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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: The Selfish Egg The Selfish Egg In writing his popular book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins made several important mistakes which, in view of the attention which his book has drawn, deserve to be corrected. To begin, Dawkins' book is based on one Big Idea which, in only slightly different form, has been around for years, and yet Dawkins did not credit its author -- a sin which may possibly be mitigated by the fact -- if it is a fact -- that he did not recognize he was using someone else's work. The Big Idea in question is the one usually expressed as 'The chicken is just the egg's way of making another egg,' an idea which in Dawkins' variant is, 'An animal is just the genes' way of making other genes.' This is an amusing idea, not merely because it is so different from the way we usually think, but because it catches us off-guard by attributing purpose to something we normally think of as purposeless. But purpose is not an idea of scientific provenance, or at least not according to the most exacting school of science, mechanism. For the mechanist -- more often called behaviorist -- the only allowable data are inputs and outputs, which means that speculation about things such as 'consciousness', 'purpose', 'love', 'fear' and other mental faculties which we are accustomed to speaking of in daily life are not admissible to the behaviorists' domain. Thus the behaviorists do not speak of a man's being in love with his wife -- they only speak of such behaviors as his kissing her, or staying with her, or having sex with her, or bringing her gifts. Indeed, it is amusing to recall one of the most famous examples of behaviorist perspective, described in the paper "On Being Sane in Insane Places", in which two scientists recalled their experiences as inmates in a mental institution, to which they had been admitted anonymously, for the purpose of seeing it 'from the ground up'. In this paper one of the authors describes how a certain nurse noticed his note-taking, which he was doing for the purpose of eventually writing up his experiences, and who described the author in one of her reports as a man much given to 'writing behavior'. However, our purpose here is not to make fun of the behaviorists, who have a good point even if it is lost on most people -- a point which, I might add, handily eliminates such obvious nonsense as speaking of a falling apple as 'wanting' to drop to the earth. The point is that Dawkins, the compleat mechanist, has violated a major principle of his faith by imputing purpose to the genes. Now I could be wrong about Dawkins' purpose (!) in the sense that he may have intended his talk of the 'purpose' of genes as merely a way of speaking in the common idiom; but if he had done so, then it seems he would have effectively pulled the rug out from under his own book, since its very title reeks of purpose. But for all that, removing the talk of purpose from discussion of chickens and eggs, or animals and genes, has an enlightening effect. In particular, once we stop talking about purpose, we are then free to apply the more general principle of systems theory which holds that all closed systems 'seek equilibrium', ie, move from a less stable to a more stable configuration. This is easy to understand intuitively: If a system S has possible states a, b, c, ... z, and if one of them, say x, is such that, if S enters x then S will not leave x, then x is an equilibrium for S, and S will eventually achieve equilibrium. As a real-world example, Jack has many potential states, but if the Giant kills Jack, then Jack has reached equilibrium. With the above thoughts in mind, we see that the confusion over the chicken-egg example is that attribution of purpose is arbitrary, and that the confusion arises because of our intuitive desire to attribute purpose to the chicken -- a dubious notion anyway. Accordingly, once we abandon 'purpose-talk', we are free to talk about equilibrium-seeking in the chicken-egg and in the animal-gene systems. (These are not closed systems, but they are -- ultimately -- a part of a closed system -- the universe.) We then see that equilibrium-seeking can be very complex, and that the simplicity of our example of equilibrium-seeking belies this fact. But the important thing is that we are now ahead of the game because we understand that what we are seeing is not exercise of 'purpose' or its philosophical variants such as 'elan vital', but rather a type of equilibrium-seeking in which the rules are usually complex. But if taking a mechanistic/behavioristic standpoint is enlightening, I do not mean to say -- as some extremist behaviorists would -- that we must talk only of 'writing behavior' and other mechanistic type concepts, when our language is steeped in the notions of human emotions, and particularly purpose. Instead, it is perfectly possible to 'work in' these notions in a scientifically-respectable way by recognizing that talking of purpose and the like -- ie, 'purpose-talk' -- is a kind of substitute language for the more exact and yet more cumbersome behaviorist language. In a sense, behaviorist language can be compared to computer machine language, while purpose-talk can be compared with higher level languages such as Fortran and COBOL which the programmer uses to create machine language programs. An even better analogy, however, is to think of behaviorist language as language which describes the computer's exact molecular structure and how it changes from one moment to the next, while purpose-talk describes computer operations in the higher level of the operations of disc drives, chips, monitors, keyboards and the like. Or even better, one may think of purpose-talk in terms of what the programmer intends when he uses his program, and what the intentions were of the people who created the machine. But in any event, both behavior-talk and purpose-talk have their places, and whether one decides to use one or the other is purely a matter of one's purposes (!) and convenience, and not something which is written in stone, philosophers' or otherwise. In closing, I think it is worthwhile to recall one of cyberneticist W Ross Ashby's remarks, to the effect that, for any closed system, we may arbitrarily divide it into two parts, one of which may be called 'organism' and the other 'environment'; and that given any such division, we will observe that the 'organism' 'adapts to' (ie, tends toward equilibrium with) its 'environment'. When we look at things this way, then, we see the chicken's act of producing an egg to be an adaptation to its environment, but with a name change, we also see the egg 'adapting' to its environment by producing a chicken. Similarly, if we wish to expand our horizons, we can view the chicken-egg system (or the animal-gene system) as an adaptation to a larger system in which it is embedded. That is, if that is our purpose.
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