Code Complete - 2 times: clearly it's a good book.
The selfish gene - 2 times - that's not programming wise, but it's an awesome book to get your thoughts rolling.
I've read the Selfish Gene and loved it, but I had NO idea that meme originated from that book. I must have skimmed that paragraph. Thank you for this!
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is the best book I've read in a while. It's like Guns, Germs and Steel but better argued and far greater in scope.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was a great read too. A bit of a slog in some places but otherwise brilliant and insightful.
The Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins. Not crazy to grasp, but figuring out how nature works is mind blowing. Of all the books I have gifted to people, this one tops the list.
I was please to see that the list contains the two science books I recommend to everyone.
The Elegant Universe (1999) Brian Greene
The Selfish Gene (1976) Richard Dawkins
Reading The Selfish Gene convinced me to give up on the ideal of arranged marriage (which I was instilled with from birth), and marriage in general.
The Selfish Gene is a great and insightful book that I would recommend.
The problem arises with those people who read
The Selfish Gene and assume they now understand all there is to know about how evolution works.
I'm sure you're not one of them, but nevertheless they are quite common, well-educated and intelligent though they often are.
As suggested in the essay those are Dawkins' words paraphrased. If you haven't already, I recommend reading The Selfish Gene. It's awesome.
Good article, reminded me the book "the selfish gene".
"The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. This was a result of asking my Twitter friends to decide between this and Art of War for me, and this won overwhelmingly. It's been a great read so far, and I'm really looking forward to learning more about how evolution and computer science can mix.
The Selfish Gene was probably the most important book I ever read. It fundamentally changed my understanding of the world.
Yeah. Surprising also since Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene about altruism 40+ years ago.
Good stuff. Just finished Dawkins' new book: The Greatest Show on Earth - should be introductory biology reading for high school students.
However, still prefer his The Selfish Gene for raising my consciousness the most.
If you haven't read it, I completely recommend The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. Fascinating view of intra-species evolutionary drives.
Not according to modern understandings of gene theory. The Selfish Gene by Dawkins is perhaps the seminal work on this topic for the popular audience.
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It describes what science believes life to be, and it can be very upsetting. Understanding it, however, made me a more confident and happier person than I was before.
Having read "
The Selfish Gene" I wasn't surprised.
This study conclusion fits pretty well within the general theme of the book.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it!
The Selfish Gene and
Guns, Germs, and Steel are pop science, not "serious non-fiction tomes".
As for books not working, that's absurd. 1) Some books work better than others. 2) To a large extent, you get more out of books the more you put into them.
It's entirely speculative but doesn't the model Richard Dawkins explains for the laymen in The Selfish Gene suggest something that would work - a drive to reproduce at the lowest level resulting in some incredible things happening over a long enough period of time.
"The Selfish Gene" was the book that finally made this click for me.
I'd suggest you first read Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran. He explores some pretty amazing quirks about the human brain.
Then, if you're still interested, read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's a pretty good overview of biological principles and true evolution.
If you liked "
The Selfish Gene" you might also consider reading Kevin Davies'
Cracking the Genome. The book describes the race to sequencing the full human genome and the implications of that research. Fascinating.
Made me wish I had taken biology...
The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
tldr; our bodies are just a side effect of the gene's greater plan
:-) Wow. This is hysterical and wildly inaccurate. Dawkins has numerous academic papers. 'The Selfish Gene' (which was praised by W D Hamilton--one the great biologists of our times) is a great introduction to genetics, a wonderful and proper science.
> I own
The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.
Okay, you've just crossed the pompous ahole threshold. Good day to you, sir.
I thought this interactive piece on the principles of game theory and strategy evolution in populations might be interesting to some. Reminded me of the more detailed explanations that Dawkins gave in The Selfish Gene and/or The Extended Phenotype (can't recall which one).
It's not false at all. Origin of Species was published in 1859. The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. So even if everyone immediately accepted Dawkins' synthesis upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of biologists' opinions over the years.
But people ARE naturally and totally individualistic. Even when they cooperate, they do it for their own individual interest. It's due to the nature of our evolution.
Read "The Selfish Gene".
I'd recommend The selfish gene , quite interesting book, it gave me a new perspective in how the evolution and life works.
I also recommend "Evolutionary Psychology: A Critical Introduction" which echoes many of the themes in "The Selfish Gene" from a different perspective.
+1 The Blind Watchmaker, although I'd argue The Selfish Gene is a better introduction to the field. The Blind Watchmaker is somewhat more focussed on argument evolution versus creationism. Still, awesome stuff.
I discussed memes in the 90s, but have never read Dawkin's book.
I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.
Dawkins' book
The Selfish Gene is the most fitting way of framing this conundrum.
Spending time and energy raising one's children isn't selfish of the parent as an individual. But it's selfish from the view of their genes.
> However, a different question is: How did this process get started? That's the question this article is addressing.
I consider this issue pretty much answered by Chapter 2 of the Selfish Gene, "the replicators". Link: http://www.evolbiol.ru/gene/index_2en.html#02
That's well known if you ever took evolutionary biology course, or game theory course.
Even popular books like Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" talk in some detail about it, and this 25 hour video course is also a must see for pretty much everyone:
http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
This is the original meaning given by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. The word ‘meme’ is more than a repeated fact – first, it doesn’t have to be a fact, and second, it suggests that our culture is the result of evolution in an environment where memes are selected for reproductive fitness (‘virality’).
I didn't read The Selfish Gene, the book that coined the term "meme", but I heard that it mostly explores that analogy, for a much broader definition of meme.
The Selfish Gene has been the most influential book on my life. Especially when Dawkins makes the point about pre-darwininan philosophy needing rethinking. His point being that natural selection/evolution is such a profound notion that it should be embedded into the underpinnings of philosophy itself.
That paper is awesome. I would rank it with Dawkin's The Selfish Gene as a transcendent perspective changer--insight through the written word that comes along a few times in a lifetime.
I can suggest "The Selfish Gene". It is about evolutionary biology, not molecular biology. I'm not really sure what you're looking for.
Except it absolutely does:
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly
programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene.
It didn't until I read this, now I'm absurdly interested and
The Selfish Gene has been ordered.
Any more modern books of note?
Since most ants are unable to reproduce, I like to think of the entire colony as the organism.
If you're interested in how evolution works, check out The Selfish Gene.
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins;
Red Queen, Matt Ridley;
Sperm Wars, Robin Baker;
Read in that order, the books explain much of what is going on in our society and lives. This has enabled me to to analyse my own, and others, actions and motives.
The selfish gene is one of the few books if you read it with an enquiring mind it will change you forever. I first read it 30 years ago now (amazing how time flies) and it still affects the way I see the world.
> Can you please explain how you jump to an understanding
Please read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Unlike his recent work, that one is really good.
>and in fact the word meme either did not exist or, if it did, it was certainly not in widespread use.
The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in 1976. The internet got the term from the book.
It seems you haven't read Mr. Dawkins yet.
Start with "The Selfish Gene", his best IMO.
Have fun!
Yes, but have you read "The Selfish Gene"? If not, you need to do that first.
"The Selfish Gene" was also a great discovery for me. I guess that coming from a CS background it was a big revelation to understand the biology in such a different perspective. Really worth reading.
Thanks. If I remember rightly this is also touched on in the Selfish Gene, though it's been over a decade since I read that.
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins
Freedom from the Known - Jiddu
For decades I've been plagued by 'what is one supposed to do in life' question, I've been restless for years.
These two books gave me atleast a logical framework to understand my frustrations.
Appreciate the upvote, but...
> Natural selection works on ecosystems too
No, it doesn't. Ecosystems don't reproduce. Natural selection works on genes (and memes). See Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene."
Our brains are much larger than apes' (IIRC about 4x), but survival advantage based on memes could well have provided the gradient. BTW yes, I have read The Selfish Gene, where Dawkins coined the term and concept.
evolution of symbiosis between two species and the evolutionary arms-race
between host-parasites are two of the many intriguing topics of evolutionary biology that never fails to amaze me. Highly recommend reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I've recently finished reading it, it's fascinating.
I completely agree.
The Selfish Gene did more to change my view of the world than any other book I've ever read. Not in a religious sense, as many others cite, but rather it laid the foundation for a deeper understanding of people, culture, violent behavior, herd mentality, etc.
It's a masterpiece.
The Selfish Gene is a great book but human behavior is hardly its main topic.
If I follow you, this is basically the notion of a "replicator" that Dawkins talked about at length (and maybe coined?) - if you haven't read The Selfish Gene, I recommend checking it out.
I would recommend reading the selfish gene and other works by Dawkins if you are interested in theories on the functional basis of mutations in the universe.
According to Wikipedia :
The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[12]
Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book titled The Selfish Gene. It was added to the dictionary by Merriam-Webster in 1998.
Richard Dawkins didn't pioneer that idea, it was Robert Axelrod. The seminal book about the topic is Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation(Dawkins was a prominent advocate of Axelrod's work, though. And "The Selfish Gene" is definitely a great read in its own right.)
I vaguely remebering reading (I think it was in The Selfish Gene) that we are more closely related to salmon than salmon are to sharks.
"The Selfish Gene" was a revelation to me. I read it during college, as a break from my math, CS and physics classes. It felt like having an evolutionary biology course on the side.
There is no such thing as altruism, at the species level. It's all selfishness (of the genes) all the way down. Read Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" to better understand human behaviour as shaped by millions of years of evolutionary forces.
> The title is an homage to Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book
The Selfish Gene.
Another instance of techies being led astray by flimsy, reactionary pseudo-science.
> I'd prefer things not directly technical though not necessarily fiction.
Sounds exactly like me. I strongly suggest:
1. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
2. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
...or if you need a little inspiration...
3. Founders at Work
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. The gene is the unit of replication, and this affects every process in this universe.
This book changed my entire outlook on the world.
Added to this list are:
Singularity is Near and
The Selfish Gene
The genes benefit. The individual doesn't really. Dawkins wrote a book about it: 'The Selfish Gene'.
By the time I read "The Selfish Gene" I didn't really see anything that enlightening in it. "The Extended Phenotype" is the one that I found most enlightening.
For a minute I thought this was about genetics (I'm listening "
The Selfish Gene"[1] audiobook).
[1] http://a.co/i5iN6Jm
Evolution, at its core, strives for only one thing: propagation of the species.No, actually. The one thing it strives for is propagation of the genes, not the species. Read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It will make things clearer.
Try reading The Selfish Gene. Altruism is not always how it seems.
The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene. I know they are a bit dated by now, but when I read them they broadened my horizons and encouraged to review my religious standpoint from a scientific perspective.
For me it was a sense of obligation which was brought home after reading this in the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Jerry Seinfeld then cemented my fate with "Don't break the chain".
The Selfish Gene is one of those books that has an uncanny ability to provoke truly awful criticism, both from people who should know better and people who quite evidently never will. To be fair to him, David Dobbs is merely in the former category.
Yeah, we’ve read The Selfish Gene, too.
The only book anyone, human or alien, really needs to read is -
"On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection"
by Charles Darwin, 1859.
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, 1974 is a good appendum there as well but once mastering "Origin" one really has the basics one needs.
The term 'meme' was coined in the 70s and means an idea that spreads from one person to another. It comes from Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene; the idea is that memes are subject to selection just like genes.
Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote the Selfish Gene. He spend some time talking about that the genes weren't in fact selfish it was just that they acted as if they were.
Species survival? Gene reproduction you mean. The organism is simply a way for the gene to propagate itself.
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
For anyone unaware, "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976.
Yeah it's like Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene. It's not that the genes are in fact selfish but rather that they act as if they are selfish.
A friend of mine found this to be true for Sun Tzu's
The Art of War.
I found something akin, not so much "interactions" as in understanding the "why" about many human things, in reading Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
Maybe you tried it when it was down?
I put "The Selfish Gene" and "The Demon-Haunted World" and I got "Women, Race and Class" by Angela Davis and "The Feynman Lectures".
At least for me, it wasn't so much about computers or computer science, as it was the first time I really deeply considered what consciousness is. It's actually the book, along with The Selfish Gene that made me dismiss the necessity of any kind of 'soul', fresh out of Catholic School.
I agree absolutely it is more likely. And I read The Selfish Gene. But how could you disprove that theory? it is sort of too obviously true, if you see what I mean. Which is why I brought up the homosexuality counterexample. So I don't think it should be taken as undeniable, even though it is plausible.
The classic work on this topic is "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, and its more technical sibling, "The Extended Phenotype."
It's anecdotal at best, "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein and Dawkin's "
The Selfish Gene", based on quotes from Torvalds.
Too bad, a real list from Torvalds could have been interesting.
I had the same problem when I read The Selfish Gene, it was littered with weird line breaks, OCR errors and general layout strangeness. So much so that I went through it myself and fixed most of it because it annoyed me too much.
Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene.
Read the Blind Watchmaker and then The Selfish Gene. These books should help you understand the science behind life's existence.(For the uninitiated)
> Which is the whole point of "
The Selfish Gene".
It's one of my favourite books, but I wonder if it had much of a lasting influence academically. It seems this article doesn't even touch upon the selfish gene viewpoint.
Read "
The Selfish Gene", or some other book that go over this research. That book is a good choice, it is probably one of the best popular science books you will read in your life.
(The research is well corroborated, except by some Marxist biologists. :-) )
You can start by checking this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
This also recapitulates much of what is theorized in "The Selfish Gene" (Richard Dawkins, 1976). So much so it's a bit surprising that the article doesn't make a single reference to that work.
If this topic interests you, I recommend reading "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie
The Game - Neil Strauss
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
... among others.
The Selfish Gene came out in the mid 1970s and was a big bestseller (probably in the millions of copies sold by now). Sure, a few other people adopted the term, but it was not in wide use. I would guess most of the people who talked about “memes” in the 90s had directly read Dawkins’s book.
> Yeah it's like when Dawking wrote
the Selfish Gene.
Dawkins.
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
If you found this interesting but don't want to dive into reading Darwin's works (as the author seems to imply we should) I highly recommend Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". I haven't read "On the Origin of Species" but I'd bet "The Selfish Gene" will probably be a more efficacious read for most people
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Fountainhead
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Great article!
Here's a question: What other books that were written for a popular audience (or that achieved a largely popular audience) also served as works that affected science itself? E.g. the article talks about The Selfish Gene being both a pop-sci book, but also a book that profoundly changed the field of Evolution.
Are there other good examples?
The entire article seems to be a longer version of the discussion of the same issue in the book for non scientists, The Selfish Gene, except for the discussion about the genetic formula/hypothesis used to explain the social insects being unprovable or may be even tautological.
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) actually explores the idea that organisms began as DNA replicating 'machines'.
"From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior."
I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, back when he was more young and idealistic. It changed my relationships with people. Recently reading Sapiens I recognised the same qualities in the writing.
Thanks for the additional insight, I learned about this type of strategy in "The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins. Although, I personally don't think that the analogy alone can describe an incredibly complex structure such as the global society.
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Richard Dawkins constantly reiterates this point in his book The Selfish Gene, constantly reminding us that genes aren't actually "selfish" and don't actually have wants, but these anthropomorphisms are useful shortcuts for communicating the subject-matter.
"Letters from a Stoic" by Seneca
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"Deep Work" by Cal Newport
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
*
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins ;
* Human, too human, by Frederick Nietzsche ;
* The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris ;
* La Femme est le propre de l'homme, by Rolf Schappi ;
* Biologie de la mort, by Frederik Revah ;
* The Manipulated Man, by Esther Vilar ;
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (Evolution)
The Red Queen - Matt Ridley (Sex and evolution)
Sperm Wars - Robin Baker (Sex as the driving force in society)
The books, if red in that order, provide a total picture of evolution in our society and the driving forces.
SICP and The Selfish Gene (R. Dawkins).
Have you read The Selfish Gene, particularly the last chapter, which introduces the concept of a meme? It's good readin', and in exactly the same vein.
The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
Non-fiction
- 'The Selfish Gene' - Richard Dawkins
Grokking the concept changed the way I thought about life forever.
- 'Quantum Reality' - Nick Herbert
One of the best introductory level books on quantum physics mysteries. No nonsense.
- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
The book that introduced me to Kant, Hume and philosophy of science. Just for that, I'm forever indebted to it.
Some favorite fiction books -
- Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Loved 'Snowcrash' too.
- 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' - Robert Heinlein
- Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, Somerset Maugham
Recombination occurs very time a new sex cell is produced during the crossing over event, Dawkins dispels the random mutation as the only means of genetic shift very early in his book "The Selfish Gene" as the crossing over process can split chromosomes mid-gene for longer, more complex DNA sequences.
I haven't read The Selfish Gene, but from what I've heard it tells the exact opposite: That every gene's goal is to propagate, for which task it merely employs the living organism.
Much agreed. Thinking of a second favourite is much less certain. Possibly 'The Selfish Gene' for me.
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" - Lewis Carroll
"Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" - Lewis Carroll
"Dracula" - Bram Stoker
"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelly
"On Education" - Bertrand Russell
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" - Douglas Adams
"Animal Farm" - George Orwell
"1984" - George Orwell
"Lord of The Flies" - William Golding
"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley
"Gulliver's Travels" - Jonathan Swift
"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkings. (
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)
The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, old but definitely worth the read. Changes the way you look at things.
No it isn't, you should read
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins. There's a chapter explaining that this is a myth with little grounds in reality.
There's a lot of backstabbing and competition that goes on within individual hives of the social insects.
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit
I read this about the same time I read the Selfish Gene, had a similar effect. It's one of the few philosophy books that I still think about today.
I have, I'm interested in memes as Dawkins defined them then. I've also read many translations of Nag Hamadi scrolls, so your example sparked my curiosity. Perhaps I need to re-read
The Selfish Gene, it's been more than a decade now.
Edit: with reflection I think I understand what you were getting at, that the memes contained in the Nag Hamadi corpus had been successfully suppressed by their memetic cousins which for whatever reason came to be the dominant 'version' of that information, until an accident of history reintroduced the different versions that had been all but extincted in the memepool.
My two cents:
The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins - makes you look at living beings as software, and at the world as an immense optimization algorithm.
Permutation City by Greg Egan - the perfectly rational idea that the mind is computable is rife with apparently unsolvable paradoxes.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Maths, logic, patterns, artificial intelligence, beauty, art and self-referentiality.
I'm reading a couple books at the moment.
Valley of Genius[1] is a history of silicon valley, but told via excerpts and quotes from influential members of the SV community. It's quite a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it. I'm in my early thirties, so this book really helps to provide context for when people say we're just rebuilding things that have been done before. Learning about what was going on at Xerox with Alan Kay is just incredible.
The other book I'm reading is the Selfish Gene[1], by Richard Dawkins. I've read this book 3-4 times already, so at this point I read it for almost philosophical reasons. It's a wonderful explanation of evolution and micro-biology. I'm sure there are more up-to-date texts, but Dawkins is a superb writer.
[1] Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
[2] The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
I also recommend Dawkins' follow-up book, "The Extended Phenotype." Dawkins' most popular writing may be on atheism and the critique of religion, but I think his greatest contributions were really found in this book plus The Selfish Gene. Though as a caveat, "The Extended Phenotype" requires some more technical sophistication in evolutionary biology than Selfish Gene.
"Economics in one Lesson" by H. Hazlitt (conveys the same as "Atlas shrugged" in much much less pages)
"The Selfish Gene" (R. Dawkins)
"Dune" (F. Herbert)
"Walden II" (B. F. Skinner)
Not evolution, but I would recommend King Solomon's Ring, written by the Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz in 1949. (Nominations: Best science book ever). A wonderful bookv in the English translation, so I would guess the French translation would be good too.
Also anything of Oliver Sacks' popular books: humorous, interesting, and insightful.
For evolution, I personally still enjoy reading The Selfish Gene (and The Extended Phenotype), but maybe you should read it first (because although it is superbly written, many people would not find it stimulating).
Dawkins never wrote a book on memes. He wrote a book on evolution at the genetic level,
The Selfish Gene. In it, he drew a comparison to genes that replicate themselves using organisms as a vehicle to ideas that replicate themselves using humans as a vehicle.
It was a throw-away comparison, not the point of the book. But, the term "meme" is a good meme, and it caught on.
When you respond to the guys who follow nasty strategies with niceness, you are literally rewarding the bad behaviors. If being cooperative wouldn't get much differences than being exploitative, then the nice guys will vanish and only the bad guys will remain. A reciprocal strategy is necessary and beneficial long-term for the world IMO.
The well-known book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has an interesting chapter titled Nice Guys Finish First giving a good illustration relevant to this idea.
"Human Evolution" by Robin Dunbar (
http://www.amazon.com/A-Pelican-Introduction-Human-Evolution...)
The book is a mind-boggling journey through our own evolutionary history and delivers surprising and sometimes funny insights on many aspects of our behavior as modern humans (e.g. it attempts to explain the origins of religion, dancing and music). The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you understand in detail which processes have transformed us from primates to modern humans. Truly fascinating, beautiful stuff.
Most people probably know Dunbar from "Dunbar's number", which relates the relative brain size of animals to the number of individuals with which they live together (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number). This often (mis-)cited number is but one example of Dunbar's ingenious, math-driven approach to many problems in biology and evolution.
To maximize mind-blowing capacity, combine Dunbar with Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Until_Yesterday), which explains how our ancestors and many traditional tribes lived (and sometimes still live), and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene), which explains many aspects of life and social organization using mathematics and evolution theory.
For me, this stuff is more mysterious, thrilling and captivating than any fiction book I've ever read.
>>"failure" and "success" are notions relative to goal achievement, and biology doesn't have goals - it's a mechanistic process.
Of course biology has goals. Every living organism's goal is to propagate its genes to the next generation. For details on this, read The Selfish Gene.
Absolutely. I had like one page in my textbook dedicated to evolution, so when I read
The Selfish Gene and everything clicked and it all made sense, it was the sort of 'eureka' moment I'd always heard about.
Yet sadly 90% of the population still misunderstand/poorly understand evolution by natural selection. They seem to think it's progressive, or some mysterious force of nature that produces "better" animals over time.
