Richard Dawkins’s, The Selfish Gene, was a major exercise in popular mystification. For Dawkins, the main means for producing human behavior is to attribute to genes characteristics that can significantly be attributed only to persons. Then, after insisting that we are all the choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling monads. Genes, of course, can be neither selfish nor unselfish any more than they or any other non-conscious entities can engage in competition or make selections. (Natural selection is, notoriously, not selection; and it is a somewhat less familiar logical fact that, below the human level, the struggle for existence is not “competitive” in the true sense of the word.) But this did not stop Dawkins from proclaiming that his book “is not science fiction; it is science…. We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Although he later issued occasional disavowals, Dawkins gave no warning in his book against taking him literally. He added, sensationally, that “the argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.” If any of this were true, it would be no use to go on, as Dawkins does, to preach: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” No eloquence can move programmed robots. But in fact none of it is true—or even faintly sensible. Genes, as we have seen, do not and cannot necessitate our conduct. Nor are they capable of the calculation and understanding required to plot a course of either ruthless selfishness or sacrificial compassion. Flew, Antony; Varghese, Roy Abraham (2009-10-13). There Is a God
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 19:08:43 +0000
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