Life Lessons

I feel bad for constantly declaring Dawkins as a pessimistic person. All my views on him have changed ever since Chapter 11, but Chapter 12 is what completely swayed me.

Chapter 12 presents us with the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a problem game that demonstrates why two people may not cooperate even if it is in both of their best interest to do so. These participants will always tend to choose Defect because they don’t have trust in each other. The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is pretty much exactly the same as the Prisoner’s Dilemma but it is repeated between the same two individuals for a number of rounds. This way, the result would be different – both individuals would most likely choose Cooperate because there’s always the next round. Thus, the Tit-for-Tat strategy is used in this game – a strategy known as the “equivalent retaliation.”

Unlike all those times when Dawkins stated his pessimistic view on these survival machines that barely have any control of themselves, his game theory approach offers us with a basis of optimism about people.  Regardless of initial conditions, climate, and the current dominance of nasty strategies, the analogy we can draw between this and human behavior is that a nice but tit-for-tat strategy can cross the “knife-edge” and never go back.   Obviously, this cannot be applied 100% to humans; however, it’s a useful outline in examining the patterns of an altruistic behavior. Despite the fact that genes struggles for continuance and maintenance of itself, altruism can achieve this continuation through reciprocation – those who are nice enough to cooperate will make others cooperate with them in return.

Also, there's another thing that we need to take a look at in this chapter. That is the matter of trust. Dawkins demonstrates how important trust between individuals is through all this game demonstrations. Without trust, nothing can be done. No one will cooperate. The game will become a mess; the players will feel unsure, not exactly sure what they should do. This is exactly the same in life. Trust is the key to life.

There is Hope

Humans are selfish. This is a fact that Dawkins was able to prove through his selfish gene theory. It even runs in our genes. Yet, Dawkins takes another step to talk about the culture side of human beings. He introduces us to the memes (who knew this word came from him?). Meme is an element of culture that gets passed down from one generation to another (but not genetically). Examples include fashion, music, catch phrases, etc. I’m sure many of you heard about “internet memes” especially now because there are the email forwards, instant messages, webpage links, etc for the memes to travel instantly. Memes are a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other – a mind-to-mind connection. If you still don’t understand what it is, just think of all those Chuck Norris jokes on the Internet. That’s a perfect example.

Example of a Meme

So typical of Dawkins, he immediately compares memes with genes. Just like genes, memes also have their own selfish side to them (although it’s not like they have any emotions). However, they have that instinct for survival. Memes compete with each other so that their idea would last longer, would become more popular, etc. They are the new replicators. Similar to genes and any other replicators, they need the “longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity” (194).

So are we just these gene and meme machines who can’t even control ourselves? Are we after all just controlled by something we cannot take over?

For those of you who want to believe in the good of human beings, there is still hope.  Dawkins clarifies that just because our genes or our human nature tell us that we are selfish people, it doesn’t mean we actually are. Ultimately, it is us who create who we are. Even the scientist who I believe to be extremely pessimistic seems to agree with me! “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (pg. 201). 

SELFISH

“A pack of hyenas can catch prey so much larger than a lone hyena…” “Spiders cooperate in building a huge communal web.” “Emperor penguins conserve heat by huddling together” (pg. 166). Dawkins begins Chapter 10 with some examples that prove his theory of altruism. He believes that animals perform what seems to be “selfless acts” to help others; however, in reality, they are doing it to benefit themselves. He examines apparent altruistic animal behavior and attempts to explain it solely in terms of the benefits gained by a selfish gene. He expands into an analysis of reciprocal altruistic relationships, where both benefit from the relationship.

Nonetheless, what I wanted to concentrate on was humans – us. Dawkins uses the examples of the animals and applies it to the minds of human beings. He zooms into the level of our own bodies and suggests “we are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.” As much as my heart desires to argue against this, I can’t help but think that it might actually be true. We help others to benefit ourselves as well. Look at our society. Most high schoolers nowadays only do community service – help the old people, the people in need, constructing houses for homeless people – just because they need the hours or it would look good on their transcripts. Celebrities offer donations for countries in need just to improve their reputations. Although I want to believe that there are people who perform altruistic things purely for the fact that they care about others, I think Dawkins completely smashed my hope that real selfless people do exist. He does this by connecting everything with genes – he gives a clear explanation that seems so reasonable through science. Honestly, I’m not a science person and I never believed that genes had much to do with who you are. Dawkins proved me wrong, but this only presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature. It makes life seem utterly pointless. I cannot present any arguments to refute his point of view…but I want to believe. I want to believe that humans have complete free will and they choose to be nice and help others. 