I like Dawkins. I find his voiced thoughts intelligent, interesting and precise.
Most importantly, it sounds like this book will provide a good summation of Evolution. Well thought out books that summarize an area of knowledge make it easier for me to create/solidify my own framework within that area. Which it turn makes it easier to branch further out without getting completely overwhelmed (a little bit is fine!)
I'm definitely looking forward to this. Hopefully I'll be done with his "The Selfish Gene" by the point this comes out.
> "We should view genes, not organisms, as the fundamental unit of propagation. They optimize for their own survival, not necessarily the organisms." --- this is an insight.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book on just that. "The Selfish Gene" (~1970). However, recent epigenetics discounts just the gene as the sole 'unit' of propogation.
Unfortunately, by releasing the God Delusion, he engaged creationists as equals in an intellectual debate. He would have been better served by supporting research on the evolutionary psychology of religion, while staying very far away from debating creationists, which has sadly become a hobby of his.
That being said, I have yet to read a book which so elegantly describes evolution as The Selfish Gene. This includes Darwin's own works. It is an absolute masterpiece, and was the foundation of my lifelong passion for biology. I consider Dawkins the most influential man in my life. That is why it hurts me to see him behave in such a counter-productive manner.
That's a misunderstanding of the thesis. Because humans tend to have trouble surviving completely alone, our nature is to privilege others and the group in many circumstances, over our individual wellbeing. Sacrifice - of comfort, health, even life - in order to secure the survival of our children and tribe is common because it is often so much more effective at allowing for the perpetuation of a given line than purely individualistic behavior. That's what's so profound about the concept presented in "The Selfish Gene": the meta-impulse to preserve one's genes often overrides the meta-impulse to preserve one's own life.
"
The Selfish Gene is a popular text ... among a certain subculture but which isn't mainstream as far as I can tell."
"broad academic or even intellectual credibility"
I see what you did there.
I don't see a problem with memetics being non-mainstream in the way it's described here. Sure. If you want a job doing something called _memetics_. If you want to gain clout and respectability among your peers for illuminating some dark corner of the worlds problems with your writing, memetics is not going to impress anyone.
I say, More ideas the better!
I'm somewhat surprised that "Free" as a concept gets people so hot under the collar.
Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their own creation.
I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much time online.
I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get worked up about.
Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":
"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it."
I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without direct payment or advertisment.
Dawkins mentions this, or maybe indirectly acknowledges it, in
The Selfish Gene. Organisms that can pass their ability to adapt on to fast acting nervous centers or even better: large brains, eventually gain a huge advantage.
The Great Filter on the other hand, relies on assuming
the steps from evolved intelligence (now) to solar system colonization/FTL travel are not only possible, but just a matter of a few millennia or so. Which is a huge assumption.
My top books:
- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan - It gave me the tools required to cut through bullshit and helped me free myself from the shackles of a religious upbringing
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Gave me the courage to look at things differently when everyone thinks we know it all
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - It made me question what I was doing professionally and I now have a list of questions to answer whenever I am in a startup to help guide me
- Compersion by Hypatia From Space - It help remove limits to how I can love and care for the people that are important to me.
It's been a while since I read the The God Delusion but I'm pretty sure he criticized Islam in it. Since then he veered into social media territory, delivering cringe-worthy 'burns' and 'hot-takes' on all sorts of clickbait news items. It's hard for me to reconcile that the same man who wrote The Selfish Gene, which I love, is the guy ranting on Twitter like a drunk FB grandpa.
The Selfish Gene. Picturing myself purely as a machine for propagating my genes was quite the perspective shift.
+1 for Man’s Search For Meaning.
Lord of the Flies. Amazing that this is assigned reading in middle school (or high school).
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Really drove home the importance of paying attention to language and framing.
Moby Dick. I’m amazed at myself for reading this on my own in high school. There’s something about that era of sea travel that speaks to my soul.
6 Pillars Of Self-Esteem. This was a HN recommendation. I’ve been doing the sentence completion exercises for about 6 months, and it’s been astounding to palpably feel my self-awareness increase.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Discusses the underlying group dynamics that influence the progress of science.
A Fire Upon The Deep. Just an amazing work of sci-fi exploring the internal logic of radically different forms of intelligence.
The Sane Society. It’s liberating to reflect on some of the crazy things that capitalism pressures us to do.
The Power Of Now. I think I might have some more issues if I re-read it, but it undoubtedly had a huge impact on me and made me introspect deeply and finally “get” meditation.
There are several birds and monkeys that try to give their children/eggs away.The bird places their eggs in another nest and then are feed by the host of that nest. I think that is an evolutionary advantage, the genes survive and the fathers have more time to feed themselves and have more eggs.
As humans we kind of do a similar thing, kindergartens, schools(other people that we don't know) rise our children and spend more time with them than us as parents.
As many times and many people in HN, I'll recommend this book: The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
I have my own idea of why music is so important to our species.
It started out as a programming bug ("auditory cheesecake"): certain arrangements of sound hijack the brain's ability to recognize patterns and emotions in pitch of voice, creating an emotional response in the listener. The best musicians are those who are best at manipulating their listeners' emotions in this way. It's not hard to see how this made them more successful reproducers early on.
At this point people could have evolved to be better at resisting this sort of manipulation; however, this proved to be too high an evolutionary hurdle to overcome. Instead, the people who were most susceptible to this manipulation actually gained an advantage -- Since they were most likely to mate with musicians, their offspring were most likely to become the best musicians in the next generation!
Thus, a positive feedback loop was created where successive generations became more musically-talented and more susceptible to the effects of music.
If you find this hypothesis interesting, I highly suggest Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I think he calls this general phenomenon the "sexy male" hypothesis.
* The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating.
* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
*
The Selfish Gene - our bodies are vessels for DNA as they travel through time. Also colony insects and birds are fascinating.
* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
Read
The Selfish Gene and
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2008/06/12/...There is doubt that a set of behaviors which is so prevalent in the population is just an accident and a disease. Evolutionary pressures exist to optimize gene expression ratios in a population. Put differently, when a certain gene becomes rare in a population individuals with that gene have a significant advantage in life and reproduce more – when the same gene becomes over prevalent individuals with that gene have a significant disadvantage and reproduce less. There are traits which have pressure to be a certain proportion of a population.
ADHD or whatever else you may call it could very well be that. Ancient societies which had a small proportion of a certain kind of person thrived because their different behavior made them successful. It doesn't have to be a disease to not fit in to a certain society.
Another reason why sexual reproduction is efficient is that it enables division of labour.
A mother needs to provide a complete eco-system (uterus) for the baby to live and grow which affects even the hormonal system.
A man doesn't need this, so he can use this energy or "program space" in his genome for other things.
It's one of Dawkins theses in his superb book "The selfish gene" [1] where he basically reduces evolution to game theory (without explicity saying so).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
>>It is pretty amazing how complicated our bodies are, but I think the expiration date is there to prevent overpopulation - if our ancestors didn't die, the planet would be overpopulated
That is an argument based on group evolution, largely disproved (some unusual edge cases might exist).
I'd recommend reading "The Selfish Gene", it is an incredibly fun journey in beautiful English (Disclaimer: I'm a non-native English speaker.) It will probably change your world view.
"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of
itself" ( Richard Dawkins -
The Selfish Gene )
Is consciousness different from self-awareness?
Because we're already using an experimental protocol for testing self-awareness in animals.
I read Origin of Species before
The Selfish Gene and I enjoyed it a lot. I actually knew enough about evolution to follow all arguments easily. This is not surprising given that Darwin tried to introduce the idea to an audience that was largely alien to the concept.
I think what I liked most about the book is the (clearly labeled) speculations. He was already anticipating a lot.
> Picture some serious non-fiction tomes.
The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel
Serious non-fiction tomes? I mean, I guess if you regard Harlequin romance as difficult novels. Okay, I'll stop giggling long enough to skim the rest.
Reading the rest, the core complaint seems to be that most people cannot effectively read and most people cannot effectively write. Which is true.
Because your brother shares around 50% of your genes. Helping your brother reproduce therefore helps to propagate some of your genes.
The principle behind this is that evolution operates at the level of genes, rather than individuals. I recommend Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a fuller explanation.
>
This genetic reductionism is like refusing to think or talk about computer software as anything but 1s and 0sDawkin's book is called "The Selfish Gene". It is not called "Selfish Adenine" or "Selfish exon".
Your analogy is interesting. Are 'genes' for buffer overflows easily found via binary searches? Would that be a defective gene? Is input sanitisation an example of a beneficial gene being transmitted, via sex of open source and responsible diclosure?
Some while ago I reread Richard Dawkins's The Extended Phenotype, which he has referred to as his favorite work. You could say it's the logical follow up on The Selfish Gene, quite technical and expert-oriented, but Dawkins is such a talented and lucid writer that anyone with enough intellectual thirst can follow the arguments. I regard it a piece of philosophy as much as a textbook about evolution.
The Selfish Gene by Dawkins was very influential on me.
Another was Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell.
I'd also cite The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand as having influenced me, although I read it when I was older and found that it mostly reinforced ideas that I was already sympathetic towards. Similar situation with Atlas Shrugged, also by Rand.
I could probably also call out The Soul of a New Machine by Kidder, as being a primary influence that pushed me in the direction of getting involved with computers.
Richard Dawkin's "The selfish gene", and "The blind watchmaker". Profoundly impacted and reinforced my thinking about God and religion. "Atlas Shrugged", while very verbose, the utopia it presented was exciting and some aspects of such meritocratic community has rubbed off. Immensely helped with shedding many biases, and focus on ability, specifically in the workplace. I also think it somehow made me less empathetic.
You know, "The Road Ahead" I think I would rank up there with "The Selfish Gene" as being among the most influential books in my life. So I have huge respect for Mr. Gates. But I wonder if he might be going a little too far with this foundation thing. Releasing live mosquitos into an audience? Sort of up there with another talented person I could mention jumping on Oprah's couch. Sad, really.
Exactly my experience too.
To ad to the stimulus/response.
Dawkins has a pretty interesting theory in "The Selfish Gene". In it he talks about why little birds peep.
One conclusion could be that they peep because they are hungry. But another more interesting conclusion he makes is that they peep to attack predators thus forcing the mother to silence them by finding food.
The important part is to spot the difference between when they are really sad/afraid and when they are simply trying to get things their way.
On top of that some children like my son don't use pacifiers which makes it quite a bit more challenging to balance things out.
Unfortunately I do have problems with explicit retention. Probably some of the strategies in the comments would improve it a lot.
I have implicit retention of many things, but I often forgot the sources, I cannot list my favorite books on the spot, but if we discuss a topic I'd have flashes of relevant memories come back.
It's like I'd grapple with a book, dream about it, get confused, shaken, startled, questioning, then I integrate it back into normal life. Especially deeper books, like I had with The Selfish Gene which dispelled so many myths I had and confirmed things I thought to be correct.
You have to go through the Baader Meinhof effect of seeing that thing everywhere. With each book I view the world from an entirely new point of view, that each seem all encompassing (how ads manipulate you, how social status and prestige works, how the finance world works and cheats, how employers manipulate, how sexual behavior works, how quantum physics works or evolution or mental games we play etc), to get the smug feeling that this current book explains it all. After going through this with 5 books, you realize that no one story explains it all, but then what to do, read about narratives, move to nihilism, then realize the boundaries of rationality and faith, believing that "good" may be in one sense illusory but worth striving for. Then you read up on more traditional views on this etc.
Trying to "retain" is a bit like measuring the quality of your friendships based on how many life facts you've memorized about them. It's surely correlated, but also misses the point. The time you spent together and the experiences you had together are valuable in themselves.
Dawkins rules. "The Selfish Gene" I think is one of the books which has had the most influence on me. That, and perhaps, "A brief history of time". I also am interested in genetic algorithms, a sort of "interface" between computer science and biology. In addition, the link to biology is further enhanced by viruses and spiders, and in more ways than just their names. :-)
As the father of a daughter of six-years-old, I know where you are coming from. The sleep deprivation, the feeling for the first time in your life that you would gladly give up your own life if it meant saving (God forgive me for saying it) the life of your child.
Even though I've read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins and I know it is all biological evolutionary programming the feelings that are triggered after the birth of your kid are very difficult to put into words.
It also made me realise why my parents made some of the choices they made in their lives. And parenthetically - not saying I agree with them but I didn't have the requisite empathy back then and having a kid gave that to me I think.
I don't follow your logic. Yes, CNN and TYT are very different. This only means they can be tagged differently, but it doesn't mean they cannot be tagged under same category.
For example, The Selfish Gene and Advanced Algebra are two very different books, but they can be both categorized as nonfiction.
Maybe you are right with the conclusion, i.e. CNN or TYT should not be both categorized as “Partisan Left,” but you need a better reason.
I found the examples very surprising - because I think several of those books exist exactly to communicate a very specific, important idea. If you can describe in a few sentences what the central idea of '
The Selfish Gene' is - I would argue that the book has done its job 'transmitting' an idea perfectly. The reason the book takes a hundred or so pages to do that transmission is because the idea is 1. specialized - if you're not a biologist you need to do a lot of work just to understand the questions and the background 2. difficult - even if you're familiar with the biology, you need to think through lots of examples and discussions of what the selfish gene idea implies and 3. controversial - Dawkins spends a lot of time explaining what evidence he has, responding to other views, disclaiming misreadings of his work, and so on.
I have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.
It's practically impossible to link behavior to genes. We know that there must be a connections, but those connections are mediated by so many feedback loops that it's next to impossible to make any predictions.
Practically every explanation linking some human behavior to genetics is a fable, devoid of serious evidence, and usually confirming somebody's cultural bias. For example, arranged marriage is far too recent a phenomenon to have a significant genetic basis.
"The Selfish Gene" is a very important book with a lot of interesting ideas, but like a lot of pop science it gives people a misleading idea of just how much they understand about a field. Evolutionary psychology is an incredibly primitive field at best, and at worst acts more like a pseudoscience (especially as practiced by non-scientists). Be incredibly suspicious about extrapolating any of it to human behavior.
> Early in tortoise evolution there are HUGE benefits to a male that doesn't flip his buddies over and gets all the ladies as a result.
I believe Dawkins would argue this doesn't result in an evolutionarily stable strategy. Refer to chapter 10 of the Selfish Gene, I think it directly answers the concerns you have.
From the links, it seems like his main criticism of Dawkins is actually merely the word "selfish" in the title of his book, and that the CEO of Enron liked it?
Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.
It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in The Selfish Gene itself?
If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential moral psychologists today.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...
Pretty sure I encountered a similar idea when reading Richard Dawkins’
The Selfish Gene which was written 45 years ago.
In fact, Dawkins coined the word meme in that book, referring to a unit of culture which propagates through imitation and repetition. He clearly recognized the tremendous influence memes can have on the behavior of descendants outside of any genetic factors:
“But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.”
This article and the Overcoming Bias post it links to ("Better Babblers") remind me of when I was in high school and was reading stuff like
Gödel, Escher, Bach and Dawkins's
The Selfish Gene (the two first books I ordered after mom allowed me to use Amazon) while also learning online about Wittgenstein and statistical text generation (Markov chains). All this led to a kind of crisis of identity because in their own ways all those things point to a deconstruction of the self.
That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a "strange loop"); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self's use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.
So I clearly remember wondering "Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?"
I think this is also the unsettling core question of Blade Runner: are we also artificial?
I wonder what theologians might say about this question.
The Selfish Gene was a phase in our understanding of evolution. The mainstream now agrees that evolution is a whole lot more complicated than that. It's still true that "group selection" is a dirty word to a majority of evolutionary scientists, but this is shifting pretty fast - much less true than it was 10 years ago. Take a look at the works of David Sloan Wilson. I recommend his book, Unto Others.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674930476 Isn't this backwards a bit or did I get it wrong - not sure if I am phrasing this right. But to simplify from a laymen's perspective a reading of The Selfish Gene - all creatures will work to continue their genetic line unless misdirected as you describe. So if in some way continuing their genetic offspring is something that activates their opioid receptor, that's what we'll do, creating and raising offspring or as grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles, helping raise relatives. This can be applied generally to all life on earth.
For me:
* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks
* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.
Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.
Yes, women realistically do experience a lot more sexual violence than men, so it is not an unfounded worry; but as ordinary and normal and safe reproductive courtship entails a lot more approaches to women, the physically smaller nurturing gender, by men, the larger more aggressive hunting gender, such examples of deviant and opportunistic sexual violence can be seen to "come with the territory" of our evolutionary history. It's nice to imagine that we as a social species could have evolved past this, but in studying our history on the scale of hundreds of years rather than evolutionary scales of thousands of years, and in studying works of scholarship such as
the Selfish Gene by Dawkins, one may not be at all surprised that we are where we are, but perhaps by continuing to educate one another we can takes steps to make all people feel, and more importantly be, safer.
The reason I felt it necessary to add the "context" to your statement is that our world consists of many many interacting postitive and negative stochastic processes, and when we look at a simple "violence" statistic it might seem "oh, this is terrible, we must stop this" when in fact things are much more complex than that.
> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book,
The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term.
I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety":
https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s
Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:
The meaning is not that far away from the original.
It's anything that goes viral.
In the original introduction to the word meme in the
last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use
the metaphor of a virus.
So when anybody talks about something going viral on
the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it
looks as though the word has been appropriated for a
subset of that.
[1]
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memesI suggest re-reading
The Selfish Gene and not getting caught up too much at the title, but actually paying attention to the content (as a high schooler it may not be easy to grok, especially if your school taught evolution wrong, even teachers often don't understand it). Dawkins never says people are always selfish by necessity. He says genes (not individual organisms) propagate
as if they were selfish, but this is just a metaphor, if the metaphor disturbs you you can ignore it, the actual content of the evolutionary reasoning does not require using words like selfish.
Also, that quote on playing just dodges the question. Why is what we call "play" so pleasurable to animals? "Because they enjoy it" is not an answer. Why don't animals do other things for pleasure? And there are very good evolutionary arguments, but that's not the point now.
Dear Input Coffee,
First off, I would feel very uncomfortable contradicting Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Bill Joy in one fell swoop. Who am I to judge, though. Argument from authority can be fallacious, sure, so let's not go there.
Think about this for a minute. By the same argument you're taking, we are just lumps of organic molecules replicating with DNA, surely we can't feel anything, right? The thing you're not considering here is emergent behaviour.
Now, you haven't talked about self-programming machines in your article, and I'm pretty sure that's what all the really smart people you've rebuked in your subtitle are scared of. Do a quick Google search for "self-programming" AND "machine learning" AND "genetic". If you've read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, you should be getting goosebumps right about now. If not, and are interested in AI in any way, I cannot stress hard enough how badly you need to go out and get that book.
I was also surprised to see you didn't include Nick Bostrom's book called Superintelligence (2014) in your quotes. If you haven't check it out, I would highly recommend it. It goes deep and wide into how a sudden, exponentially growing spike of machine intelligence could impact our society.
Dawkins is amazingly lucid when he sticks to topics he knows very well. “
The Selfish Gene” and “The Extended Phenotype” were world altering for me. Like integral calculus, I rarely have cause to apply the concept in the domain in which it was described, but the understanding that his conveyance of the material shaped in me is something I feel in my thinking every day, more than two decades later.
“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.
The problem in this case is that TFA presented this phenomenon as some black magic unexplainable by science, despite reasonable explanations having been provided half century ago and popularized even among lay audience by books like
The Selfish Gene.
But hell if you are wrong about the general trend ;)
edit:
Really what TFA did is it just falsified some extremely naive and humanly-subjective interpretation of the slogan "survival of the fittest", without bothering to mention that this interpretation had already been known to be defective years ago and there are subtler alternatives which don't have this problem.
>I disagree with that, it happens at every level, from the continental down to the molecular.
The problem is that evidence for this has been extremely hard to come by.
> I am not aware of a clear answer to these questions, so I would be excited to hear from you if you know of one.
Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene very elegantly explains the evolution of cooperative/altruistic behavior through analyzing the dynamics of gene selection. It's a great read for anyone interested in the finer details of evolution. The main takeaway is that cooperative behavior in organisms can be understood as genes encouraging their own proliferation by increasing the fitness of its copies in other organisms; a gene to help my brother is really a gene helping itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Little_PiggiesIn his latest collection of essays originally published in Natural History magazine, paleontologist Gould examines diverse and diverting topics. The title piece refers to toes, and we learn that five is not necessarily the optimum number. Gould re-examines the work of astronomer Edmund Halley and 16th-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who pinpointed the moment of creation (Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.);
Edit: I see The Selfish Gene listed here quite a bit. It might be of special interest to you to read Dawkins "rival" on the other side of the pond - Stephan Jay Gould. His "punctuated equilibrium" resonates with me more than Dawkins take on evolution, simply because it involves something less "neat".
Plus, even as a child I found Gould made me laugh out loud sometimes.
Unfortunately,
The Selfish Gene leaves it an open question of how the brain developed its capacity to represent and model the world, which is the very notion of intelligence.
From the book:
> The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. There is no reason to suppose that electronic computers are conscious when they simulate, although we have to admit that in the future they may become so. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.
It's a fair question, but the whole point of Axelrod /
The Selfish Gene / Cooperative Games is to call out how much a game theory approach would support strategies which are anti-Objectivist. Where contributing to the commons, investing in public good, cooperating, radically grows the pie to the point where it's in everyone's self interest to cooperate.
Basically, times in life where it's a 'positive sum' as opposed to 'zero-sum' game.
Non-zero by Robert Wright, is probably the best synthesis on this topic.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9526993-nonzero
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. It describes biology from the perspective of the gene as the unit of natural selection, rather than the organism or the species, and demonstrates the power of that perspective to explain much about the natural world. But then, the author generalizes the concept of a gene to that of the replicator, which is any kind of pattern that influences its environment to produce copies of the pattern. (As an example, the author invents the concept of a meme, being a unit of culture that uses brains to spread itself across a culture.) This (the replicator) is the mind-blowing concept that I'm still thinking about 35 years after I first read this marvelous little book. Organisms and people and species and cultures are ephemeral side-effects of mindlessly self-replicating patterns. You'll never look at the world the same way after reading this one!
