faculty of Reason or Rationality
ONLY makes sense if understood as a faculty to REPRESS, CONTROL, INHIBIT pre-rational tendencies. Those tendencies may be very welcomed by Dawkins and the Dawinians but they are still pre-rational. The motto, "pre-" here is important, because it's like when we see the bee queen cutting the prick of the drone as he makes love to her and we say, "That's IMMORAL!". Surely a-moral at best! And highly moral to some! (Hey, it's the way the genome will reproduce) -- Plus they only live 90 days, so what gives? In Dawkinsian parlance there's not just the selfish gene (we have not proved this oxymoronic in that, say, my pair of socks have "selves" -- even though they don't self-reproduce -- what a marvel a gene is). But there's also the meme, which encomprises most of what we mean by 'human' (or Homo sapiens, if you must -- and YOU must) AND the extended genotype and the extended phenotype. These are important notions, 'the extended' stuff -- because I tend to think that a genome of a race, say, goes with the clothes they use: I'm currently undergoing a very Grecian phase -- almost nudist! And have come to disregard overdone considerations. The weather helps! So there's more to race -- call me the Italian race -- than the genome: there's the phenotype and the environment. Do in Rome as the Romans, etc. Special traits of 'race' only work well in the proper environment. Was the name of the book that Kramer mentions about miscegenation? I love that issue! We see so _little_ of it. On the other hand, it's sex all over. As Ronald Frankau used to say,
"Everyone has got sex-appeal to someone,
or many of us wouldn't be here;
even the horses abide by this rule.
They are attracted to the horse,
or there wouldn't be a mule!"
---- What a genius! The song to hear in "Banned Songs of the BBC", CD.
Roger -
ReplyDeleteYou quote Dawkins in your notes:
"Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense."
This leaves plenty of room for "group" selection - like when the White man was "selected" over the Red man in the Americas, thanks to the former's gene for not giving a crap about, much less feeling universal love for, "the species as a whole." Much of human progress has followed the conquest of less technologically capable groups by more technologically capable groups. Thus, the species has “benefited” from the fact that its members don't give a rat's patoot about it.
It might be useful to do a thought experiment in which kinship is ignored, where humans give no preference whatsoever to family in any matter. I would bet that the families that cohered out-multiply those that didn't. So the cohesion gene would take root. How could it not?
I think it’s important to remember that the species is not a social unit. The beehive is a social unit. One's family is a social unit. Neighborhoods, homelands, high schools, ethnic groups, and fraternities are social units to which we try by cultural means, often with great success, to engender the sort of affection we feel for our families. (Note how we use family-oriented words in our efforts to forge those ties.) But functionally, what distinguishes these groups from the species at large is that they help their common genome to reproduce by enabling their members to cooperate in coordinated plus-sum games. It is in the interest of the genes of all of the members of such a group to have their carriers act in the interest of any group that can provide that benefit. I don’t believe Dawkins would disagree. But our allegiance to these groups varies in intensity, and I believe that Dawkins would claim, correctly, that family comes first.
Just a note to the effect that I posted a longish post inspired by Kramer's use of 'plus-sum game'. I'll let R. B. Jones reply here then. Thanks, and cheers! JLS
ReplyDelete