Our genes do not control us. Dawkins seems right in almost everything, but I think he forgot about something. Human nature changed...it definitely changed from those times when we lived only to survive. We don't think about survival nowadays – it seems to come to us naturally. Thus, maybe our genes are connected to the past, but we have moved on. We are no longer "survival machines;" we are humans – humans with feelings.

KEY WORDS:

• Altruism (n) = the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others
• Aggregation (n) = collection: several things grouped together or considered as a whole
• ‘Domain of Danger’ = the area of ground in which any point is nearer to that individual than it is to any other individual
• Predator (n) = an animal that that naturally preys on others

Spotlight on the Genes

Have you ever had that moment when you go, "Aha!" Well, that was me a few minutes ago when I was reading the third chapter "Immortal Coils" of The Selfish Gene. In my earlier blog post, I have asked a few questions that came to my mind while reading the second chapter. One of these questions was "Why is the title of the book The Selfish Gene?" The third chapter pretty much gives you a straight forward answer.

No, I was completely off-track when thinking that the genes were selfish due to their "personality." It has nothing to do with characteristic traits. "The gene is a basic unit of selfishness" (pg 36). When we think about evolution and its process, we normally think about the organisms. They're the ones going through the process; they're the ones evolving into even more complex organisms. What Dawkins is trying to tell us here is that that is NOT the case. It's the genes. Genes are the ones going through all the different survival of competitions between different genes. It's the gene-centered view of evolution where all the genetic material, natural selection, and evolution are considered from the perspective of the genes.

Vocabularies that I did not know in this chapter:

1. cistron = a section of a DNA (or RNA) molecule that codes for specific polypeptide in protein synthesis
2. flotilla = a fleet of ships or boats
3. troupe = a group of dancers, actors, or other entertainers who tour to different venues
4. aggregation = collection; several things grouped together or considered as a whole
5. denizen = an inhabitant or occupant of a particular place
6. altruism = practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others

Exactly what it's NOT suppose to mean...

Questions on The Replicators

Many people who saw me holding this book The Selfish Genes told me that it was the one of the best works they have ever read. Excited to read it, I started off with the second chapter The Replicators in class. In all honesty, I was disappointed. I felt like I was reading a biology textbook instead and probably didn’t understand half of the things Dawkins was trying to explain to us. However, here is a short summary of what I understood from this chapter:

Dawkins starts off with “In the beginning was simplicity” (pg 12). He starts explaining about the emergence of life and the evolutionary stages that occurred afterwards. I’m no biologist and although you don’t have to be a biologist to understand his work, I didn’t understand any of the first part he said until I got to the “primeval soup” part. The only thing I know is that he 100% supports Darwin’s theory of evolution. The primeval soup, which he didn’t explain too well so I had to look it up on Wikipedia later, is some type of ocean that contains a lot of chemicals or molecules (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc). So in other words, life started from a chemical reaction that occurred inside that ocean. There were several chemical reactions, which soon left from one simple molecule to a very complex one. What I grasped from this was that there was a sudden transition from a non-life (or inorganic substance) to an actual living thing. Is this even possible? Obviously, one of those molecules was the DNA – also known as the Replicator. The name pretty much says it all. Replicators have an ability to produce copies of themselves; therefore, they soon started dominating the primeval soup because they start combining with other molecules. How did these replicating molecules lead to the creation of complex life? Well, they didn’t just stay as molecular kings but steadily became very complex through evolution. It was able to build bodies for protection – a wall of protein around itself. These bodies are what he calls “survival machines” in which when the replicator grew more complex, so did their survival machines. I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but we, humans, happen to be these survival machines.

This chapter left me with numerous questions that I probably need clarification on:

1)   Why exactly is the title of this book called “The Selfish Gene?” Is he claiming that genes are selfish?

2)   Do these primitive molecules exist today? Where are they now?

3)   I don’t understand if this primeval soup/ocean thing is a theory of Dawkins or it’s actually a fact in science, but if it was realm then…when did the ocean stop brewing up all these possible chemical reactions? When did this ocean go away? Clearly, looking at our world right now, such ocean doesn’t exist anymore.

4)   If believing what Dawkins said, “there is a tendency towards stability” – then why exactly is there such a variety of survival machines today? If it was so stable, then why didn’t one stable form occur and quickly become the norm?

A depiction of the primeval soup