> 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.)
The original meaning:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
The word meme was “coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[11][16] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[17]”
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Picked this up after recently finishing The Selfish Gene, as I remembered what a thrilling read Crime and Punishment was.
Dostoyevsky is funny, thought-provoking and anxiety-inducing as ever.
Unlike some other authors, he rarely makes characters whose viewpoints he disagrees with into cheap caricatures with bad arguments.
He is intellectually honest and provides unprecedented (at least for its time) psychological insight into his complex characters.
I have always been sad to finish Dostoyevsky's books, but as the Penguin Classics version is around 1000 pages long, it will hopefully take a bit longer this time around.
I've noticed this on HN for genetics- and especially evolution-related topics. Many commenters here confidently state as fact things which turn out to be dead wrong. If your knowledge of evolution is limited to having read '
The Selfish Gene', you should be aware that you likely carry several misconceptions and also have many large gaps in your knowledge.
It turns out that, although possibly a virtue when programming, hubris can easily lead you astray if you're outside your field of expertise. Humility is more useful in these situations.
I am sure that this holds true for many other topics; it should give us all pause before we accept statements as true just because they sound agreeable to us, or before we regurgitate opinions whose veracity we're not in a position to verify.
Incidentally, I've also spotted this on the TV show QI, many of whose clever 'facts' are misleading at best or just plain incorrect.
The premise of
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) is that the unit of evolution isn't the individual but the gene. Individuals need not be selfish, their genes are, and genes compete with each other.
It's then easy to justify altruistic behavior when the best interests of an individual isn't up for considerations but the best interests of a gene. Selfishness isn't competing against yourself.
Use this drive to work with the evolutionary dynamics of populations in a "cheating" vs. "cooperating" and you get an arms race of cheaters vs cooperators which tends around some equilibrium which, going back to selfish genes, tends to balance the costs and rewards of selfishness which in lots of different creatures tends towards cooperation between individuals quite a lot.
The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins
Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.
The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker
Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.
The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!
For the given examples:
The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel, there is another issue not covered in the article: the books are philosophical interpretations of some facts the author chose to support their theories. Even more so, some of those facts and studies have been since debunked.
So for these examples it is my opinion that it's not a case of books not working, but of very healthy brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
>I swear no one knows a thing about science these days.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
>What Evolutionary Psychology does is provide an explanation for a behavior given what we know about evolution, biology, economics, game theory, etc.
It provides a guess on what could have happened based on those fields. To be science you need to be able to form theories and for an assertion to be a theory it must be falsifiable. An assertion to explain the modern woman's behavior toward mating in terms of evolution can not be falsified, so it doesn't qualify as a theory. Doesn't sound much like science to me.
As far as I know, you're in a pretty small minority with your claim that Evo Psych is science. A lot of people debate Psychology itself being science, but Evo Psych. Wow, may as well put homeopathy, voodoo and everything else in.
>His first (biology) book, The Selfish Gene, which established him as a leader in the field, is 100% science.
Nice. You imply that I know nothing about science yet you say a book that is largely speculating on what might have happened and why it might have happened is 100% science.
It reminds me of how viral images are referred to as memes, often by people who are ignorant of the original and fuller meaning of the term as a viral idea (as opposed to and deliberately reminiscent of the view of a gene being a viral biological entity, as in "
The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" itself).
Of course, the term "viral" is itself used metaphorically here, and is also used as an analogy to a biological entity. But in this case, I think more people are aware of the existence of viruses than they are of the original meaning of the term "meme", though they might not make the conscious connection between a "viral" idea, video, or image and that of a biological virus or how it spreads "virally".
I happened to be reading
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter at the same time, and both of them point at exactly this being the reason for consciousness. I was stunning at how both reached the same conclusion, that consciousness arrises from recursion of self perception, from very different points.
Also, if anyone is watching Westworld (spoilers), it seems to come to the same conclusion funnily enough. What finally gives the androids consciousness is some kind of recursive idea of listening to themselves.
This is just a taste of what this guy can write. If you liked this, do yourself a favor and check out couple of his books. (They're pretty evenly divided between atheism and evolutionary biology. If it's first published before 2000, it's probably the latter. And don't be afraid of older dates, The Selfish Gene was published in the 70s and it's still probably the best).
the answer you are suggesting has higher deadweight losses to the economy and will make the poor (and everybody else) worse off, full stop. In exchange for which you claim a hypothesized benefit to pigs which I don't believe and also don't believe you have a basis for believing, and which sits on a very shaky foundation, see Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene"
What got me thinking about corporate evolution was Richard Dawkins, who applied concepts from evolutionary biology to non-biological spheres with "meme". You might consider his book "
The Selfish Gene".
This is a popular line of thought (try googling "corporation evolutionary biology", which gets you to pages like https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-biology-of-corporate-survival ), but it has a weakness: it's hard to be rigorous. In the field of evolutionary biology, experiments are hard to design and hypotheses are hard to falsify, so a lot of the writing is deeply infected by the author's prejudices.
I'm sure there's something there, and I'm confident that whatever it is is more plausible than fragile conspiracy theories like the Illuminati. But exactly how non-biological entities compete and evolve is hard to say.
Non-Fiction (Science)
- *The Selfish Gene* by Richard Dawkins
- *The Righteous Mind* by Jonathan Haidt
- *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman
Non-Fiction (Social)
- *The Art of Not Being Governed* by James C. Scott
- *The Unwinding* by George Packer
- *People's History of the United States* by Howard Zinn
Fiction
- *East of Eden* by John Steinbeck
- *Sometimes a Great Notion* by Ken Kesey
- *The Brothers Karamazov* by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
edit: formatting
I vehemently agree with the theme of your message, and of course the fine quote at the end.
But I have a non-trivial quibble -- please don't be too quick to dismiss Richard Dawkins' science
writing. Keeping comparisons with the giant, i.e. Darwin, aside, Dawkins is one of the most eloquent science writers. On par with the inimitable Carl Sagan, dare I say.
A year or so ago I've read The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins (which, I gather, touches the same ideas from The Selfish Gene). He writes extremely poignantly about "cumulative selection", the "immortal gene", "adaptive complexity" (the particular property of living things that is replicable only by Darwinian selection) and many other riveting topics. Not to mention lots of fun and meaningful analogies related to various computer-related concepts (if you enjoy that sort of thing) and to the natural world, to explain DNA and related ideas (refer to "The Power of Archives" chapter). Also, have a gander at Science in the Soul, also by Dawkins, a collection of essays; FWIW, very much recommend it. Some fine writing in there.
(Note to self: Resume reading On the Origin of Species again.)
It is you who do not understand evolution, though you are hardly alone in this. I suggest you read "
The Selfish Gene." The inherent competition in evolution is not among individuals, it is among alleles.
> which is possible in environments of abundance
Sure, but environments of abundance do not occur naturally. The natural state is for exponential growth to continue until resource pressure limits it, which is to say, until abundance ends. (This is because, in nature, alleles that reproduce exponentially always out-compete those that don't.)
Yes, we can produce abundance, which in turn can produce peace. But that's an artificial process, not a natural one.
I am curious why people keep taking this attitude to Dawkins. And Dawkins himself was also curious why people had this reaction to his books.Well perhaps both you and Dawkins are naive - or perhaps only you are...
It should be rather obvious that ninety percent of the impact any book or idea system is the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch for Dawkin is "we are controlled by our (selfish) genes". If Dawkins includes caveats, well, how sweat of him but it really doesn't change the basic effect of writing a book called "The Selfish Gene". All your caveats are fine too but I suspect only reading the executive is definitely facilitated by evolution...
Mind-blowing for those who've read '
The Selfish Gene' and thought it explained everything about evolution:
'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin
'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch
'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei
Regardless of how you define what a "gene" is, the "unit of selection" is a fragment of an organism's dna, not the organism itself. In this context Dawkin's explores an ESS(evolutionary stable strategy) that exhibits altruistic behaviour. It's also worth noting that group selection is shown to be unstable as an evolutionary strategy. This review of
The Selfish Gene gives some good background
http://www.miketuritzin.com/writing/review-the-selfish-gene/.
Oh, and for good measure every should read Dawkin's
The Selfish Gene. In one of the last chapters he introduces the concept of a meme. It's doesn't take much effort to see how a meme would relate to a sea of self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating ideas to which humans and human society are but a substrate. Except The Selfish Gene explains the rules by which these reified ideas would operate.
My point being, the conceit of The Matrix is less far fetched when you explore these less abstract concepts more firmly grounded in scientific thinking. In many ways they're far more fascinating because the reality is both more intricate and relatable.
As I remember it, it was stated in "The Selfish Gene" that the vast bulk of genetic code served only a single purpose: ensuring it itself was replicated. It had no known function for the organism, it simply was copied from generation to generation. The primary "goal" of any self-replicator. Since it didn't actively interfere with the genes that do have an affect on the construction of the structures the genes build around themselves to protect and propagate those genes, namely us and any other organisms, the genes would simply continue being copied along indefinitely.
This is, I believe, similar to what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term, meme, in
The Selfish Gene (1976). Now meme has taken on a more degenerate meaning.
I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.
> To really answer this you should read "
The Selfish Gene."
I did. Well the first several chapters at least. I did not find a convincing answer to the question I am raising here.
> The phenotype of a gene is not necessarily constrained by any physical boundaries.
Sure it's not necessarily constrained. But in practice there is very high correlation between family relatedness and physical proximity / social group.
If the main rebuttal against group selection is "families can be spread out", I don't think that warrants the level of criticism that is leveled at it. An organism surrounded by genetically unrelated peers is the exception, not the rule.
EDIT: Reading a bit more, I think I may be understanding this distinction better. "Kin selection" and "group selection" are more different than the names suggest. "Kin selection" means that natural selection incentivizes an individual to be altrustic towards their own kin. "Group selection" means that natural selection will favor the survival of an entire group over another group based on the comparative genetic strengths of the two groups.
If a species produces an excessive number of males, then it becomes advantageous to produce more females to mate with them, so evolution is always nudging them back to a 50:50 ratio:
https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/tutorials/Adaptat...
So I guess the idea behind genetic engineering is to destabilize the ratio and wipe out the species faster than natural evolution can respond.
I would suggest reading "The Selfish Gene", which covers a lot of topics like this.
I'm going to plug a few great non-fiction books that are easy(ish) to read and deep on content. I'm sure there are a lot more out there.
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Coming Into the Country - John McPhee
The Unwinding - George Packer
Anything by James C Scott (Thinking Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed)
The Righteous Mind - John Haidt
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (Regardless of how you feel about his current public persona, this book published in 1976 is an absolute classic)
> Sometimes the interests of our genes and our memes align, such as when we invent antiseptics and antibiotics. Other times they conflict, such as when we invent birth control.
One of the most important concepts to take away from The Selfish Gene is that the idea that genes have "interests" is just an interesting thought experiment to explore how gene selection can lead to what appear to unselfish behaviors like cooperation, sympathy, and sacrifice.
Dawkins does not actually believe that genes are selfish, which IIRC he says right at the beginning of the book. So to say that the interests of genes and memes align (or don't align) is a fundamental flaw. Neither genes nor memes have interests. They just are.
And further, to believe that birth control is somehow harmful to the propagation of genes is also to miss an important concept from the book: that there is more to evolution than a strict numbers game. If birth control permits parents to invest greater resources in each child, then each child will have a greater competitive advantage in the population.
Finally, there is a lens through which genes and memes might someday be comparable, and that is information theory. However, we're a long way off from the theoretical and computational footing to try such a thing.
If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins'
The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly:
Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust.
I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions.
I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.
That's pretty cool.
Semi-relevant: Richard Dawkins touches upon the relationship between the genes of parasites and hosts in the Chap. 13, "The Long Reach of the Gene" (added in 2. ed.) of his book "The Selfish Gene".
He says that if the parasite genes are "transmitted to future generations via the same vehicles as the host's genes [...], the parasite will do all that it can to help the host, not only to survive, but to reproduce. Over evolutionary time it will cease to be a parasite, will cooperate with the host, and may eventually merge into the host's tissues and become unrecognizable as a parasite at all." [0]
P.S. Apropos of Wolbachia, did you also play MGS V recently?;P
[0]: https://books.google.no/books?id=koaD_Aod_V0C&lpg=PT343&ots=...
Of course, every bee wants credit for their own find. So there needs to be a countervailing costly mechanism to prevent bees from simply over-promoting any pollen source they know.Two problems with this. Most importantly, if bees have the same genetic interests (it's a bit complicated but see The Selfish Gene for Dawkin's explanation of why bees are genetically programmed not to have different interests than their hives) then there is no reason for a bee to want credit. Second, has any reward for the scouts ever been observed?
Richard Dawkins wrote an evolutionary program for "The Selfish Gene". It drew these tree like graphs and evolved them over time according to some evironmental parameters (can't remember exactly. Was a preference for certain angles in composition). Very interesting. Was facinating at how "biological" the end products were. They were very reminicient of forms in nature.
It’s a messy process, and we may not be able to see where it’s going, but you can bet that there will be changes in human phenotypes and their prominence over the course of many generations.
>Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
If I understand you correctly, that’s just not true. In his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins showed that the individual gene is the unit of selection. A genotype that tends to result in a slightly stronger preference for a family life is exactly the kind of thing that could become more prominent, even within one or two generations. I’m sure this is happening right now.
>In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations.
I was not making a particular example at all. That is the function of natural selection: it selects for the genotypes had by those who have children who go on to have children themselves.
The selection doesn’t have to happen at the level of a preference for kids. A gene related to diligence or conscientiousness or just about anything else can have effects that ultimately cause differential reproductive success for you and your offspring.
The fact that it’s all too complicated for us to model has bearing on it at all.
I apologize for being so gung-ho in my attack on your original comment. The criticism really wasn't worth the paragraphs I poured into it. I think it struck a chord because I somewhat recently read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and I, as many holders of a head full of fresh new ideas are wont to do, swung them like a hammer at the first thing that might, in a particular light, from a particular angle, look like a nail.
Obviously these lists are subjective but a couple of examples would be:
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Evolution)
MindStorms by Seymore Papert (Education)
Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn (Scientific Method/ Philosophy)
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Formal Systems)
The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Entrepreneurship)
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F Druckert (Entrepreneurship but most likely because I had a quite crazy experience while reading it)
They are all books written by what I consider careful thinkers i.e. people who are able to avoid confusing what they want the world to be with what they actually observe.
They don't have to be right and can be highly subjective as long as their premise is clear and they are aware of it.
> It was really really difficult.
I think that this was easier explained in "The Selfish Gene". Individual altruism is an emergent characteristic of a selfish gene.
I risk my live 10 times to save others until I die without off-spring. It is altruistic for me, but the gene has saved 10 people that are probably related to me. That means that the gene has a probability over 10% to be in that other individuals it is a win for the gene.
From my point of view it sucks, I don't have offspring. But the gene survives and prospers. This is still more extreme in species like bumblebees where sisters share 75% of their genes.
For monozygotic twins there is a similar case. From the gene perspective is irrelevant if one survives or the other, even that it is really important for the individuals.
> … it made sense for humans to be lactose-intolerant as adults
> Nature's solution was …
What made sense for an individual human is for everyone to be lactose-intolerant except them. This is what gives the best results for the individual in the near-starvation scenario.
Your suggestion sounds very much like “group selection”, an idea with many high-profile detractors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection ). The only argument I read against it was in “The Selfish Gene”, but according to the Wikipedia page, I could have picked from other high-profile scientists. Something looking like group selection may work in some cases (“The Selfish Gene” itself describes John Maynard Smith's counter-proposal of Evolutionary Stable Strategies), but offering such an explanation as obvious amounts to ignoring a lot of debunking by many bright people.
Well, you already mentioned Dawkins, but to anyone else reading this, I can't recommend
The Selfish Gene enough. It dramatically changed the way I understand nature, and with the chapter on memes, the way I understand culture. I hear The Extended Phenotype, again by Dawkins, is also excellent, but regrettably, I haven't read it yet.
I also highly recommend Dan Dennett. He covers these topics more directly. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking covers his thoughts on consciousness and evolution in a very direct and superbly clear manner.
Dennett also co-edited an anthology of fiction and non-fiction called The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame). It was one of the most interesting and enjoyable books I have ever read. It covers a very wide variety of topics surrounding the editors' theory of the mind, including the classic dualist/materialist debate (the editors are distinctly materialists), evolution, the mechanics at the core of consciousness, and so much more. It's another one that I can't recommend enough.
I was 15 when I read Issac Asimov's book Understanding Physics. That one book caused a radical change in me. Even though I had always found math and science enjoyable, I was struggling at the time with the Physics 1 class I was taking in high school. I read the book half way through the first semester, and went from a state of struggling to a state of effortless understanding. That experience taught me that for me, the best way to learn was to teach myself. First read a well-written layman's overview of a topic, and then dive deep with well-written academic books.
Extrapolating a bit from that lesson, and with ~40 more years of hindsight, I'd highly recommend that a bright 14 year old read some books that give a broad overview of science & philosophy, and establish a thorough understanding of the scientific method. One that I happen to be reading right now that I feel is remarkable is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch is a theoretical physicist at Oxford working on Quantum Computation. The Beginning of Infinity (despite the new-agey sounding name) is an incredible work.
Another book I highly recommend is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, not just for how it explains Neo-Darwinish, but because of the chapter on Memes. Deutsch also has a great treatment of Memes.
For whatever reason people are often tempted to victimize themselves and assume that everyone has it better than them. Which is an incredibly slippery and dangerous slope(looking at the news over the last few years). And with that in mind, "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling is a __MUST__ imo. Once you wrap your head around the facts, a next good choice is "The Black Swan" and "Antifragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, despite some (to a certain extent justified) bashing on tech people. Note to self: need to pick up "Skin in the Game".
Completely with you about Spivak, as far as calculus goes.
Physics: recently picked up Walter Lewin's "For the Love of Physics" and it's a masterpiece. Didn't get the chance to finish it because of the pandemic and it got locked in the office but it appears he's managed to cram in an entire university course in one book.
Biology and anatomy - "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins is brilliant entry point for people with limited knowledge on the subject.
Chemistry - no idea, that's the one subject which I hated with a passion since I was a child. Very paradoxical, given that physics was arguably my favorite subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...
History - Yuval Noah Harari's books, though somewhat anecdotal as far as history is concerned. I'd say there are way too many to list here and there is way too much to read about all major events in history to fit in just a few books.
I've been studying history privately for about 8 years now, and 'Maps of Time' by David Christian has fundamentally changed the way I look at the progression of mankind. Essentially, he's described from the highest possible level how modernity has come to be. There is too much detail in the book to go into depth, but it's a fascinating, and more than worthwhile read for the knowledge-seeker.
Another I'd add is 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. I have a Bachelor degree in science and never thought I'd be able to add to my understanding of evolution, but this book accomplished it. Almost everything I've studied can be broken into two periods - that I studied before reading the Selfish Gene, and what I studied after.
Lastly, I'd add Hume's 'Treatise on Human Nature', specifically his theory of substances. The basic idea was that as you learn more information about a substance, how you define that substance changes. First you see an orange ball, and you think it's just an orange colored ball. Later someone tells you it's a fruit, and your understanding of it changes.
How this is relevant is that I realized this can be applied to the world at large. Our understanding of any given phenomena is intrinsically linked to what we know about it. So there is no such thing as 'enlightenment' 'self-awareness' etc, there is only ever increasing awareness as we move through life, and we can also make a point to be intentional about increasing our own awareness.
One thing the article fails to discuss is Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. Dawkins discusses the idea in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, and it can show how specific behaviors become resistant to invasion and thus settle in an equilibrium. It provides a much better model than the simple games.
> we were designed to reproduce
No, we weren't designed to do anything (because we weren't designed). We reproduce because reproduction is an essential component of the evolutionary process that created us. But:
1) for humans, reproduction of memes is at least as important a component of our evolution as reproduction of genes and
2) even if you consider only reproduction of genes, the reproduction of genes is NOT the same as the reproduction of individuals.
You should read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
The word "dishonest" comes with a baggage of connotations. Most people aren't going to read the book and they'll misunderstand the purpose.
To give an example : as much as I think that "The Selfish Gene" is an awesome title, I feel like I have to defend the choice of words whenever I recommend the book. It doesn't really convey the meaning correctly. It means the right thing if you've read the book; otherwise it's misleading.
That's what I think will happen with the term "dishonest minority".
"We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment"
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
Dawkins talking about the first sentence, about 1980:
"...that was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular ways favoured by biologists. Of course it is a hard truth to swallow at first gulp. As Dr Christopher Evans has remarked, "This horrendous concept - the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances - is so desperately at odds with almost every other view that Man has of himself, that Dawkins’ book has received a bleak reception in many quarters. Nevertheless his argument is virtually irrefutable" ...
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58430
The Selfish Gene is a popular text by an academic articulating a very specific view of evolution, one that's caught on among a certain subculture but which isn't mainstream as far as I can tell.
Plenty of terms originally coined by academics lack broad academic or even intellectual credibility. I'd agree with the OP that the use of "Meme" is one. I'd also agree that this is because the term provides no clarity - ideas aren't like genes. Genes reproduce by a set mechanism, ideas can be stretched and modified any way you want. Genes are interpreted and realized by a fairly set mechanism. Ideas can be realized any old way. The "Meme" concept is one person's bad analogy imo.
Why must it be non-fiction? I'll stick to non-fiction since you asked, but I think its an odd limit to put in place in this discussion.
--------
In my opinion the essential book for anyone interested in science and technology would be How To Win Friends and Influence People. By far the most important book. By far. I really can't overstate the importance of learning to interact with other people in polite, persuasive and friendly ways.
In my four years at an engineering university (RPI) the amount of people I ran in to that couldn't relate to others in a meaningful way and carry a normal conversation blew my mind. It was surreal. And I don't know what percent of them were aware of this but I would guess it can't be too high.
