Discount Dawkins

[hackenslash]

Indeed. My quibble with all his books has been his apparent neglect of drift.

[pErvinalia]

As I said, I haven't read it for a long time, but I kind of thought it's central message was to debunk a lot of pop-psychology about the "self" and free-will and agency and anthropocentricism etc..

edit: or was that just the unintended side-effect?

edit again: just to clarify my above thing about debunking pop-psychology... I didn't meant to imply that he advanced the proposition that we are unthinking biological robots. Just that there are other considerations to "the self" in our thinking.

[Hermit]

What are the alternatives? Gene complexes, whole organism, populations (aka EO Wilson)?

Initially genes were undoubtedly the sole driver of evolution, but I think in the course of it they have ceased to be the sole and primary one. Evolution has become so much more determined by social interaction (and by that I mean social interaction before hominids long before hominids even existed) that the "selfish gene", while still being a factor, has subsumed a subordinate role.

The primacy of the gene as the principal - arguably sole - driver of evolution.

A quibble; it was the process of selection, acting on gene frequencies, that he saw as the principal (but not sole) driver of evolution. His key point was to more carefully define what the "gene" could be...

Like rEv I have not read The Selfish Gene for many years, but from memory Dawkins argued that compared to genes all other factors fade into insignificance. His last chapter - supposedly an indication of how we might transcend the tyranny of the selfish gene - does nothing to diminish its alleged primacy.

[JimC]

Indeed. My quibble with all his books has been his apparent neglect of drift.

I don't think he denied that it occurred. He was mainly at pains to point out that when a clear example of adaptation is observed, then natural selection must have occurred in past populations of that organism. The fine details of any given structure, though, may come from a variety of random factors.

I acknowledge that determining whether a given feature of an organism is truly an adaptation can, in some circumstances, be difficult.

[hackenslash]

susu argues, quite compellingly, that NS and drift shouldn't even be thought of as distinct, rather that they should be thought of as facets of a single process, namely population resampling, not least because even deleterious mutations can go to fixation as long as they're not too strongly selected against.

[JimC]

susu argues, quite compellingly, that NS and drift shouldn't even be thought of as distinct, rather that they should be thought of as facets of a single process, namely population resampling, not least because even deleterious mutations can go to fixation as long as they're not too strongly selected against.

If all we are concerned about is change of any sort, sure.

However, organisms clearly have a suite of features exquisitely tuned to promote their survival and reproductive success. The past process that lead to the development of such a suite must primarily involve natural selection, with drift restricted to attributes which are neutral, or very close to neutral...

[Svartalf]

Not sure if it's been discussed here, but 'absence of evidence' has been hashed out in this thread.

In this post, Cali proves not merely a negative, but what people actually mean when they say you can't prove a negative, namely a non-existence postulate.

In both cases the problem is one of ensuring that the entities in question are sufficiently well defined, but any example of a counter renders the statement false.

Thanks Hack, that will be hours of reading for me.

[rainbow]

Indeed. My quibble with all his books has been his apparent neglect of drift.

My quibble is that they are deeply boring, as he has nothing new to say.

[JimC]

Indeed. My quibble with all his books has been his apparent neglect of drift.

My quibble is that they are deeply boring, as he has nothing new to say.

At the time, he definitely had something new to say, and made a real contribution to the development of evolutionary theory.

[cronus]

Indeed. My quibble with all his books has been his apparent neglect of drift.

My quibble is that they are deeply boring, as he has nothing new to say.

At the time, he definitely had something new to say, and made a real contribution to the development of evolutionary theory.

Yeah, one hit wonder though and all that came after might be classed as self-publicity stunts to keep his name in lights.

[Hermit]

...self-publicity stunts to keep his name in lights.

What next? "Disco Dawkins"? Naw. At best that would be a piss-weak title for a parody thread.

[cronus]

...self-publicity stunts to keep his name in lights.

What next? "Disco Dawkins"? Naw. At best that would be a piss-weak title for a parody thread.

I always ask questions when the writers name is larger than the title of the book.

[Hermit]

...self-publicity stunts to keep his name in lights.

What next? "Disco Dawkins"? Naw. At best that would be a piss-weak title for a parody thread.

I always ask questions when the writers name is larger than the title of the book.

Writers generally don't have a say in jacket design. I've noticed a lot of books written by Aldous Huxley with the author in larger type than the title, but you don't have to be dead for the promotional department to do that.

What really does irk me is when PhD or MD is appended to the name, though.

[pErvinalia]

...self-publicity stunts to keep his name in lights.

What next? "Disco Dawkins"? Naw. At best that would be a piss-weak title for a parody thread.

This is as good as you'll get for Disco Dawkins. Skip to 4:50 for the really freaky shit..

[cronus]

He's looking and sounding more like Prince Charles with every passing haircut.