The number one thing I wish I saw more of in engineers isn't an understanding of other sciences or deep domain knowledge. It's consideration. Plain, pure consideration for other people and how they might feel about things.
--------
The Selfish Gene would perhaps be a close second.
Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond is also a good read for people in STEM fields.
The Emperor of All Maladies, a book about the history of cancer. Extremely fascinating read, and accessible regardless of your level of biology knowledge.
"
The Selfish Gene" does not argue that genes produce selfish individuals, or that all traits are simple Mendelian traits governed by single genes. You've either not read TSG or have fundamentally misunderstood it.
The still mainstream evolutionary biology it describes does not require any particular relationship between genotype and phenotype, just that one exists. Polygenic traits are just as well described by it as simple Mendelian traits. It also accommodates a range of factors like plasticity, epistasis, and gene by environment interactions that complicate the relationship between genotype and phenotype.
Additionally, your understanding of "selfish" as genes which produce defectors in cooperative scenarios is incorrect. "Selfish" is a metaphor to describe the fact that to be favoured by selection genes must contribute to a phenotype that increases their own propagation (to the degree that they are not constrained from doing so, and issues like linkage and pleiotropy aside).
Passage below is where he really mentions Dawkins:
> The epitome of this line of thought came with militant atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene—a work that insisted all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes that, for some reason no one could quite explain, acted like “successful Chicago gangsters,” ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves. Such descriptions were typically qualified by remarks like, “Of course, this is just a metaphor, genes don’t really want or do anything.” But in reality, the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed. As a result, the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.
It goes on to discuss an alternative to the neo-Darwinist view and brings back to the core thesis of the piece, play. I'd really just massacre the thesis if I summarized it so if you find that interesting or disagree I'd really read his piece I linked above!
In no particular order ...
I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness works, this time through a work of fiction
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - strongly influenced my beliefs about political systems
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - changed how I thought about animal behavior and what living things do
Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig - strongly influenced my beliefs about US government
Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky - made me rethink my view of the media and news
Ornamental features are not obsolete. Many animals are selected for their ornamental features, which may act as heuristics for fitness (both for the opposite sex in reproduction and for the same sex in combat/competitiveness). I know not all of the book is still considered wholly accurate, but Dawkins describes this at length in The Selfish Gene.
-
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Language, Truth, and Logic by A. J. Ayer
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
Books that serve as investment philosophy guides for those who've developed a habit of saving money but are looking for the "next step" in building more wealth. From the mind of one of the greatest investors of all time:
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (get the annotated version with an epilogue written by Warren Buffett!)
- The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
A book that discusses what matters most in your life from a resource-allocation, measurable results standpoint (family, etc.):
- How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen
A book I read 10 years ago that forever changed the way I manage productivity and organization both at work and in my personal life:
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
Books that show that our universe is just as crazy, if not crazier, than science fiction:
- Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy
- Quantum Chance: Nonlocality, Teleportation and Other Quantum Marvels
- ..and so on with intersecting topics!
Not to mention, I love trying to have as deep an understanding as I can by reading highly technical textbooks on cosmology, gravitation, and quantum physics.
I agree wholeheartedly for fiction, where reading for enjoyment is concerned. But even good fiction deserves multiple reads. Where rereading is more of an essential is with non-fiction. Especially non-fiction that is read for the purpose of obtaining and using the information. A few examples would be The Selfish Gene, How To Win Friends And Influence People, Better Angels of Our Nature, and of course The Art of the Deal. Ok maybe not that last one.
There is a problem with this theory: it hypothesizes a benefit to a
group, but no benefit to the
individual who commits suicide. Individuals who do not have the gene(s) that predispose toward committing suicide would therefore be more fit than individuals who do, and these gene(s) would never become widespread.
I believe this was one of the main points of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
"The Selfish Gene" is explicitly directed at the layman, and absolutely no knowledge of biology is assumed. While this presents a danger of boring readers (such as myself) who are already familiar with DNA and meiosis, the colorful metaphors Dawkins uses throughout the book do much to keep the reading engrossing and entertaining.
After a lengthy exploration of basic biology, covering topics such as DNA and the origin of life, Dawkins introduces the gene-centered view of evolution that has long been textbook orthodoxy. Dawkins uses the remainder of the book to look at various types of animal behavior in an effort to convey some general conclusions and tools to help the reader understand evolution and natural selection. Much of his effort is devoted to explaining behavior in terms of the 'selfish gene' - especially social behavior that has long been held to have evolved 'for the good of the species.' Dawkins shows that how fundamental axiom of natural selection (that the genes best at surviving and reproducing will eventually spread through the gene pool) leads directly to the selfish gene and the behavior exhibited by nearly all animals (humans being the prime exception).
I should warn that conservatives would probably not enjoy the book nearly as much as I did. Dawkins is an open secular humanist with socialist leanings, and is not worried about offending the delicate sensibilities of creationists and fundamentalists. This book should only be read by those willing to 'accept' the validity of natural selection and evolution; others would only waste their time. I would direct readers seeking a more scientific discussion of these issues to G. C. Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection." All others will most likely enjoy "The Selfish Gene" a great deal and finish the book with a new appreciation for and understanding of evolution and biology.
1) For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long. When you die at 30, there's not much selection for biological mechanisms to fix the problems that happen in someone who is 60. Natural selection is looking for genes that are good at reproducing themselves, not genes that are good at giving an individual long life. Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).
2) That's the whole point of SENS; repairing the damage for which we DON'T have repair mechanisms because of point #1. For example, our lysosomes (the "garbage collector/incinerator" in our cells) accumulate some molecules that they can't break down because they don't have the right enzymes, so they accumulate throughout our lives and end up affection cell function all around our bodies (lysosomes are full and can't do their jobs anymore). SENS has found other organisms that do have these enzymes, and are looking at ways for us humans to use those enzymes to clean up that "long-lived garbage".
> Cell damage is allowed to happen.
Yes, because your genes don't care about you (so to speak - read Dawkins's The Selfish Gene). After you've reproduced, there's no pressure to fix damage that only affects you after reproduction age.
Nothing causes more suffering in the world than the diseases of aging, and curing those diseases should be priority #1. Living longer is just a welcome side-effect.
In
The Selfish Gene, Dawkins proposed that grandparents - obviously well beyond child bearing - can affect their gene propagation by caring for their grandchildren, at least indirectly.
What a true scientist; most people are content to think we dote on grandchildren as a civilized people with innate appreciation for new life. Rather, our genes will eradicate those who fail to help their offspring's offspring survive.
http://musingsofscience.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/book-review...
+1 for The Selfish Gene, one of the best books I've read. If you have any interest in the process of evolution/natural selection, I highly recommend it. It's not as "political" or explicitly atheistic as some of Dawkins' more recent work either, so people who have a negative opinion of that sort of thing shouldn't be turned off by his name being on it.
I suspect the science isn't quite 'seeking the individual'.
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.
You still are dodging addressing my points, before going into a "READ THE BOOK" mode. I don't have to read the Bible to realize how it was made and why is it flawed... Similarly, I don't need to read the book, to know the inclusive selection theory on which
The Selfish Gene was based is flawed, and hasn't lived up to its models.
EDIT: Started reading it:
The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in...
We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA—but there are many...
My former quote sure is misinterpreting things /s
I was going to put down "The Selfish Gene" myself. I remember picking it up in high school and hating the first few pages. I read the first chapter in college, and I didn't get what all the fuss was about. After college, I picked up the book, and was blown away! In retrospect, my younger self wasn't ready for it
>For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long.
Again, this is completely irrelevant to your argument. You can still evolve to live for a longer time while reproductively viable.
>Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).
Again, it's all about trade-offs. For some organisms, it's most advantageous for them to reproduce as much as they can all in one go, and for others it makes sense to live a really long time and reproduce throughout that time period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity
I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.
Worse. My parents had a rather religious phase and sent me to a religious school. Science teacher literally said "carbon-14 dating is a lie from scientists that hate god". If I'd have read
The Selfish Gene, or even A Brief History of Time as a kid, it'd have saved me a lot of time.
Those things you list seem relatively good, no? Making a microprocessor from gates while " just hooking up " sounds pretty near idyllic.
- "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality.
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
It's funny, the author has made a decent case for why pop science/non-fiction books are useless (I agree) despite pitching a book on an obvious nonsense subject about imaginary computers unlikely to ever exist (or, if you're an optimist; to exist in our lifetimes). Imagine wanting to master a field less realistic than phlogiston theory or medieval demonology to the extent that it "also means repeating those quick memory tests in expanding intervals over the following days, weeks, and months." I suppose indoctrination is necessary since this form of anti-knowledge is unlikely to ever be actually
used -unlike actual knowledge, say, such as linear algebra or obscure tree data structures relating to metric spaces.
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
I've seen a couple of oblique references to this in other comments, but I'll go a little deeper: if you want to truly understand the prisoner's dilemma scenario and how it relates to human, or more generally, animal behavior, there is incredible coverage of the topic in Richard Dawkins'
The Selfish Gene. He pioneered the idea of running PD "competitions" in an attempt to discover the best evolutionary strategy for PD, and how these strategies might predict large-scale behavior in animal populations. Each competitor (other scientists and researchers) submitted a strategy for handling the PD in the form of written code that could face off against other strategies. Each round of competition consisted of thousands of iterations of the game. Some strategies were simple and some were incredibly complex. Across two competitions, the second with 60 competing strategies, the simple and "non-cynical" strategy called tit-for-tat won handily. (Tit-for-tat is mentioned briefly in the original article without any explanation.) This is the strategy:
- Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate.
- If provoked, the agent will retaliate.
- The agent is quick to forgive.
- The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.
The fact that this strategy was a consistent winner in his competitions has led Dawkins to argue that "nice guys finish first" and could be a partial explanation for certain forms of so-called "altruistic" animal behavior -- behavior that seemingly gives no benefit to the altruist, except for the fact that too may benefit when it is their turn to be helped. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Guys_Finish_First
But please continue by reading more rigorous work on evolution, or you run the risk of being badly misinformed. I suggest, at a minimum, a decent textbook. Here I'd recommend Douglas Futuyma's
Evolution.
Follow this up with some key works in the field, such as Gould's early critique of naive adaptationism,
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.
Also consider different perspectives such as the those described in following books, which take, respectively, drift- and mutation-first approaches to evolution:
The Origins of Genome Architecture, M Lynch; and
Mutation-Driven Evolution, M Nei.
Above all, know that evolution is far more complex, subtle (and interesting) than The Selfish Gene would have you believe.
The book "War" by Sebastian Junger. I don't know the page but that doesn't matter, it is a good book.James Galbraith - The Predator State maybe a bit. Oh and Andrés Reséndez - A Land So Strange - The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca of course!! Robert Dallek - Nixon and Kissinger - Partners in Power (2007), Epic of Gilgamesh, Richard Dawkins -
The Selfish Gene, Niel Strauss - The Game.
That about covers it. It took me about an hour to compose the list, the main point it brings across is a very nuanced understanding of what it is to be human, described by the people that often have experienced the what they write about. since I'm the composer, I think it might help to mention that I am rated near genius (just as a rough measure - I know it has downsides - however in my case I far exceed my actual score due to some other knobs and whistles I came pre-equiped with). You're welcome. Cunt. :P
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Blew my mind out the back of my head in high school. Changed the way I looked at the world. Made evolution make some sense, and to some degree, paired with the extended phenotype, helped society make more sense. So much of altruism, racism, and tribalism have roots in game theory of you accept the hypothesis of the gene as the unit of natural selection.
But, perhaps more importantly it taught me by example how to make a good argument that can be rooted in multiple deep disciplines but accessible to the masses.
This article hints at, but doesn't fully articulate, the irony of two apparently very different disciplines applied upon each other.
Vaccine-resistance, as a mental-state looks akin to the immune system, which normally confers disease immunity but, when running amok can trigger allergies.
It is implied that some medical sociologists now consider vaccine-resistant thinking as a kind of allergy to benign societal forces and are planning a social vaccination program to eradicate such wrong-headedness.
As an aside, the word meme was used near to its original sense - as Dawkins defined it - in the last chapter of his classic "The Selfish Gene".
> Picture some serious non-fiction tomes.
The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?
Maybe those books are specifically bad? I haven't read them, but I had long monologues about some historical books I read giving people basically lectures on topic.
And my brain recalls facts and situations from them when it is associated in unrelated discussions too.
It's only a problem if it is keeping you from some goal. Example: If you're doing a research report on a certain president and you find yourself reading up on a dozen other interesting presidents, well that's a problem because it keeps you from finishing your report.
On the other hand, if you are interested in genetic algorithms and you wind up reading about real genetics, epigentics and then Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene", I don't see how that is bad.
Agreed...Certain brilliant works, read at just the right moment in our lives, align with our intuition, validates the information we've gathered and parsed to that point, and propels us forward with confidence...
I read Edward O. Wilsons' "On Human Nature" the year it was published (1978)...I just happened to stumble upon it in a bookstore...a wonderful read which prompted me to wonder,"What other thinkers are out there that I don't know about?"
This was two years after Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene"...I was unaware of the book, or Dawkins in general, for at least a decade...when I discovered it I devoured it...
It had the effect of further cementing the philosophy of living my previous inquiries had led me to...
I've discovered no benefit to putting a label on myself, whether that be atheist, agnostic, or theist...early on I discovered others held tightly to their views and were usually very unlikely to change them...discussions were interesting and invigorating, but ultimately fruitless...
What I most appreciate about the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson is that they are quite serious thinkers...they encourage us to "go with the best available evidence"...there's no better advice...
There's ample evidence that we humans are finite beings, and IMHO we don't much like the idea of that, i.e., we want answers as to why we exist at all...and we're often unwilling to embrace "the best available evidence"...
Further, I think that those who cannot accept that we appear to be finite beings misunderstand the concept of "infinity"...it extends backwards, forwards, in any direction our human linguistic invention of the concept of "time" might include...infinity implies limitless possibilities...
I'll continue to proceed with my life based on what "the best available evidence" suggests...if new and compelling evidence is uncovered I'm willing to turn on a dime...
> Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future.
Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.
Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.
Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.
If there is only one big brain, "WE" won't exist anymore. There will only be "I". In Richard Dawkins'book, The Selfish Gene, he explains how organisms are only vehicles for the genomes within them and how genomes tend to compete for resources and how they could be described as essentially "selfish". For that reason alone, it is very unlikely that "we" could turn into an "I". On the other hand, genomes are just another way to transmit information, and mankind has created other kinds of information, entirely separate from biological processes. Maybe it will be that information that may give rise to "One big brain" but it will be a whole new species, if it is allowed to exist, unless we learn to live along symbiotically. Even then, once an artificial species emerges, others may emerge too (see Tom Ray's Tierra experiments) and those may exist entirely separate lives from the symbiosis.
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins, The Red Queen - Ridley
I've read these books midway through high school, already interested in biology and medicine. The depth and complexity of how life forms handle evolutionary pressure is mind blowing. Why you favor relatives over strangers, the competition between mother and child, progress through collaboration of genes etc. You see the world completely differently (after reading many more books on geology, genetics, anthropology, anatomy, cellular biology etc) afterwards.
For a novel: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson,
Truely changed how I look at computers and encryption as a not mathematically inclined reader. Building a computer out of church pipe organ components etc.
One of my big takeaways from reading GEB was that while higher-level semantics can emerge from any low-level symbolic substrate, the details of
how that semantics emerges are not at all simple or obvious or “likely to happen by random chance”.
Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene, published just a few years earlier, is the clearest exposition that I have read of how this process probably played out in terrestrial life: the “semantics” encoded by amino acid sequences correspond to a molecule/cell/organism’s likelihood of surviving and replicating. For all but the simplest and most ephemeral replicators, this generally means accurately predicting environmental conditions. General intelligence, then, would conceivably arise simply due to selection pressures pushing organisms to live in the broadest range of environments.
In some sense, this process does sound more like an engineering problem, as the embodiment which “contains” the intelligence is probably not an optional component.
You're dead on, I think. There's a few things to consider:
1) There's a general anti-tech sentiment that is a huge defining part of our zeitgeist. It's only a few years old and I'm already tired of it and articles like this one contribute to the fatigue.
2) The NYT is leaning very hard into this fad for a variety of reasons - good for their bottom line, good for their self-image, etc. There was a very funny one a few weeks ago where the NYT "took down" Google's terrible ToS - until someone (in the comments) pointed out the NYT one was even worse. If you're shouting and pointing at someone else, people won't have time to look at you.
3) Lately, I keep being reminded of the Selfish Gene, which has a few chapters devoted to Evolutionary Stable Strategies. In essence, Tech has gotten so big that being a "tech critic" has become a lucrative (high reward/low cost) position to take, like being a cheater in a monogamous population. Any environment can support a certain percentage of such defectors, though if there are suddenly too many, it stops being lucrative and a new stable equilibrium will be reached. I highly recommend it, it has really helped me make sense of these rapid shifts.
I don't think any part of our brain is "responsible for optimizing contentment" or "deleting traumatic memories."
In evolutionary terms, individual organisms are optimized for reproducing and living long enough to give their offspring (more accurately, their genes) a good shot at survival. Richard Dawkins explains that in The Selfish Gene and other books. "Contentment," a human social construct, and classifying a memory as "traumatic" probably have little to do with what evolution has optimized us (or any organism) for. If we reproduce and pass on our genes, then slowly die a miserable and traumatic death, that makes no difference in terms of evolution.
OK. I'll define this as "10 books that I'd recommend to my 40-years-younger self to prioritize", and leave aside the problem that 2 or 3 of these would not yet have been published.
The Iliad
Shakespeare
The Life of Johnson
Federalist Papers
Pride and Prejudice
Ulysses
The Waste Land
The Selfish Gene
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Infinite Jest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics> Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Critics regard memetics as a pseudoscience. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual.
> The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[2] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.
I believe memetics is one of the most impactful but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness.
It's true that "
The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a
lot of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but
not of all cultures on earth, particularly not eastern philosophy, and not the animal kingdom at large)
If you have never read any of these counterpoints, but find that the conclusions of Selfish Gene have shaped your world view, please consider reading some of these counterpoints and seeing if they persuade you to consider new perspectives.
A particularly thorough book detailing these counterpoints is Matthieu Ricard's book:
Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World
I don't remember the quote verbatim but I read something in "
The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins - which really felt like a jolt. The book says that an evolutionary stable strategy is one that is immune to treachery from within and needn't be the one that is the most beneficial to the group. Once I digested this, it seemed obvious but when I read that the first time, it really caught me off guard.
Also, Lewis Carroll's quote:
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
still makes me think about how we use language.
I listened to
the Selfish Gene on Audible recently and was blown away by it.
All through school I never had much of an interest in biology or genetics. I think if I’d read this earlier it may have changed my mind.
Planning on reading the Blind Watchmaker at some point.
Spurred on by reading the former I thought I’d listen to A Brief History of Time. Wow that is a whole different kettle of fish. I had to stop because I realized it wasn’t the right format (Audiobook), for me at least.
I agree that these are two ways to parse "
The Selfish Gene" and the first one that you listed is more accurate, but what I don't like about the title is that is sounds a bit like an excuse that someone would use.
"Hey, that's just the way my genes made me : I'm selfish, okay, but that's, like, genetics, survival of the fittest so it's all fine and I don't have to feel bad about it ..."
The bad thing about the "Dishonest Minority" title is that is sounds like he's referring to a bunch of freeloaders who are abusing the system and ruining it for every honest tax-payer. From reading his excerpt, we know that it's not what he's saying at all. I like the shock value of using "Dishonest Minority", but sometimes book with titles like that nuance it by having a subtitle that goes like "How we all benefit from them" or something like that.
Of course we are more than our genes. We can rise above our primitiveness, hopefully. I didn't mean to defend the gene-centric theory of evolution because I am not an expert on it. And yes, I have read Dawkins' "
The Selfish Gene" too, so I am acquainted with the theory that altruism and collaboration can stem from the so-called selfish gene.
Enough of theories. Let us look at facts. There are limited resources, and we will fight for them. Like I said, I don't believe that we fight for what's good for the species. We fight for ourselves, our families and communities. We are still rather tribal.
Classic misunderstanding and caricature of the Darwinian argument and Dawkins' book. For one, he conflates genes and organisms.
> all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes
Either this is just physicalism (which is quite well accepted among most scientists) or assumes the straw Darwinist is a genetic determinist and denies environmental effects, which is misleading.
> ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves
When Darwinists say something approaching this, they are talking about genes and not people and indeed it is merely a metaphor.
> that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior
No, quite the opposite. It's not about rational motives, the whole point is there is no intelligence behind it, no "intelligent design" no reasoning. The whole thing emerges from natural selection and the fact that gene proportions will change from generation to generation and this process is not fully random: some genes succeed more than others through the properties they lend to organisms.
Again, let's not conflate social Darwinism as an ideology with Darwinian evolutionary theory, of which Dawkins' book is merely a popularizer. Also, at the time of writing The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wasn't so obsessed with being a militant atheist as in the last ~15 years or so. The Selfish Gene is a pretty uncontroversial in a scientific sense, but it's quite unfortunate in its title and many people don't want to put in the mental effort of thinking about evolutionary mechanisms. It's the type of thinking we use for math puzzles or a hacking, and it's unpleasant to most people so they jump back to arguing about politics and "surely they actually mean XYZ, let's not bother engaging with the actual words in the book..."
And just on the side, I don't particularly like Dawkins as a person, I find his books on atheism quite dull and weak-manning religion, his tweets annoying and provocative in a cringe-inducing way, and his intellectual output over the last decade disappointing overall. Doesn't mean I feel the need to caricature the scientific arguments.
Maybe you ought to re-read
The Selfish Gene. It first distills evolution down to first principles: there are classes of chemicals that tend to construct copies or near-copies of themselves; the chemicals that do not do this but consume raw material from the same finite pool will gradually decrease in frequency; meaning over time chemical variants/combinations that are more successful at duplicating themselves propagate while those who fail to secure resources do not propagate.
At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.”
The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment).
This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
I would be very, VERY sceptical - the moment he brought in evolution, he argued a theory based on (and nigh-identical to) group selectionism. Except group selectionism has been thoroughly debunked, to the point where he might as well have been spouting Lamarckism - read "
The Selfish Gene", by Richard Dawkins.
Put simply, you can't just jump from looking at individual survival to looking at a group's survival, because any individual could just be a free-rider. More importantly, what's actually been observed is that group selectionism simply doesn't happen in the real world.
So while anything I said about the rest would be mere opinion, there is at least one multi-paragraph section of his argument that is a GIANT heap of shit.
This is basically my viewpoint on agnosticism vs atheism as well. My trajectory was Catholic (but not devout) -> atheist -> agnostic. I'm fascinated by all kinds of religions as historical artefacts even though I don't follow any specific one.
I certainly don't view agnosticism as a weasel term either. I cannot be certain there is no god any more than I could be certain there is one (and note by god I'm not referring to the man with the beard and the pearly gates and all that.... something that I think can easily get lost in conversation on this topic). I think it's honest to just say "I don't know".
I have a friend who's in the process of discovering his own atheism and while atheism is not a religion, I can clearly see the similarity in passion. I was likely the same back when I was exploring it at first.
Have heard lots about The Selfish Gene but never actually sat down and read it.... should really do so. Is there a more modern version to read these days, or is TSG timelessly applicable?
See Dawkin's response at
http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/...The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether – it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely untrue.
The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith.
Sometimes I wonder if the existence of a "geek-culture" is not a bit problematic. I have read (and liked) so many of the books in this list that I worry whether a subculture / industry where everyone consumes the same books / movies / memes is not in danger of becoming an echo-chamber containing a very limited set of ideas and excluding smart people that haven't read the same books.
On the other hand I can see that there is an argument to be made for a set of shared ideas and terminology to communicate more effectively and help people find common ground in social situations. Anyway, I would be interested to read other people's thoughts about this.
On a different note, I am surprised not to see any of Dawkins' books on that list (I would at least add The Selfish Gene).
The selfish gene is a great book. I read it when it was about 15 and it really resonated with me.
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
This is embarrassing. I grew up with sorta fundie parents (they got better) and dropped out of school early (religious schools...), so it might be different for HNers that had a solid mental upbringing.
A Brief History of Time because it pretty much slapped any thoughts I had of a supernatural universe/god right out of my mind. I know it's not highly regarded, but for a rather ignorant guy, it woke me up.
The Selfish Gene (inc The Extended Phenotype). This is one I think is the most powerful, even for people that had OK education. Showing how life could possibly evolve, just with random mutations and non-random survival made it real to me that we live in a natural world. And not just that, but that since it's so obviously a natural world, it's up to us to decide what is right, what our purpose is. The earth and nature aren't going to help us there - it's our call, full stop. That is huge, and many otherwise seemingly well educated people don't seem to get it.
Heuristics and Biases. (Though Thinking Fast and Slow might be more approachable.) This book opened me up to the fact that I'm running on busted hardware. That I've got serious, unfixable, biases built into my brain. That a lot of what I do is a fast but inaccurate parallel system at work. (Interestingly, this is the essence of Taoism, wu wei).
Lately, LessWrong. (Available as a book called Rationality: From AI to Zombies). These sequences have helped me, well, get less wrong, slowly, at making decisions and general thinking. I try to be aware of when I'm being biased and incorrect. I make better predictions and actively try to update my priors, instead of just confirming my previous beliefs. As I get older (34) I find I'm unwittingly acting close minded on occasion, and need to actively work against it.
> If your knowledge of evolution is limited to having read 'The Selfish Gene', you should be aware that you likely carry several misconceptionsI know this is veering wildly offtopic, but when I see misconceptions about evolution on HN, they're usually not being displayed by people with too rudimentary a science background, it's mostly people with an altogether unscientific background such as creationism or other religious and philosophical ideas that are in conflict with factual information.
> Incidentally, I've also spotted this on the TV show QI, many of whose clever 'facts' are misleading at best or just plain incorrect.
I'm not familiar with that show, but that's a common problem in science journalism now, and it's not even confined to "popular" science anymore either. Maybe it's always been that way, and I just notice it more nowadays.
When you have a lot of sheep around, evolution is bound to come up with a sheep that feeds on other sheep. For such mutants, having 'social camouflage' is a critical trait, because otherwise they would be losing to normal sheep due to their tit-for-tatting.
As for the advantage, it seems pretty clear to me: higher chances at being the alpha-male(female?), plus the resource advantage due to not having the ability for reciprocal altruism (and the ability to get away with that).
All few human psychopaths I have personally met were natural-born leaders. One is now occupying a high-level position within a successful company that produces manupulative F2P games. Another was a woman who, despite her being deaf-mute, was able to organize a successful remote web studio (before it fell apart due to her politicking and other members, including me, bailing out).
Also, quoting Wikipedia: "In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country's 2 million people could be [Genghis] Khan descendants".
Edit: if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene discussed cheaters (that is, individuals who didn't reciprocate) as being a viable evolutionary strategy, as long as they are in a minority.
I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction:
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins
A New Kind of Science - Wolfram
The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter
Atlas Shrugged - Rand
The Fountainhead - Rand
Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
Ambient Findability - Peter Morville
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi
Artificial Life - Steven Levy
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html
Glasshouse - Charles Stross
Permutation City - Greg Egan
Neuromancer - William Gibson
The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner
The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Evolutionary pressures aren't as simple as "if it lowers your chance of reproducing it's bad." You can read "
The Selfish Gene" for more info.
Consider a gene that promotes compassion, selflessness and sharing. While it may lower your individual fitness, groups with some individuals with this gene may fare better as a whole.
Same as autism. For example, say autistic people see connections that other people don't. Having a low rate of "different thinkers" is positive for the group as a whole, even if the individuals may be disadvantaged in other ways.
"Few people can experience now what Darwin's contemporaries did when The Origin of Species was first published, because everyone now is raised either to take evolution for granted, or to regard it as a heresy. No one encounters the idea of natural selection for the first time as an adult."
It's interesting to read this in the context of _The Selfish Gene_. Mary Midgley (who wrote a scathing attack on the book[1]) once suggested that she probably found it hard to appreciate its virtues because she'd read the ideas in it so many times before -- by the time the book came out they hardly seemed novel to her.
[1]: http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php...
"So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do."
Peter Singer is a good case study in this.
"why we routinely trust non-kin (an evolutionary puzzle, to be sure), how the majority of us are honest, and that a minority of us are dishonest. That dishonest minority are the free riders of societal systems, and security is how we protect society from them. I will model the fundamental trade-off of societal security -- individual self-interest vs. societal group interest -- as a group prisoner's dilemma problem, and use that metaphor to examine the basic mechanics of societal security."
Some of these ideas remind me of a book I read recently: "The Selfish Gene". In it, Richard Dawkins approaches these same questions from the gene standpoint, and uses game theory to explain how good / bad behavior evolves in an ecosystem, and why free-riding is not always the evolutionarily stable strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
Based on a News.YC recommendation, I'm currently reading "The Selfish Gene" right now and in the book, Richard Dawkins, says at some point billions of years ago a critical fundamental evolution happened - a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident, a "Replicator" with the ability to replicate itself. He said the chance of that happening was "exceedingly improbable" and "but in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years". Improbable accidents (like the one that probably occurred around generation 20,000 of the bacteria) can shape the future.
Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above.
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
> If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?
Really? This is getting upvoted here? How disappointing.
"Evolution doesn't have a goal, it doesn't make future plans. Evolution is an accident."
- Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene
Did you know giraffes have a nerve connecting the points in it's head that are about 5cm apart? But instead of connecting those 2 points directly, the nerve goes all the way down through the neck, then all the way back up, to connect its end point. Is there any advantage in this design instead of just connecting directly? No there isn't, giraffes are that way only because, historically, that's how they evolved. Evolution doesn't make intelligent plans. Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all. Evolution is imperfect. Alluding there's anything intelligent about evolution is alluding to intelligent design and creationism.
Mr. Byrnes, it is a little more complicated than that.
Many of the people angry about this incident will, in another context, back up someone like Richard Dawkins when he offends. Dawkins happens to be one of my favorite authors, but he is quite provocative. And Heroku advertises the Dawkins Foundation as a success story:
http://success.heroku.com/dawkins-foundation
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
(RDFRS) supports scientific education and advances
critical thinking and an evidence-based understanding of
the natural world, in the quest to overcome religious
fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human
suffering. The foundation’s namesake and founder, Richard
Dawkins, is a scientist and best-selling author of works
including The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and The
Blind Watchmaker.
As an objective fact, The God Delusion is surely a book that many millions of people around the world are on the record as finding "offensive" [1,2,3].
So the issue is really not whether a statement is offensive or not, or how the apology is phrased. It is whether the group that is offended has the power to force an apology.
[1] http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/religious-debates/65603...
[2] http://richarddawkins.net/articles/628795-duking-it-out-over...
[3] http://mattgrube.com/seminary-writings/dawkins-god-delusion-...
To really answer this you should read "The Selfish Gene." But the TL;DR is that the unit of selection in Darwinian evolution is neither the organism nor the group, but the gene. Ant colonies are the phenotype of a group of genes that glommed together over the years to form an evolutionarily viable unit. But the unit is not what is being selected ever, it's the individual genes. The phenotype of a gene is not necessarily constrained by any physical boundaries. (For example, the phenotype of the human genome extends into outer space!)
In no particular order and probably not remembering all:
The signal and the noise - Nate Silver;
Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
1984 - Orwell;
Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl;
Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger (not only international politics but also deep-thinking strategy that can be used anywhere);
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius;
Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock;
Propaganda - Edward Bernays;
Pitch anything - Oren Klaff;
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond;
How to win friends and influence people& Stop worrying (both by Dale Carnegie);
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins;
Trust - Francis Fukuyama;
Does that include Klingon and Elvish?
Less flippantly, I believe in 1980 it was for most people a better use of one's time to read "The Selfish Gene" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" than to learn Linear B, in order to think and reason differently. (I specify a date since the main ideas described in those books now pervade culture, so they would have less of an impact now.)
Regarding Scandinavian languages and gender, "Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter—except the Bergen dialect, which has only two genders: common and neuter." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language). Danish and Swedish have two grammatical genders, common and neuter.
Traces of a masculine gender remain in Swedish when used to refer to a male. For example, "den rika" could mean "the rich", while "den rike" means "the rich man". However, it's perfectly fine to use "den rika" for the rich man.
All of the Scandinavian languages have more of a gender system than English does, so I think it's a bit odd to use that property as an example. Could you explain why learning (say) the Swedish gender system helps one think and reason differently in any useful form, other than the obvious one of being able to comprehend Swedish and related languages?
Maybe you are right, it is not in the same category as
The Selfish Gene. However, I thought the parts about the early history of computing were written very well, as someone who did not know much about it before.
I was also thinking that a non-fiction book with no fluff and no injection of personality/flair from the author is a textbook. There are many outstanding textbooks (like Molecular Biology of the Cell) which offer pure information, but I think commercial non-fiction books are aimed at a more general audience. The author needs to fluff a book up a bit to make the material approachable. I also wonder how some non-fiction books would read if untouched by editors.
There is a lot in this essay that is problematic. I'll offer just two examples:
"What exactly does science tell us about the idea of a human nature?"
Science can't tell you anything until you have a philosophy of knowledge which defines a thing called "science". So the argument becomes a bit circular here.
This is worse:
"If we take evolutionary biology seriously, then we certainly should reject any essentialist conception of it, such as Aristotle’s."
That is a large if. Here are some unsolved problems in evolutionary biology:
1. Why do people become gay?
2. Why do people adopt children who are unrelated to them?
3. Why does such a large percentage of the population suffer mental illness?
4. Why do people engage in acts of altruism, helping those they are not related to?
5. Why do people believe in gods, and why do they make sacrifices to these gods?
A famous argument against evolutionary biology was made by Richard Dawkins back in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene. As Dawkins says in that book: "We can rise above our genes; indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."
Before we "take evolutionary biology seriously" we need to carefully consider all of the arguments against it. And since so much of this article depends on "take evolutionary biology seriously", the whole article is weak.
Mind you, I believe a strong case can be made for a human nature. But I wouldn't build that case on evolutionary biology, without first addressing the known limits of evolutionary biology. A stronger case could be built if one first argued for independent agency in the processes arising from genes. This is the "ghost in the machine" argument. But that argument would have something in common with the philosophers who are being criticized in this article.
To see Game Theory from a 'cooperation' point of view, check out the landmark book,
The Evolution of Cooperation[1] by Robert Axelrod.
Axelrod's work was also summarized in The Selfish Gene. (And more recently, in Behave, by Sapolsky.)
From the abstract:
"We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival."
[1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/robert-axelrod/the-evoluti...
> which suggests that you are here simply because you are here. There is no grand goal, no epic mission to fulfill, no gods to please. You are here because your parents were optimized for reproduction and raising children, who existed because their parents were etc.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also outlines the same idea, and tries to explain how we got that way. Read it when I was a lot younger, but the concept has stayed with me.
The best book I read in 2009 was
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's surprisingly accessible (I've never taken a biology class), and talks a lot about evolutionary game theory which I found fascinating.
Some other books I read last year:
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. It was a great book, Pinker's writing is accessible and entertaining. Much more so than On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.
More with Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight by Paul Ciotti. I really enjoyed this one, it was the story of the first team to cross the English channel with human-powered flight.
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. I liked this one better than Gladwell's other books. There is less theorizing and arguing a point and more telling stories, which is what Gladwell excels at.
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. If you are patient with what is sometimes (in my humble opinion) pointlessly arguing semantics, some of the sections are interesting.
This happens to me as well. I have noticed, however, that while I can't recall facts very well from books I've read they often do change my perspective on things and that is much longer lasting. For example, reading the book "
The Selfish Gene" had a profound effect on how I thought about the world, even though I can't remember much at all of its contents other than it being about how evolution selects at the level of genes.
With more technical books I find it is almost impossible for me to learn anything substantial from them unless I do the exercises, however, the exercises tend to take an enormous amount of time. So what I find myself doing is skimming most technical books and then then going more in depth on the few that seem relevant/interesting to me.
Much more importantly (since nature doesn't care much about unsuccessful individuals) it's a survival mechanism for the packI am not a biologist, but according to (what I understood of) "The Selfish Gene" and the like, the natural selection takes place on the level of genes. Since the successful reproduction of a gene is usually (barring some exceptional situations mentioned in the book) tightly coupled with the fate of the individual carrying the gene, reasoning about natural selection that operates on individuals typically leads to correct conclusions. Reasoning about natural selection on packs is on the other hand typically incorrect, if it leads to conclusions different from the individuals-based selection.
In your example, if you imagine two genes, one that tells the low status carrier to accept starvation, and the other that tells its carrier to fight for dear life no matter what its social status, the second gene will win and the first one will go extinct, even if from the point of view of the whole pack the first gene could be better.
This is not to say that your hypothesis is invalid, as I'm sure it can be rephrased in terms of genes/individuals without losing the core message.
Richard Dawkins, in (iirc) The Selfish Gene proposed that if we really wanted to increase the average lifespan of humans beyond what it is now (we're on the high side of longevity compared to even other primates) then the way to do it would be if people were only allowed have children progressively later in life with each generation. It may be that we're doing this on our own naturally. I myself am the product of several generations who had children late in life, and it does seem like people in my family age more slowly.
thanks for the tips - I've been meaning to check out '
The Selfish Gene'. I checked out the lesswrong.com article - I'm not sure that my argument is the same as what they are trying to disprove - it sounds like their models are based on individuals that collude or act altruistically in order to benefit collectively. I don't think that 'intention' is a good concept for understanding evolution in the first place. Also, from checking out the Wikipedia article on group selection, it doesn't sound like there is scientific agreement that this concept is disproved:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selectionI'll go and read The selfish Gene before I write more, but one more pesky comment about the experiment in the lesswrong.com article: I am suspicious of their conclusion that their case study disproves group selection. This does not seem to respect the vast scope of evolutionary time scale. Maybe group selection is like quantum tunneling - with large clusters of individuals, the chances of it happening are infinitesimal - you won't see it in the laboratory. But on an evolutionary time scale, infinitesimal chances do happen occasionally - and if they yield advantageous results, they will shape life's future. Maybe our love for music came about from freak genetic mutations that in fact didn't serve much purpose for individual survival, but this collective activity caused individuals to synchronize their behavior. Maybe this synchronization helps low-advantage/individual traits 'tunnel' probabilistically and exist long afterward because the same traits are high-advantage/collective traits. (?)
Richard Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene" uses the same language, but, to his credit, he pauses regularly to remind the reader that genes are not really "selfish" and that they don't have "wants" and "desires," but that he is using that language to make it easier to understand the concepts. I understand your complaint, but it's a necessary communication technique when dealing with the general public.
I wasn't arguing in favor of any of those 3 scenarios, I was simply pointing out that the very smart might be considering game moves that were non-obvious. I'm also keeping an open mind about the possibility that there is no reproductive advantage to limiting one's children. Richard Dawkins seems to believe that. In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins writes: "We can rise above the influence of our genes, indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."
The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell
The World Is Flat - Thomas Friedman
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Game - Neil Strauss
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Ultra Marathon Man - Dean Karnazes
I'm not really up on the history of these ideas, but my impression is that The Selfish Gene was a contribution in the same sense that Einstein's paper on special relativity was a contribution. Neither really changed what one would predict the result of any experiment to be (the Lorentz transformation had already been produced before Einstein, by, err, Lorentz...), but rather in the perspective by which one views the field, which does affect future research.
Goedel, Escher, Bach -- If you're reading this page you will dig this book.
Guns, Germs, and Steel -- how circumstance drove civilizations. Fun storytelling even if it's a bit too "just-so". definitely trains you to look at any situation and seek it's origins with less initial judgement.
The Visual Display of Quantitive Information -- gets at the essence of communication and medium. more than it seems!
The Alchemy of Finance -- "reflexivity", but if you're also interested in Soros or some finance storytelling it's worth it.
The Selfish Gene -- as everyone else has said.
The Prize -- the history of oil. huh? yeah. Likely to change how you look at the history of technology, government, power, the saudis, and geopolitics.
I understood the world a whole lot better after reading
The Selfish Gene (e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introducti... but see if you can find a used copy of an earlier edition). This is the book that introduced the meme meme.
Biology in general is tremendously useful in providing you with a whole set of patterns and models of "things that work" (in the proper context, of course). Studying some college level general biology is recommended if you haven't already.
The word 'meme' was coined in "
The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution.
You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.
"Present Shock" by Douglas Rushkoff
"Super Forecasting" by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control" by Walter Mischel
"Precision: Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Horse Racing" by C X Wong
"Functional Swift" by Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra
__ DIDN'T FINISH __
"Thinking in Forth" by Leo Brodie
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick
__ QUEUED FOR READING __
"Porcelain" by Moby
"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
All these "evolutionary arguments" -- this isn't real science. It's just a bunch of "just so" stories that are tested in some of the flimsiest ways (one phenomenon demonstrated to a statistically significant degree -- therefore that must have been "the reason for the evolutionary change").
Listen, tons of features that an animal has are not correlated so highly to survival as to make enough selective pressure to make that feature come to completely dominate a population. I am very skeptical of the widely "held" assumption otherwise.
For example, lets say the human anorectal angle was specifically "evolved" for pooping while squatting. Is it a "just so" story or did the exact anorectal angle contribute SO MUCH to survival or reprosuction that it became the standard for bipedal humans?
Consider just how much relative advantage with survival and replication any given feature must have in order to come to dominate ALL the other features that are competing in the population. And this is in just one area. During a single reproduction, there are tons of genetic and epigenetic variables that could be selected for, which determine different things. Why would a specific feature in a specific part of the body, that provides merely a minor improvement at any given time, come to completely replace all other genotype expressions? I have never seen a good analysis of this, just hopeful handwaving, especially in popular books like The Selfish Gene.
It's almost a cliche on the Intarwebs, but it might help you to read some Dawkins, specifically
The Selfish Gene.
The progress of a species does not happen for the benefit of individual members, and that's true for us as humans as well. In that sense, as long as someone makes it, we all make it.
(Which is why it bothers me that so much is apparently riding on this one mission. The job of carrying human spaceflight forward is too much responsibility for one man, one company, or even one government, and Musk might do well to remind everyone of that before the launch.)
Actually, I was thinking of Finnish.
With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.
Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.
To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.
Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."
Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.
The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.
> Greg Bears theories on how germs and viruses actually control the overall operations of humans in a bid for self survival
Perhaps you have read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [0]
It is important to understand science, history, and human behaviour. The tendencies are clear. But biological reductionism has limited application for explaining complex systems. All you can really say is that people seek to maintain power and support favourable power structures. Whether this is because their microbiome "wants" this or it's simply better to be in control than to be a slave, I leave for other microbiomes to debate.
Woman remains a slave even in much of the modern world for reasons that have not changed. [1]
There is a political power structure allied with an economic power structure, and, in this case, an Abrahamic religion to blind the population and enforce conformity. If anything is capable of weakening the ideological power structure, it is the wealth generated by economic activity.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Is_the_Nigger_of_the_Wor...
In fact, the basic idea of The Selfish Gene is precisely a rejection of your previous statement: according to Dawkins, evolution is not concerned with the "propagation of the species", but with the propagation of individual genes. It is merely incidental that this sometimes results in competition among "survival machines", which happen to be grouped into species.
It's the conclusion of Dawkins'
The Selfish Gene and
The Extended Phenotype.
The Revolutionary Phenotype describes the transition of life from protein self-replicator (no known current ancestors), to protein-RNA tangos (no known current ancestors), to RNA replicators (current RNA viruses), to RNA-DNA tango (RNA-DNA reverse transcribing viruses), to DNA replicator (biological life).
The next revolutionary phenotype (let's call it RT) would be one that replaces DNA, first via a DNA-RT tango (machines editing our DNA) and eventually with RT (the machines) replacing DNA completely.
The video I linked above goes over the consequences of this. The book will describe it in more detail, and is slated to be released next month.
The book you're recommending seems to be about psychological and spiritual relationships between human beings, from what I can gather from a quick skim on Amazon. But not a single one of the reviews actually describes a single argument the book is making (strange), so it's hard to judge.
Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" is a scientific work about evolutionary selection at the gene level -- I don't recall him touching on psychology at all. (He provides evolutionary explanations for certain altruistic behaviors, but I don't recall him even starting on how they might be expressed via a psychological mechanism or at any conscious level.)
I can't quite imagine what either have to do with each other -- they seem to be such different topics. Or what Dawkins' work has to do with "western culture", or culture at all. At heart it's a quite mathematical/statistical argument.
I'm curious, what exactly do you see being refuted?
I swear no one knows a thing about science these days. People are so disconnected that they think "science" only happens in a sterile lab by guys in lab coats.
The behavior of a female mating with a more "alpha" male while at the same time deceiving her mate has been observed in a plethora of animal species. That this behavior exists is without question.
What Evolutionary Psychology does is provide an explanation for a behavior given what we know about evolution, biology, economics, game theory, etc. It is quite scientific. Many EP theories are very much testable, albeit usually impractical. Science is always a game of probabilities and finding the best explanation for an observation given known facts.
>Dawkins' books are also largely philosophical in nature, not scientific
His first (biology) book, The Selfish Gene, which established him as a leader in the field, is 100% science. An Ancestors Tale is also purely science.
"Why is that?"
Complex configurations have more entropy than simple configurations. Life causes entropy to increase more quickly. You can think of living beings as agents of entropy if you like, but that implies that entropy acts with purpose, which it doesn't.
I remember having an argument at college with someone who argued that the laws of thermodynamics conflicted with the theory of evolution. So asked him what entropy was. He gave a bunch of different layman's definitions, such as comparing it "disorder" or "chaos". I wrote down for him, "S = k log N" and told him that if he doesn't know Boltzmann's equation, he has no business lecturing me on thermodynamics. This person also said that there was no natural process that created information. I wanted to tell him that the laws of thermodynamics, combined with Boltzmann's equation, and used in combination with Shannon's definition of information, imply that the amount of information in a closed system must always increase. Interpreted physically, mutation increases the entropy/information in genetic code.
If you want to know more about entropy, talk to a chemist. Chemists have to know entropy or they can't do their jobs.
As for the linked blog post, the idea of applying theories from evolutionary biology to the study of information is usually attributed to Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene". This is the book that coined the term "meme", and I recommend it.
To me, the key point of "
The Selfish Gene" was that the base unit of evolution is the gene. I don't see anything in this article which disagrees with this notion, and they did quote a biologist who said something similar:
Pruitt and Goodnight don’t propose a mechanism by which the colonies boomeranged back to their original state. And without such a mechanism, some researchers argue that the results could be due to ordinary selection acting on individuals. “I think they over-interpret [the results] as evidence of group-level selection,” said Andy Gardner, a biologist at the University of Oxford. “Natural selection may factor in the needs of the group, to some extent, when it hones the adaptations of individuals. But group fitness is not the whole story.”
I understand Gardner's point to be that even if the selection pressure starts at the group level, it can still go down to the individual, and then down to the gene. In that sense, we're still selecting the gene.
Actually, upon reading the actual article, the authors say basically the same thing in the first paragraph:
"In societies in which individual fitness is tightly linked with the performance of the group, the theory of group selection predicts that evolution will favour traits in individuals that aid in maximizing their group’s success—which, in turn, are predicted to increase individuals’ long-term evolutionary interests. Here we define group selection as selection caused by the differential extinction or proliferation of groups1. This represents a broad definition that is not in any way adversarial to the importance of kinship selection for social evolution."
Assuming I understand the authors correctly, they mean that the "fitness" of an individual cannot always be considered to be in isolation. In order to determine the fitness of an individual, we may have to consider the combination of the individual, and the group in which they live. I see that as consistent with the notion of a "selfish gene", as I understand it.
While I can't cite any studies, Richard Dawkins presents some of the theory in
The Selfish Gene.
While total "nice guys" tend to finish last in a population of "bad guys", a localised population of "fool me once guys" can, given time, push out the "bad guys", and become a dominant population.
This works when the benefits of working together outweigh the benefits of screwing over the other guy. While a population of bad guys is busy screwing each other over, the fool me once guys are busy working well together, unless they get screwed over, in which case they can refuse to do business again. An outcome that makes it harder for bad guys to keep screwing people over.
But Chomsky didn't change when he was old. He became well-known for his politics when he was in his 30s. Dawkins was 35 when his "
The Selfish Gene" was published, and 45 when "The Blind Watchmaker" was published. Both are involved in areas that interested them when they were under 40 years old.
My point is that neither Chomsky (and now neither Dawkins) fits your description ... unless you say that people 30-40 of age are already old?
My other point is that most successful scientists don't shift into topics drastically outside their interests when they were young. Dirac? No. Erdős? No. Barbara McClintock? No. Von Braun? No. Karl Sharpless? No. Jocelyn Bell Burnell? No. Just take the list of Nobel prize winners for science and see how few of them got into politics later in life, or for that matter moved into topics markedly outside of their original area.
Yes, of course some do. But car dealership owners, and chefs (Samak Sundaravej, PM of Thailand, was a television chef for 7 years), and priests and singers also get into politics. So my last point was that there's nothing of note about a few scientists getting into politics as they get older, because people of all sorts of different fields go into politics as they get older.
Hence, my comment that there are strong biases which affect your parenthetical observation.
It
resembles "gene" but has an independent origin:
meme (n.)
"an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene
I fully understand what she means (I'm not an idiot) - and I think the way people describe "morals" is very vague to the point of being useless, as correct human actions can be easily enforced using other means (for example we have laws not to kill each other - Why? Well you could say it's the moral thing to do - and of course people say that. But it's also such a waste - everyone would live in fear and nothing would get done if this wasn't enforced - Murder is just economically bad, as is fraud, rape, abuse, battery, censorship and many other things - morals need not come into it - not enforcing these protections is more expensive - for more treatment in thinking like this see "
The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins).
See the problem with the terms "intrinsic worth" and "dignity" is that they are almost meaningless and very fuzzy. What do you mean exactly?
> “All lives have equal value”
Melinda Gates repeatedly emphasized the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s deep belief that all lives have equal value and everyone should be given the same chance.
I've come to the exact same conclusion that she has with harder terms. We need to give people the same chance because if done so - we are all better off.
> I can't stand this nimrod.
A professor at Oxford and the man who wrote The Selfish Gene, one of the best science books EVER, is many things. Nimrod is not one of them.
> Outside of the US, there is nowhere on the planet where that belief system comes close being 40% of a population.
This is patently false. Alot of europeans think this. They think this is a uniquely American problem. I have no idea where this myth comes from, but I have my suspicions: they are a victim of poor media coverage and a sense of cultural superiority.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4410927/...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4648598.stm
39% of people in the UK chose "creationism" or "intelligent design". One in three believe the earth is under 10,000 years old. These numbers are slightly, but not substantially, higher in the US.
No.
If for example you wanted to discuss The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, the first step would not be to "not use the ideas described within (e.g. genetics and biology research)". Ignoring the topics within and attacking the author for what he later wrote about Atheism or how he behaved in interviews would a mindblowingly terrible way to critique his book about biology.
When discussing or critiquing an essay, the first step is to actually address the ideas inside of it. Attacking the character of its author or other things they may have said about unrelated topics is not a rational substitute.
In this case, geofft's comment is flawed on multiple levels. Aside from making a purely ad hominem argument against the 2008 essay How to Disagree, its specific attack was the author's twitter usage that occurred more than five years later.
The irony here is that Pinker then embraces the American prison-industrial complex in The Blank Slate as being a necessary part of this trend, when the US is probably an outlier.
There is a similarity between Pinker (at least in The Blank Slate) and Gray in that they both paint their targets with one big flaw before bashing them. Gray's template straw man is a humanist who didn't read The Selfish Gene.
"In reality it's the species that has an evolutionary fitness".
Sorry but no. Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Selection does NOT act on the level of a bee colony, it acts on the level of the individual genes to be found within that colony. So sure some bees are infertile, but they are in service of the genes of the fertile bees. They are in effect enslaved by the genes of the Queen bee for instance.
Some types of ants will raid the colonies of other ants, and kidnap their children, bring them back, and the kidnapped children were grow up in service/servitude to the colony which had kidnapped them, and join in on future raids of what was once their home nest. The kidnapped ants are in service to their captors, to the genes of their captors. Say for instance the kidnapped ants were black, and their captors were red(or the other way around), so, even though the kidnapped ants do not have the "red" gene, they are helping to promote the selective advantage of the "red" gene by joining in the hunt for the colony of their captors. It is not a matter of "colony a" being selected for over and above "colony b". It is rather the genes of either colony getting selected for over other genes. All life, from viral to the naked apes like us, are subject to "the tyranny of the selfish gene".
photaweonJune 10, 2020
The selfish gene - 2 times - that's not programming wise, but it's an awesome book to get your thoughts rolling.
wpasconFeb 21, 2019
unmoleonAug 15, 2017
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was a great read too. A bit of a slog in some places but otherwise brilliant and insightful.
lake99onJune 7, 2015
MyrmornisonApr 5, 2015
sridcaonFeb 6, 2019
kartmanonSep 11, 2014
jonathansizzonMar 28, 2017
I'm sure you're not one of them, but nevertheless they are quite common, well-educated and intelligent though they often are.
hrishionAug 24, 2009
lelimaonAug 9, 2019
derwikionSep 1, 2009
samdonMar 29, 2010
vinutherajonDec 21, 2008
conjecturesonJune 5, 2020
joubertonOct 9, 2009
However, still prefer his The Selfish Gene for raising my consciousness the most.
ndiscussiononJuly 3, 2018
rjbworkonJuly 12, 2018
zedronMay 12, 2020
jdmoreiraonSep 11, 2017
This study conclusion fits pretty well within the general theme of the book.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it!
mopierottionApr 17, 2018
oiwejuvoiaonMay 11, 2019
As for books not working, that's absurd. 1) Some books work better than others. 2) To a large extent, you get more out of books the more you put into them.
stevenwooonJan 21, 2019
dreamcompileronApr 27, 2020
dcurtisonJuly 4, 2008
Then, if you're still interested, read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's a pretty good overview of biological principles and true evolution.
nimrodyonJan 2, 2010
Made me wish I had taken biology...
qvrjueconJune 11, 2021
jshawlonMar 27, 2017
tldr; our bodies are just a side effect of the gene's greater plan
gskonJuly 5, 2010
MikeCaponeonOct 8, 2009
Okay, you've just crossed the pompous ahole threshold. Good day to you, sir.
pauldelanyonJan 18, 2019
nollidgeonMay 5, 2011
nickpponSep 30, 2020
Read "The Selfish Gene".
pesentionOct 2, 2014
kuuonJuly 2, 2019
dkarapetyanonDec 13, 2014
helveticamanonOct 3, 2008
kbutleronSep 22, 2018
I probably got it from study of artificial intelligence/machine learning/evolutionary algorithms - I had no indication most of the others in my discussions had read The Selfish Gene either.
nostromoonAug 28, 2017
Spending time and energy raising one's children isn't selfish of the parent as an individual. But it's selfish from the view of their genes.
arjunnarayanonJuly 16, 2015
I consider this issue pretty much answered by Chapter 2 of the Selfish Gene, "the replicators". Link: http://www.evolbiol.ru/gene/index_2en.html#02
super_marioonMay 26, 2012
Even popular books like Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" talk in some detail about it, and this 25 hour video course is also a must see for pretty much everyone:
http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
sjyonFeb 21, 2019
emiliobumacharonMar 12, 2020
sorenn111onSep 4, 2018
almutasimonNov 25, 2014
correct_horseonFeb 26, 2021
Ygg2onFeb 27, 2018
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.
nkozyraonDec 13, 2014
Any more modern books of note?
turbletyonMar 20, 2021
1. https://books.google.com/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&pg=PA192
snikerisonOct 18, 2017
If you're interested in how evolution works, check out The Selfish Gene.
villmannonMar 9, 2017
Red Queen, Matt Ridley;
Sperm Wars, Robin Baker;
Read in that order, the books explain much of what is going on in our society and lives. This has enabled me to to analyse my own, and others, actions and motives.
danieltillettonJan 29, 2016
maratdonOct 18, 2011
Please read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Unlike his recent work, that one is really good.
krapponNov 20, 2020
The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in 1976. The internet got the term from the book.
chmonAug 15, 2013
Start with "The Selfish Gene", his best IMO.
Have fun!
lisperonJuly 10, 2019
kuuonFeb 6, 2019
n4r9onJune 13, 2018
cortesoftonMay 22, 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
dominotwonSep 4, 2018
Freedom from the Known - Jiddu
For decades I've been plagued by 'what is one supposed to do in life' question, I've been restless for years.
These two books gave me atleast a logical framework to understand my frustrations.
lisperonJuly 10, 2019
> Natural selection works on ecosystems too
No, it doesn't. Ecosystems don't reproduce. Natural selection works on genes (and memes). See Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene."
hyperpalliumonMar 18, 2017
rex_lupionNov 21, 2020
between host-parasites are two of the many intriguing topics of evolutionary biology that never fails to amaze me. Highly recommend reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I've recently finished reading it, it's fascinating.
dakrootieonMar 7, 2017
It's a masterpiece.
pklausleronSep 2, 2017
dllthomasonDec 31, 2020
a3nonFeb 17, 2021
> The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. ...
caublestoneonSep 24, 2016
ArnoVWonFeb 17, 2021
The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[12]
shevisonApr 10, 2021
iainmerrickonAug 28, 2017
(Dawkins was a prominent advocate of Axelrod's work, though. And "The Selfish Gene" is definitely a great read in its own right.)
benjaminjackmanonAug 4, 2017
scott_sonFeb 5, 2019
nickpponMar 22, 2021
s_kilkonMay 17, 2018
Another instance of techies being led astray by flimsy, reactionary pseudo-science.
lbrandyonMay 25, 2008
Sounds exactly like me. I strongly suggest:
1. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
2. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
...or if you need a little inspiration...
3. Founders at Work
ndiscussiononFeb 5, 2019
mojoeonJan 4, 2018
cmauryonDec 5, 2010
Added to this list are:
Singularity is Near and
The Selfish Gene
perilunaronDec 6, 2020
BjoernonJune 13, 2010
billswiftonOct 10, 2009
scardineonOct 17, 2017
[1] http://a.co/i5iN6Jm
asdflkjonMar 31, 2008
No, actually. The one thing it strives for is propagation of the genes, not the species. Read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. It will make things clearer.
ndiscussiononJan 30, 2019
aalhouronSep 13, 2018
smackayonMar 3, 2018
rjknightonDec 15, 2013
layoutIfNeededonNov 15, 2020
Allocator2008onApr 13, 2009
"On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection"
by Charles Darwin, 1859.
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, 1974 is a good appendum there as well but once mastering "Origin" one really has the basics one needs.
catalogiaonJuly 18, 2020
ThomPeteonNov 16, 2015
gumbyonJune 18, 2016
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
prawnonFeb 21, 2011
ThomPeteonApr 9, 2015
hgaonMar 13, 2010
I found something akin, not so much "interactions" as in understanding the "why" about many human things, in reading Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
AntiImperialistonDec 13, 2020
I put "The Selfish Gene" and "The Demon-Haunted World" and I got "Women, Race and Class" by Angela Davis and "The Feynman Lectures".
empath75onJan 19, 2017
justincormackonDec 11, 2012
lisperonMay 22, 2018
s2r2onAug 7, 2011
Too bad, a real list from Torvalds could have been interesting.
sondr3onNov 2, 2014
dragonbonheuronMar 6, 2018
kyberiasonFeb 6, 2019
ashishmax31onJan 26, 2021
LuconOct 2, 2014
It's one of my favourite books, but I wonder if it had much of a lasting influence academically. It seems this article doesn't even touch upon the selfish gene viewpoint.
berntbonMar 28, 2016
(The research is well corroborated, except by some Marxist biologists. :-) )
You can start by checking this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Hamilton
amadeuspagelonSep 4, 2018
theophrastusonNov 20, 2015
IndianAstronautonDec 13, 2014
mindcrimeonFeb 3, 2018
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie
The Game - Neil Strauss
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
... among others.
jacobolusonSep 22, 2018
jacquesmonNov 16, 2015
Dawkins.
UdikonJan 26, 2018
huevosabioonJan 27, 2018
skadamouonApr 16, 2021
yatsykonMar 6, 2017
rfuggeronJan 27, 2011
The Fountainhead
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
edanmonJan 29, 2016
Here's a question: What other books that were written for a popular audience (or that achieved a largely popular audience) also served as works that affected science itself? E.g. the article talks about The Selfish Gene being both a pop-sci book, but also a book that profoundly changed the field of Evolution.
Are there other good examples?
stevenwooonApr 16, 2018
paulryanrogersonSep 25, 2018
aterimperatoronMay 5, 2011
I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.
paulgbonFeb 28, 2009
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
kolleykibberonFeb 5, 2019
lentil_souponJuly 31, 2015
Mindblowing book if you haven't read it.
spectramaxonAug 17, 2019
joubertonOct 12, 2009
Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
ideonexusonMar 10, 2017
ArslanAtajanovonFeb 3, 2018
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"Deep Work" by Cal Newport
"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
grondiluonFeb 6, 2019
* Human, too human, by Frederick Nietzsche ;
* The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris ;
* La Femme est le propre de l'homme, by Rolf Schappi ;
* Biologie de la mort, by Frederik Revah ;
* The Manipulated Man, by Esther Vilar ;
villmannonNov 30, 2015
The Red Queen - Matt Ridley (Sex and evolution)
Sperm Wars - Robin Baker (Sex as the driving force in society)
The books, if red in that order, provide a total picture of evolution in our society and the driving forces.
motxiloonNov 4, 2010
hugh3onMay 17, 2011
daniel-cussenonDec 4, 2007
I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
mp_cnbonOct 3, 2010
- 'The Selfish Gene' - Richard Dawkins
Grokking the concept changed the way I thought about life forever.
- 'Quantum Reality' - Nick Herbert
One of the best introductory level books on quantum physics mysteries. No nonsense.
- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
The book that introduced me to Kant, Hume and philosophy of science. Just for that, I'm forever indebted to it.
Some favorite fiction books -
- Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
Loved 'Snowcrash' too.
- 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' - Robert Heinlein
- Anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, Somerset Maugham
sageikosaonJuly 5, 2013
majewskyonOct 14, 2017
dejbonOct 12, 2009
bloodorangeonMay 11, 2013
"Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There" - Lewis Carroll
"Dracula" - Bram Stoker
"Frankenstein" - Mary Shelly
"On Education" - Bertrand Russell
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" - Douglas Adams
"Animal Farm" - George Orwell
"1984" - George Orwell
"Lord of The Flies" - William Golding
"Brave New World" - Aldous Huxley
"Gulliver's Travels" - Jonathan Swift
"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins
BigCanOfTunaonJune 7, 2015
The idea that organisms evolved to be survival vehicles for our genes totally inverted and simplified my view of life. It gave me a plausible explanation for how we came to be, and put the final nail in religion's coffin (for me).
jvandenbroeckonDec 27, 2011
avaronJune 13, 2010
There's a lot of backstabbing and competition that goes on within individual hives of the social insects.
enkionMar 22, 2008
mattmanseronAug 8, 2015
I read this about the same time I read the Selfish Gene, had a similar effect. It's one of the few philosophy books that I still think about today.
taylorfinleyonJuly 10, 2019
Edit: with reflection I think I understand what you were getting at, that the memes contained in the Nag Hamadi corpus had been successfully suppressed by their memetic cousins which for whatever reason came to be the dominant 'version' of that information, until an accident of history reintroduced the different versions that had been all but extincted in the memepool.
UdikonOct 3, 2015
The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins - makes you look at living beings as software, and at the world as an immense optimization algorithm.
Permutation City by Greg Egan - the perfectly rational idea that the mind is computable is rife with apparently unsolvable paradoxes.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Maths, logic, patterns, artificial intelligence, beauty, art and self-referentiality.
sudofailonAug 14, 2018
Valley of Genius[1] is a history of silicon valley, but told via excerpts and quotes from influential members of the SV community. It's quite a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it. I'm in my early thirties, so this book really helps to provide context for when people say we're just rebuilding things that have been done before. Learning about what was going on at Xerox with Alan Kay is just incredible.
The other book I'm reading is the Selfish Gene[1], by Richard Dawkins. I've read this book 3-4 times already, so at this point I read it for almost philosophical reasons. It's a wonderful explanation of evolution and micro-biology. I'm sure there are more up-to-date texts, but Dawkins is a superb writer.
[1] Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
[2] The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
stallmanifoldonFeb 5, 2019
dmichulkeonAug 8, 2016
"The Selfish Gene" (R. Dawkins)
"Dune" (F. Herbert)
"Walden II" (B. F. Skinner)
robocatonJuly 16, 2019
Also anything of Oliver Sacks' popular books: humorous, interesting, and insightful.
For evolution, I personally still enjoy reading The Selfish Gene (and The Extended Phenotype), but maybe you should read it first (because although it is superbly written, many people would not find it stimulating).
scott_sonJune 7, 2009
It was a throw-away comparison, not the point of the book. But, the term "meme" is a good meme, and it caught on.
typonAug 22, 2020
The well-known book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has an interesting chapter titled Nice Guys Finish First giving a good illustration relevant to this idea.
ThePhysicistonJune 7, 2015
The book is a mind-boggling journey through our own evolutionary history and delivers surprising and sometimes funny insights on many aspects of our behavior as modern humans (e.g. it attempts to explain the origins of religion, dancing and music). The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you understand in detail which processes have transformed us from primates to modern humans. Truly fascinating, beautiful stuff.
Most people probably know Dunbar from "Dunbar's number", which relates the relative brain size of animals to the number of individuals with which they live together (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number). This often (mis-)cited number is but one example of Dunbar's ingenious, math-driven approach to many problems in biology and evolution.
To maximize mind-blowing capacity, combine Dunbar with Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Until_Yesterday), which explains how our ancestors and many traditional tribes lived (and sometimes still live), and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene), which explains many aspects of life and social organization using mathematics and evolution theory.
For me, this stuff is more mysterious, thrilling and captivating than any fiction book I've ever read.
enraged_camelonOct 14, 2017
Of course biology has goals. Every living organism's goal is to propagate its genes to the next generation. For details on this, read The Selfish Gene.
otalponMar 6, 2017
Yet sadly 90% of the population still misunderstand/poorly understand evolution by natural selection. They seem to think it's progressive, or some mysterious force of nature that produces "better" animals over time.
dreneionAug 12, 2009
Most importantly, it sounds like this book will provide a good summation of Evolution. Well thought out books that summarize an area of knowledge make it easier for me to create/solidify my own framework within that area. Which it turn makes it easier to branch further out without getting completely overwhelmed (a little bit is fine!)
I'm definitely looking forward to this. Hopefully I'll be done with his "The Selfish Gene" by the point this comes out.
0xfebaonSep 7, 2016
Richard Dawkins wrote a book on just that. "The Selfish Gene" (~1970). However, recent epigenetics discounts just the gene as the sole 'unit' of propogation.
FD3SAonFeb 8, 2014
That being said, I have yet to read a book which so elegantly describes evolution as The Selfish Gene. This includes Darwin's own works. It is an absolute masterpiece, and was the foundation of my lifelong passion for biology. I consider Dawkins the most influential man in my life. That is why it hurts me to see him behave in such a counter-productive manner.
bsanr2onOct 6, 2020
xtiansimononMar 21, 2021
"broad academic or even intellectual credibility"
I see what you did there.
I don't see a problem with memetics being non-mainstream in the way it's described here. Sure. If you want a job doing something called _memetics_. If you want to gain clout and respectability among your peers for illuminating some dark corner of the worlds problems with your writing, memetics is not going to impress anyone.
I say, More ideas the better!
ZeroGravitasonJuly 1, 2009
Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their own creation.
I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much time online.
I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get worked up about.
Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":
"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It’s simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don’t, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I’m earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there’s nothing free about it."
I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without direct payment or advertisment.
0xfebaonJuly 14, 2017
The Great Filter on the other hand, relies on assuming
the steps from evolved intelligence (now) to solar system colonization/FTL travel are not only possible, but just a matter of a few millennia or so. Which is a huge assumption.
xutopiaonFeb 5, 2019
- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan - It gave me the tools required to cut through bullshit and helped me free myself from the shackles of a religious upbringing
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Gave me the courage to look at things differently when everyone thinks we know it all
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - It made me question what I was doing professionally and I now have a list of questions to answer whenever I am in a startup to help guide me
- Compersion by Hypatia From Space - It help remove limits to how I can love and care for the people that are important to me.
uniqueidonApr 21, 2021
kaycebasquesonMay 11, 2018
+1 for Man’s Search For Meaning.
Lord of the Flies. Amazing that this is assigned reading in middle school (or high school).
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Really drove home the importance of paying attention to language and framing.
Moby Dick. I’m amazed at myself for reading this on my own in high school. There’s something about that era of sea travel that speaks to my soul.
6 Pillars Of Self-Esteem. This was a HN recommendation. I’ve been doing the sentence completion exercises for about 6 months, and it’s been astounding to palpably feel my self-awareness increase.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Discusses the underlying group dynamics that influence the progress of science.
A Fire Upon The Deep. Just an amazing work of sci-fi exploring the internal logic of radically different forms of intelligence.
The Sane Society. It’s liberating to reflect on some of the crazy things that capitalism pressures us to do.
The Power Of Now. I think I might have some more issues if I re-read it, but it undoubtedly had a huge impact on me and made me introspect deeply and finally “get” meditation.
lelimaonMar 14, 2019
As humans we kind of do a similar thing, kindergartens, schools(other people that we don't know) rise our children and spend more time with them than us as parents.
As many times and many people in HN, I'll recommend this book: The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
lukas099onJuly 22, 2015
It started out as a programming bug ("auditory cheesecake"): certain arrangements of sound hijack the brain's ability to recognize patterns and emotions in pitch of voice, creating an emotional response in the listener. The best musicians are those who are best at manipulating their listeners' emotions in this way. It's not hard to see how this made them more successful reproducers early on.
At this point people could have evolved to be better at resisting this sort of manipulation; however, this proved to be too high an evolutionary hurdle to overcome. Instead, the people who were most susceptible to this manipulation actually gained an advantage -- Since they were most likely to mate with musicians, their offspring were most likely to become the best musicians in the next generation!
Thus, a positive feedback loop was created where successive generations became more musically-talented and more susceptible to the effects of music.
If you find this hypothesis interesting, I highly suggest Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene. I think he calls this general phenomenon the "sexy male" hypothesis.
3minus1onFeb 5, 2019
* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
3minus1onFeb 5, 2019
* Thinking Fast and Slow - study after study shows that we exhibit so, so many cognitive biases, as our minds take shortcuts. there are some things you can do to recognize and mitigate these biases.
* Imagined Communities - the notion of a "nation" is only 300 years old and has no objective basis, only the fact that a group of people agree that it is a thing.
colechristensenonMay 13, 2019
There is doubt that a set of behaviors which is so prevalent in the population is just an accident and a disease. Evolutionary pressures exist to optimize gene expression ratios in a population. Put differently, when a certain gene becomes rare in a population individuals with that gene have a significant advantage in life and reproduce more – when the same gene becomes over prevalent individuals with that gene have a significant disadvantage and reproduce less. There are traits which have pressure to be a certain proportion of a population.
ADHD or whatever else you may call it could very well be that. Ancient societies which had a small proportion of a certain kind of person thrived because their different behavior made them successful. It doesn't have to be a disease to not fit in to a certain society.
dmichulkeonMar 25, 2016
A mother needs to provide a complete eco-system (uterus) for the baby to live and grow which affects even the hormonal system.
A man doesn't need this, so he can use this energy or "program space" in his genome for other things.
It's one of Dawkins theses in his superb book "The selfish gene" [1] where he basically reduces evolution to game theory (without explicity saying so).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
berntbonFeb 6, 2012
That is an argument based on group evolution, largely disproved (some unusual edge cases might exist).
I'd recommend reading "The Selfish Gene", it is an incredibly fun journey in beautiful English (Disclaimer: I'm a non-native English speaker.) It will probably change your world view.
Ace17onApr 26, 2019
itself" ( Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene )
Is consciousness different from self-awareness?
Because we're already using an experimental protocol for testing self-awareness in animals.
lolconJan 30, 2016
I think what I liked most about the book is the (clearly labeled) speculations. He was already anticipating a lot.
madhadrononMay 11, 2019
Serious non-fiction tomes? I mean, I guess if you regard Harlequin romance as difficult novels. Okay, I'll stop giggling long enough to skim the rest.
Reading the rest, the core complaint seems to be that most people cannot effectively read and most people cannot effectively write. Which is true.
flombleonJan 3, 2017
The principle behind this is that evolution operates at the level of genes, rather than individuals. I recommend Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a fuller explanation.
DanBConMay 25, 2012
Dawkin's book is called "The Selfish Gene". It is not called "Selfish Adenine" or "Selfish exon".
Your analogy is interesting. Are 'genes' for buffer overflows easily found via binary searches? Would that be a defective gene? Is input sanitisation an example of a beneficial gene being transmitted, via sex of open source and responsible diclosure?
arketyponJune 9, 2020
mindcrimeonFeb 5, 2019
Another was Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell.
I'd also cite The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand as having influenced me, although I read it when I was older and found that it mostly reinforced ideas that I was already sympathetic towards. Similar situation with Atlas Shrugged, also by Rand.
I could probably also call out The Soul of a New Machine by Kidder, as being a primary influence that pushed me in the direction of getting involved with computers.
neeleshsonFeb 5, 2019
tylerjwilk00onFeb 25, 2020
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxt--mMjwA
Allocator2008onFeb 5, 2009
ThomPeteonMar 16, 2010
To ad to the stimulus/response.
Dawkins has a pretty interesting theory in "The Selfish Gene". In it he talks about why little birds peep.
One conclusion could be that they peep because they are hungry. But another more interesting conclusion he makes is that they peep to attack predators thus forcing the mother to silence them by finding food.
The important part is to spot the difference between when they are really sad/afraid and when they are simply trying to get things their way.
On top of that some children like my son don't use pacifiers which makes it quite a bit more challenging to balance things out.
bonoboTPonMay 27, 2020
I have implicit retention of many things, but I often forgot the sources, I cannot list my favorite books on the spot, but if we discuss a topic I'd have flashes of relevant memories come back.
It's like I'd grapple with a book, dream about it, get confused, shaken, startled, questioning, then I integrate it back into normal life. Especially deeper books, like I had with The Selfish Gene which dispelled so many myths I had and confirmed things I thought to be correct.
You have to go through the Baader Meinhof effect of seeing that thing everywhere. With each book I view the world from an entirely new point of view, that each seem all encompassing (how ads manipulate you, how social status and prestige works, how the finance world works and cheats, how employers manipulate, how sexual behavior works, how quantum physics works or evolution or mental games we play etc), to get the smug feeling that this current book explains it all. After going through this with 5 books, you realize that no one story explains it all, but then what to do, read about narratives, move to nihilism, then realize the boundaries of rationality and faith, believing that "good" may be in one sense illusory but worth striving for. Then you read up on more traditional views on this etc.
Trying to "retain" is a bit like measuring the quality of your friendships based on how many life facts you've memorized about them. It's surely correlated, but also misses the point. The time you spent together and the experiences you had together are valuable in themselves.
Allocator2008onOct 15, 2008
igraviousonOct 27, 2010
Even though I've read The Selfish Gene by Dawkins and I know it is all biological evolutionary programming the feelings that are triggered after the birth of your kid are very difficult to put into words.
It also made me realise why my parents made some of the choices they made in their lives. And parenthetically - not saying I agree with them but I didn't have the requisite empathy back then and having a kid gave that to me I think.
datashowonDec 29, 2019
For example, The Selfish Gene and Advanced Algebra are two very different books, but they can be both categorized as nonfiction.
Maybe you are right with the conclusion, i.e. CNN or TYT should not be both categorized as “Partisan Left,” but you need a better reason.
banach_donSep 22, 2020
I have read that book, I believe I understood its central message, I could probably explain it (not very elegantly) in a couple of sentences, and I can't point to any other particular benefit I drew from reading the book, and yet I'm very glad I read it.
jfengelonApr 16, 2021
Practically every explanation linking some human behavior to genetics is a fable, devoid of serious evidence, and usually confirming somebody's cultural bias. For example, arranged marriage is far too recent a phenomenon to have a significant genetic basis.
"The Selfish Gene" is a very important book with a lot of interesting ideas, but like a lot of pop science it gives people a misleading idea of just how much they understand about a field. Evolutionary psychology is an incredibly primitive field at best, and at worst acts more like a pseudoscience (especially as practiced by non-scientists). Be incredibly suspicious about extrapolating any of it to human behavior.
msteinertonJan 29, 2016
I believe Dawkins would argue this doesn't result in an evolutionarily stable strategy. Refer to chapter 10 of the Selfish Gene, I think it directly answers the concerns you have.
crazygringoonJune 25, 2019
Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.
It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in The Selfish Gene itself?
If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential moral psychologists today.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...
jkhdigitalonJune 5, 2021
In fact, Dawkins coined the word meme in that book, referring to a unit of culture which propagates through imitation and repetition. He clearly recognized the tremendous influence memes can have on the behavior of descendants outside of any genetic factors:
“But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.”
mbrockonFeb 26, 2019
That sounds hokey, but to explain briefly: GEB indicates that your self (your consciousness of being someone) is a swirling self-referential symbolic process (a "strange loop"); Dawkins indicates that your self is a kind of evolved meme whose function in nature is to further your family of genetic replicators; Wittgenstein indicates that your self is a habitual user of language where deep meaning is not as important as social function; and Markov chains indicate that your self's use of language can be modeled at least to a rough approximation by extremely simple statistics.
So I clearly remember wondering "Am I just a kind of slightly more advanced Markov chain?"
I think this is also the unsettling core question of Blade Runner: are we also artificial?
I wonder what theologians might say about this question.
mitteldorfonDec 11, 2014
stevenwooonNov 14, 2019
ProcrastesonFeb 5, 2019
* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks
* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.
Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.
sheepleherdonMay 16, 2016
The reason I felt it necessary to add the "context" to your statement is that our world consists of many many interacting postitive and negative stochastic processes, and when we look at a simple "violence" statistic it might seem "oh, this is terrible, we must stop this" when in fact things are much more complex than that.
Tech-NoironFeb 7, 2018
I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety":
https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s
Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes
bonoboTPonSep 3, 2020
Also, that quote on playing just dodges the question. Why is what we call "play" so pleasurable to animals? "Because they enjoy it" is not an answer. Why don't animals do other things for pleasure? And there are very good evolutionary arguments, but that's not the point now.
leblancfgonSep 15, 2016
First off, I would feel very uncomfortable contradicting Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Bill Joy in one fell swoop. Who am I to judge, though. Argument from authority can be fallacious, sure, so let's not go there.
Think about this for a minute. By the same argument you're taking, we are just lumps of organic molecules replicating with DNA, surely we can't feel anything, right? The thing you're not considering here is emergent behaviour.
Now, you haven't talked about self-programming machines in your article, and I'm pretty sure that's what all the really smart people you've rebuked in your subtitle are scared of. Do a quick Google search for "self-programming" AND "machine learning" AND "genetic". If you've read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, you should be getting goosebumps right about now. If not, and are interested in AI in any way, I cannot stress hard enough how badly you need to go out and get that book.
I was also surprised to see you didn't include Nick Bostrom's book called Superintelligence (2014) in your quotes. If you haven't check it out, I would highly recommend it. It goes deep and wide into how a sudden, exponentially growing spike of machine intelligence could impact our society.
obelosonFeb 5, 2019
“The Mating Mind” by Geoffrey Miller (another biologist who would do the world a favor by sticking to his domain of expertise) came to me more recently but has left a similar impression. It impeccably elaborates upon the power of sexual selection and how it intertwines with natural selection.
qb45onMay 6, 2017
But hell if you are wrong about the general trend ;)
edit:
Really what TFA did is it just falsified some extremely naive and humanly-subjective interpretation of the slogan "survival of the fittest", without bothering to mention that this interpretation had already been known to be defective years ago and there are subtler alternatives which don't have this problem.
hackinthebochsonJune 23, 2017
The problem is that evidence for this has been extremely hard to come by.
> I am not aware of a clear answer to these questions, so I would be excited to hear from you if you know of one.
Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene very elegantly explains the evolution of cooperative/altruistic behavior through analyzing the dynamics of gene selection. It's a great read for anyone interested in the finer details of evolution. The main takeaway is that cooperative behavior in organisms can be understood as genes encouraging their own proliferation by increasing the fitness of its copies in other organisms; a gene to help my brother is really a gene helping itself.
KuhlMenschonFeb 6, 2019
In his latest collection of essays originally published in Natural History magazine, paleontologist Gould examines diverse and diverting topics. The title piece refers to toes, and we learn that five is not necessarily the optimum number. Gould re-examines the work of astronomer Edmund Halley and 16th-century Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who pinpointed the moment of creation (Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.);
Edit: I see The Selfish Gene listed here quite a bit. It might be of special interest to you to read Dawkins "rival" on the other side of the pond - Stephan Jay Gould. His "punctuated equilibrium" resonates with me more than Dawkins take on evolution, simply because it involves something less "neat".
Plus, even as a child I found Gould made me laugh out loud sometimes.
yamrzouonApr 27, 2020
From the book:
> The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. There is no reason to suppose that electronic computers are conscious when they simulate, although we have to admit that in the future they may become so. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.
thedudeabides5onMar 8, 2021
Basically, times in life where it's a 'positive sum' as opposed to 'zero-sum' game.
Non-zero by Robert Wright, is probably the best synthesis on this topic.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9526993-nonzero
maskedinvaderonFeb 26, 2018
Ive always been fascinated by ants and their social structure, first introduced to their amazing skills in Richard Dawking's 'The Selfish Gene' -[3]
1.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1380471/Survi...
2. https://entomologytoday.org/2014/02/11/ants-can-lift-up-to-5...
3. https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Popular-Science/dp/01928...
pklausleronMar 27, 2017
acqqonFeb 9, 2019
The original meaning:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
The word meme was “coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[11][16] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[17]”
eivarvonSep 9, 2015
Picked this up after recently finishing The Selfish Gene, as I remembered what a thrilling read Crime and Punishment was.
Dostoyevsky is funny, thought-provoking and anxiety-inducing as ever.
Unlike some other authors, he rarely makes characters whose viewpoints he disagrees with into cheap caricatures with bad arguments.
He is intellectually honest and provides unprecedented (at least for its time) psychological insight into his complex characters.
I have always been sad to finish Dostoyevsky's books, but as the Penguin Classics version is around 1000 pages long, it will hopefully take a bit longer this time around.
jonathansizzonApr 26, 2016
It turns out that, although possibly a virtue when programming, hubris can easily lead you astray if you're outside your field of expertise. Humility is more useful in these situations.
I am sure that this holds true for many other topics; it should give us all pause before we accept statements as true just because they sound agreeable to us, or before we regurgitate opinions whose veracity we're not in a position to verify.
Incidentally, I've also spotted this on the TV show QI, many of whose clever 'facts' are misleading at best or just plain incorrect.
colechristensenonJune 5, 2020
It's then easy to justify altruistic behavior when the best interests of an individual isn't up for considerations but the best interests of a gene. Selfishness isn't competing against yourself.
Use this drive to work with the evolutionary dynamics of populations in a "cheating" vs. "cooperating" and you get an arms race of cheaters vs cooperators which tends around some equilibrium which, going back to selfish genes, tends to balance the costs and rewards of selfishness which in lots of different creatures tends towards cooperation between individuals quite a lot.
tvladeckonFeb 5, 2019
Evolution is the reason we exist! Understanding how it happens and why it can lead to counterintuitive outcomes is very important. He also narrates his own audiobooks and is excellent at it.
The Blank Slate & The Better Angels of our Nature by Pinker
Both books counter much accepted wisdom. The second book, in particular, will make you think of humanity in a fundamentally different light.
The Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness by Taleb
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!
trabant00onSep 22, 2020
So for these examples it is my opinion that it's not a case of books not working, but of very healthy brain garbage collector discarding information that is not actionable and in a lot of cases not even correct. Popular edutainment is not exactly "some serious non-fiction tomes".
flyinRyanonDec 19, 2012
Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
>What Evolutionary Psychology does is provide an explanation for a behavior given what we know about evolution, biology, economics, game theory, etc.
It provides a guess on what could have happened based on those fields. To be science you need to be able to form theories and for an assertion to be a theory it must be falsifiable. An assertion to explain the modern woman's behavior toward mating in terms of evolution can not be falsified, so it doesn't qualify as a theory. Doesn't sound much like science to me.
As far as I know, you're in a pretty small minority with your claim that Evo Psych is science. A lot of people debate Psychology itself being science, but Evo Psych. Wow, may as well put homeopathy, voodoo and everything else in.
>His first (biology) book, The Selfish Gene, which established him as a leader in the field, is 100% science.
Nice. You imply that I know nothing about science yet you say a book that is largely speculating on what might have happened and why it might have happened is 100% science.
pmoriartyonAug 8, 2017
Of course, the term "viral" is itself used metaphorically here, and is also used as an analogy to a biological entity. But in this case, I think more people are aware of the existence of viruses than they are of the original meaning of the term "meme", though they might not make the conscious connection between a "viral" idea, video, or image and that of a biological virus or how it spreads "virally".
splikeonDec 7, 2016
Also, if anyone is watching Westworld (spoilers), it seems to come to the same conclusion funnily enough. What finally gives the androids consciousness is some kind of recursive idea of listening to themselves.
radu_floricicaonJan 17, 2010
fsckboyonAug 2, 2021
rectangonJune 28, 2018
This is a popular line of thought (try googling "corporation evolutionary biology", which gets you to pages like https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-biology-of-corporate-survival ), but it has a weakness: it's hard to be rigorous. In the field of evolutionary biology, experiments are hard to design and hypotheses are hard to falsify, so a lot of the writing is deeply infected by the author's prejudices.
I'm sure there's something there, and I'm confident that whatever it is is more plausible than fragile conspiracy theories like the Illuminati. But exactly how non-biological entities compete and evolve is hard to say.
lkrychonFeb 5, 2019
Non-Fiction (Social)
Fiction
edit: formatting
kashyapconMay 11, 2019
But I have a non-trivial quibble -- please don't be too quick to dismiss Richard Dawkins' science
writing. Keeping comparisons with the giant, i.e. Darwin, aside, Dawkins is one of the most eloquent science writers. On par with the inimitable Carl Sagan, dare I say.
A year or so ago I've read The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins (which, I gather, touches the same ideas from The Selfish Gene). He writes extremely poignantly about "cumulative selection", the "immortal gene", "adaptive complexity" (the particular property of living things that is replicable only by Darwinian selection) and many other riveting topics. Not to mention lots of fun and meaningful analogies related to various computer-related concepts (if you enjoy that sort of thing) and to the natural world, to explain DNA and related ideas (refer to "The Power of Archives" chapter). Also, have a gander at Science in the Soul, also by Dawkins, a collection of essays; FWIW, very much recommend it. Some fine writing in there.
(Note to self: Resume reading On the Origin of Species again.)
lisperonJuly 23, 2015
> which is possible in environments of abundance
Sure, but environments of abundance do not occur naturally. The natural state is for exponential growth to continue until resource pressure limits it, which is to say, until abundance ends. (This is because, in nature, alleles that reproduce exponentially always out-compete those that don't.)
Yes, we can produce abundance, which in turn can produce peace. But that's an artificial process, not a natural one.
joe_the_useronJuly 16, 2011
Well perhaps both you and Dawkins are naive - or perhaps only you are...
It should be rather obvious that ninety percent of the impact any book or idea system is the elevator pitch. The elevator pitch for Dawkin is "we are controlled by our (selfish) genes". If Dawkins includes caveats, well, how sweat of him but it really doesn't change the basic effect of writing a book called "The Selfish Gene". All your caveats are fine too but I suspect only reading the executive is definitely facilitated by evolution...
jonathansizzonJune 7, 2015
'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', SJ Gould and RC Lewontin
'The Origins of Genome Architecture', M Lynch
'Mutation-Driven Evolution', M Nei
ollysbonMay 24, 2011
wahernonJune 22, 2018
My point being, the conceit of The Matrix is less far fetched when you explore these less abstract concepts more firmly grounded in scientific thinking. In many ways they're far more fascinating because the reality is both more intricate and relatable.
knomeonMar 8, 2020
wahernonJune 7, 2019
I read it 10 years ago, and Dawkins' book remains modern even today. Genetic evolutionary science hasn't surpassed it, we've just developed a richer understanding of the chemistry.
habermanonMay 22, 2018
I did. Well the first several chapters at least. I did not find a convincing answer to the question I am raising here.
> The phenotype of a gene is not necessarily constrained by any physical boundaries.
Sure it's not necessarily constrained. But in practice there is very high correlation between family relatedness and physical proximity / social group.
If the main rebuttal against group selection is "families can be spread out", I don't think that warrants the level of criticism that is leveled at it. An organism surrounded by genetically unrelated peers is the exception, not the rule.
EDIT: Reading a bit more, I think I may be understanding this distinction better. "Kin selection" and "group selection" are more different than the names suggest. "Kin selection" means that natural selection incentivizes an individual to be altrustic towards their own kin. "Group selection" means that natural selection will favor the survival of an entire group over another group based on the comparative genetic strengths of the two groups.
p1mrxonMay 4, 2021
https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/tutorials/Adaptat...
So I guess the idea behind genetic engineering is to destabilize the ratio and wipe out the species faster than natural evolution can respond.
I would suggest reading "The Selfish Gene", which covers a lot of topics like this.
lkrychonDec 18, 2018
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Coming Into the Country - John McPhee
The Unwinding - George Packer
Anything by James C Scott (Thinking Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed)
The Righteous Mind - John Haidt
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (Regardless of how you feel about his current public persona, this book published in 1976 is an absolute classic)
snowwrestleronJan 30, 2016
One of the most important concepts to take away from The Selfish Gene is that the idea that genes have "interests" is just an interesting thought experiment to explore how gene selection can lead to what appear to unselfish behaviors like cooperation, sympathy, and sacrifice.
Dawkins does not actually believe that genes are selfish, which IIRC he says right at the beginning of the book. So to say that the interests of genes and memes align (or don't align) is a fundamental flaw. Neither genes nor memes have interests. They just are.
And further, to believe that birth control is somehow harmful to the propagation of genes is also to miss an important concept from the book: that there is more to evolution than a strict numbers game. If birth control permits parents to invest greater resources in each child, then each child will have a greater competitive advantage in the population.
Finally, there is a lens through which genes and memes might someday be comparable, and that is information theory. However, we're a long way off from the theoretical and computational footing to try such a thing.
abathuronJune 24, 2019
Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust.
I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions.
I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.
eivarvonSep 18, 2015
Semi-relevant: Richard Dawkins touches upon the relationship between the genes of parasites and hosts in the Chap. 13, "The Long Reach of the Gene" (added in 2. ed.) of his book "The Selfish Gene".
He says that if the parasite genes are "transmitted to future generations via the same vehicles as the host's genes [...], the parasite will do all that it can to help the host, not only to survive, but to reproduce. Over evolutionary time it will cease to be a parasite, will cooperate with the host, and may eventually merge into the host's tissues and become unrecognizable as a parasite at all." [0]
P.S. Apropos of Wolbachia, did you also play MGS V recently?;P
[0]: https://books.google.no/books?id=koaD_Aod_V0C&lpg=PT343&ots=...
formulaTonMay 2, 2015
Two problems with this. Most importantly, if bees have the same genetic interests (it's a bit complicated but see The Selfish Gene for Dawkin's explanation of why bees are genetically programmed not to have different interests than their hives) then there is no reason for a bee to want credit. Second, has any reward for the scouts ever been observed?
jwilliamsonOct 16, 2008
marcoperazaonJune 13, 2019
>Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
If I understand you correctly, that’s just not true. In his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins showed that the individual gene is the unit of selection. A genotype that tends to result in a slightly stronger preference for a family life is exactly the kind of thing that could become more prominent, even within one or two generations. I’m sure this is happening right now.
>In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations.
I was not making a particular example at all. That is the function of natural selection: it selects for the genotypes had by those who have children who go on to have children themselves.
The selection doesn’t have to happen at the level of a preference for kids. A gene related to diligence or conscientiousness or just about anything else can have effects that ultimately cause differential reproductive success for you and your offspring.
The fact that it’s all too complicated for us to model has bearing on it at all.
knomeonFeb 22, 2018
ThomPeteonAug 3, 2017
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Evolution)
MindStorms by Seymore Papert (Education)
Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn (Scientific Method/ Philosophy)
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Formal Systems)
The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Entrepreneurship)
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F Druckert (Entrepreneurship but most likely because I had a quite crazy experience while reading it)
They are all books written by what I consider careful thinkers i.e. people who are able to avoid confusing what they want the world to be with what they actually observe.
They don't have to be right and can be highly subjective as long as their premise is clear and they are aware of it.
kartanonJan 3, 2017
I think that this was easier explained in "The Selfish Gene". Individual altruism is an emergent characteristic of a selfish gene.
I risk my live 10 times to save others until I die without off-spring. It is altruistic for me, but the gene has saved 10 people that are probably related to me. That means that the gene has a probability over 10% to be in that other individuals it is a win for the gene.
From my point of view it sucks, I don't have offspring. But the gene survives and prospers. This is still more extreme in species like bumblebees where sisters share 75% of their genes.
For monozygotic twins there is a similar case. From the gene perspective is irrelevant if one survives or the other, even that it is really important for the individuals.
pascal_cuoqonApr 4, 2015
> Nature's solution was …
What made sense for an individual human is for everyone to be lactose-intolerant except them. This is what gives the best results for the individual in the near-starvation scenario.
Your suggestion sounds very much like “group selection”, an idea with many high-profile detractors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection ). The only argument I read against it was in “The Selfish Gene”, but according to the Wikipedia page, I could have picked from other high-profile scientists. Something looking like group selection may work in some cases (“The Selfish Gene” itself describes John Maynard Smith's counter-proposal of Evolutionary Stable Strategies), but offering such an explanation as obvious amounts to ignoring a lot of debunking by many bright people.
gradysonApr 28, 2014
I also highly recommend Dan Dennett. He covers these topics more directly. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking covers his thoughts on consciousness and evolution in a very direct and superbly clear manner.
Dennett also co-edited an anthology of fiction and non-fiction called The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame). It was one of the most interesting and enjoyable books I have ever read. It covers a very wide variety of topics surrounding the editors' theory of the mind, including the classic dualist/materialist debate (the editors are distinctly materialists), evolution, the mechanics at the core of consciousness, and so much more. It's another one that I can't recommend enough.
bicubicmessonMar 27, 2015
Extrapolating a bit from that lesson, and with ~40 more years of hindsight, I'd highly recommend that a bright 14 year old read some books that give a broad overview of science & philosophy, and establish a thorough understanding of the scientific method. One that I happen to be reading right now that I feel is remarkable is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch is a theoretical physicist at Oxford working on Quantum Computation. The Beginning of Infinity (despite the new-agey sounding name) is an incredible work.
Another book I highly recommend is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, not just for how it explains Neo-Darwinish, but because of the chapter on Memes. Deutsch also has a great treatment of Memes.
axegon_onJune 11, 2020
Completely with you about Spivak, as far as calculus goes.
Physics: recently picked up Walter Lewin's "For the Love of Physics" and it's a masterpiece. Didn't get the chance to finish it because of the pandemic and it got locked in the office but it appears he's managed to cram in an entire university course in one book.
Biology and anatomy - "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins is brilliant entry point for people with limited knowledge on the subject.
Chemistry - no idea, that's the one subject which I hated with a passion since I was a child. Very paradoxical, given that physics was arguably my favorite subject ¯\_(ツ)_/¯...
History - Yuval Noah Harari's books, though somewhat anecdotal as far as history is concerned. I'd say there are way too many to list here and there is way too much to read about all major events in history to fit in just a few books.
mcraenichonFeb 8, 2019
Another I'd add is 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins. I have a Bachelor degree in science and never thought I'd be able to add to my understanding of evolution, but this book accomplished it. Almost everything I've studied can be broken into two periods - that I studied before reading the Selfish Gene, and what I studied after.
Lastly, I'd add Hume's 'Treatise on Human Nature', specifically his theory of substances. The basic idea was that as you learn more information about a substance, how you define that substance changes. First you see an orange ball, and you think it's just an orange colored ball. Later someone tells you it's a fruit, and your understanding of it changes.
How this is relevant is that I realized this can be applied to the world at large. Our understanding of any given phenomena is intrinsically linked to what we know about it. So there is no such thing as 'enlightenment' 'self-awareness' etc, there is only ever increasing awareness as we move through life, and we can also make a point to be intentional about increasing our own awareness.
navaitonFeb 13, 2015
lisperonNov 8, 2014
No, we weren't designed to do anything (because we weren't designed). We reproduce because reproduction is an essential component of the evolutionary process that created us. But:
1) for humans, reproduction of memes is at least as important a component of our evolution as reproduction of genes and
2) even if you consider only reproduction of genes, the reproduction of genes is NOT the same as the reproduction of individuals.
You should read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
gyomonMay 9, 2011
To give an example : as much as I think that "The Selfish Gene" is an awesome title, I feel like I have to defend the choice of words whenever I recommend the book. It doesn't really convey the meaning correctly. It means the right thing if you've read the book; otherwise it's misleading.
That's what I think will happen with the term "dishonest minority".
yesenadamonJan 16, 2020
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
Dawkins talking about the first sentence, about 1980:
"...that was no metaphor. I believe it is the literal truth, provided certain key words are defined in the particular ways favoured by biologists. Of course it is a hard truth to swallow at first gulp. As Dr Christopher Evans has remarked, "This horrendous concept - the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances - is so desperately at odds with almost every other view that Man has of himself, that Dawkins’ book has received a bleak reception in many quarters. Nevertheless his argument is virtually irrefutable" ...
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58430
joe_the_useronMar 20, 2021
Plenty of terms originally coined by academics lack broad academic or even intellectual credibility. I'd agree with the OP that the use of "Meme" is one. I'd also agree that this is because the term provides no clarity - ideas aren't like genes. Genes reproduce by a set mechanism, ideas can be stretched and modified any way you want. Genes are interpreted and realized by a fairly set mechanism. Ideas can be realized any old way. The "Meme" concept is one person's bad analogy imo.
simonsarrisonJune 22, 2012
--------
In my opinion the essential book for anyone interested in science and technology would be How To Win Friends and Influence People. By far the most important book. By far. I really can't overstate the importance of learning to interact with other people in polite, persuasive and friendly ways.
In my four years at an engineering university (RPI) the amount of people I ran in to that couldn't relate to others in a meaningful way and carry a normal conversation blew my mind. It was surreal. And I don't know what percent of them were aware of this but I would guess it can't be too high.
The number one thing I wish I saw more of in engineers isn't an understanding of other sciences or deep domain knowledge. It's consideration. Plain, pure consideration for other people and how they might feel about things.
--------
The Selfish Gene would perhaps be a close second.
Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond is also a good read for people in STEM fields.
The Emperor of All Maladies, a book about the history of cancer. Extremely fascinating read, and accessible regardless of your level of biology knowledge.
garthferengionJan 31, 2016
The still mainstream evolutionary biology it describes does not require any particular relationship between genotype and phenotype, just that one exists. Polygenic traits are just as well described by it as simple Mendelian traits. It also accommodates a range of factors like plasticity, epistasis, and gene by environment interactions that complicate the relationship between genotype and phenotype.
Additionally, your understanding of "selfish" as genes which produce defectors in cooperative scenarios is incorrect. "Selfish" is a metaphor to describe the fact that to be favoured by selection genes must contribute to a phenotype that increases their own propagation (to the degree that they are not constrained from doing so, and issues like linkage and pleiotropy aside).
marricksonSep 3, 2020
> The epitome of this line of thought came with militant atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene—a work that insisted all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes that, for some reason no one could quite explain, acted like “successful Chicago gangsters,” ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves. Such descriptions were typically qualified by remarks like, “Of course, this is just a metaphor, genes don’t really want or do anything.” But in reality, the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed. As a result, the neo-Darwinists went even further than the Victorian variety. If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.
It goes on to discuss an alternative to the neo-Darwinist view and brings back to the core thesis of the piece, play. I'd really just massacre the thesis if I summarized it so if you find that interesting or disagree I'd really read his piece I linked above!
autarchonSep 2, 2017
I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness works, this time through a work of fiction
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - strongly influenced my beliefs about political systems
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - changed how I thought about animal behavior and what living things do
Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig - strongly influenced my beliefs about US government
Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky - made me rethink my view of the media and news
JamilDonJan 10, 2019
atlas1428onSep 7, 2018
- Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
- Language, Truth, and Logic by A. J. Ayer
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
Books that serve as investment philosophy guides for those who've developed a habit of saving money but are looking for the "next step" in building more wealth. From the mind of one of the greatest investors of all time:
- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (get the annotated version with an epilogue written by Warren Buffett!)
- The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
A book that discusses what matters most in your life from a resource-allocation, measurable results standpoint (family, etc.):
- How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen
A book I read 10 years ago that forever changed the way I manage productivity and organization both at work and in my personal life:
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
Books that show that our universe is just as crazy, if not crazier, than science fiction:
- Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy
- Quantum Chance: Nonlocality, Teleportation and Other Quantum Marvels
- ..and so on with intersecting topics!
Not to mention, I love trying to have as deep an understanding as I can by reading highly technical textbooks on cosmology, gravitation, and quantum physics.
jmartricanonMay 6, 2017
graueonJan 22, 2013
I believe this was one of the main points of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
curiouseronDec 13, 2014
After a lengthy exploration of basic biology, covering topics such as DNA and the origin of life, Dawkins introduces the gene-centered view of evolution that has long been textbook orthodoxy. Dawkins uses the remainder of the book to look at various types of animal behavior in an effort to convey some general conclusions and tools to help the reader understand evolution and natural selection. Much of his effort is devoted to explaining behavior in terms of the 'selfish gene' - especially social behavior that has long been held to have evolved 'for the good of the species.' Dawkins shows that how fundamental axiom of natural selection (that the genes best at surviving and reproducing will eventually spread through the gene pool) leads directly to the selfish gene and the behavior exhibited by nearly all animals (humans being the prime exception).
I should warn that conservatives would probably not enjoy the book nearly as much as I did. Dawkins is an open secular humanist with socialist leanings, and is not worried about offending the delicate sensibilities of creationists and fundamentalists. This book should only be read by those willing to 'accept' the validity of natural selection and evolution; others would only waste their time. I would direct readers seeking a more scientific discussion of these issues to G. C. Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection." All others will most likely enjoy "The Selfish Gene" a great deal and finish the book with a new appreciation for and understanding of evolution and biology.
MikeCaponeonOct 8, 2009
2) That's the whole point of SENS; repairing the damage for which we DON'T have repair mechanisms because of point #1. For example, our lysosomes (the "garbage collector/incinerator" in our cells) accumulate some molecules that they can't break down because they don't have the right enzymes, so they accumulate throughout our lives and end up affection cell function all around our bodies (lysosomes are full and can't do their jobs anymore). SENS has found other organisms that do have these enzymes, and are looking at ways for us humans to use those enzymes to clean up that "long-lived garbage".
> Cell damage is allowed to happen.
Yes, because your genes don't care about you (so to speak - read Dawkins's The Selfish Gene). After you've reproduced, there's no pressure to fix damage that only affects you after reproduction age.
Nothing causes more suffering in the world than the diseases of aging, and curing those diseases should be priority #1. Living longer is just a welcome side-effect.
xhrootonSep 5, 2012
What a true scientist; most people are content to think we dote on grandchildren as a civilized people with innate appreciation for new life. Rather, our genes will eradicate those who fail to help their offspring's offspring survive.
http://musingsofscience.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/book-review...
jrs95onFeb 3, 2018
sagoonJuly 18, 2020
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.
Ygg2onFeb 28, 2018
EDIT: Started reading it:
My former quote sure is misinterpreting things /s
jostmeyonFeb 6, 2019
araneaeonOct 8, 2009
Again, this is completely irrelevant to your argument. You can still evolve to live for a longer time while reproductively viable.
>Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).
Again, it's all about trade-offs. For some organisms, it's most advantageous for them to reproduce as much as they can all in one go, and for others it makes sense to live a really long time and reproduce throughout that time period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semelparity_and_iteroparity
I own The Selfish Gene. And unlike you, I've read most of his actual scientific work as well, not just his work for the plebeian.
MichaelGGonJan 2, 2015
Those things you list seem relatively good, no? Making a microprocessor from gates while " just hooking up " sounds pretty near idyllic.
rayalezonSep 4, 2018
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
scottlocklinonSep 22, 2020
Books are mostly not for actually learning a technical subject; they're for reviewing the subject after you already know something, and expanding your knowledge after you have the basics. There are many things I know, and can recall with effort, as they're in long term memory, but can easily recall and apply if I pick up a book and thumb through it for a few minutes. Yeah, I can cook up a nice boeuf bourguignon or pumpernickel bread from memory, but it's gonna go a lot more smoothly if I read the cookbook.
Another thing he misses; if a book makes you feel something, it's going to stick with you a lot more clearly than some recitation of dry facts. Storm of Steel sticks with me better than the official British History of the Great War. Similarly, "Darwinian Fairytales," which is absolutely hilarious in addition to being perfectly correct, sticks with me a lot better than "The Selfish Gene" -which I've paid considerably more attention to.
jzlonAug 28, 2017
- Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate.
- If provoked, the agent will retaliate.
- The agent is quick to forgive.
- The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.
The fact that this strategy was a consistent winner in his competitions has led Dawkins to argue that "nice guys finish first" and could be a partial explanation for certain forms of so-called "altruistic" animal behavior -- behavior that seemingly gives no benefit to the altruist, except for the fact that too may benefit when it is their turn to be helped. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_Guys_Finish_First
jonathansizzonMar 27, 2017
Follow this up with some key works in the field, such as Gould's early critique of naive adaptationism,
The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.
Also consider different perspectives such as the those described in following books, which take, respectively, drift- and mutation-first approaches to evolution:
The Origins of Genome Architecture, M Lynch; and
Mutation-Driven Evolution, M Nei.
Above all, know that evolution is far more complex, subtle (and interesting) than The Selfish Gene would have you believe.
winfredonDec 13, 2013
That about covers it. It took me about an hour to compose the list, the main point it brings across is a very nuanced understanding of what it is to be human, described by the people that often have experienced the what they write about. since I'm the composer, I think it might help to mention that I am rated near genius (just as a rough measure - I know it has downsides - however in my case I far exceed my actual score due to some other knobs and whistles I came pre-equiped with). You're welcome. Cunt. :P
mudilonJan 11, 2014
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
mattnewtononMar 27, 2017
Blew my mind out the back of my head in high school. Changed the way I looked at the world. Made evolution make some sense, and to some degree, paired with the extended phenotype, helped society make more sense. So much of altruism, racism, and tribalism have roots in game theory of you accept the hypothesis of the gene as the unit of natural selection.
But, perhaps more importantly it taught me by example how to make a good argument that can be rooted in multiple deep disciplines but accessible to the masses.
lovemenotonOct 6, 2019
Vaccine-resistance, as a mental-state looks akin to the immune system, which normally confers disease immunity but, when running amok can trigger allergies.
It is implied that some medical sociologists now consider vaccine-resistant thinking as a kind of allergy to benign societal forces and are planning a social vaccination program to eradicate such wrong-headedness.
As an aside, the word meme was used near to its original sense - as Dawkins defined it - in the last chapter of his classic "The Selfish Gene".
watwutonSep 22, 2020
Maybe those books are specifically bad? I haven't read them, but I had long monologues about some historical books I read giving people basically lectures on topic.
And my brain recalls facts and situations from them when it is associated in unrelated discussions too.
chrisbennetonJan 8, 2012
On the other hand, if you are interested in genetic algorithms and you wind up reading about real genetics, epigentics and then Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene", I don't see how that is bad.
OutdoorsmanonJan 30, 2016
I read Edward O. Wilsons' "On Human Nature" the year it was published (1978)...I just happened to stumble upon it in a bookstore...a wonderful read which prompted me to wonder,"What other thinkers are out there that I don't know about?"
This was two years after Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene"...I was unaware of the book, or Dawkins in general, for at least a decade...when I discovered it I devoured it...
It had the effect of further cementing the philosophy of living my previous inquiries had led me to...
I've discovered no benefit to putting a label on myself, whether that be atheist, agnostic, or theist...early on I discovered others held tightly to their views and were usually very unlikely to change them...discussions were interesting and invigorating, but ultimately fruitless...
What I most appreciate about the efforts of Dawkins and Wilson is that they are quite serious thinkers...they encourage us to "go with the best available evidence"...there's no better advice...
There's ample evidence that we humans are finite beings, and IMHO we don't much like the idea of that, i.e., we want answers as to why we exist at all...and we're often unwilling to embrace "the best available evidence"...
Further, I think that those who cannot accept that we appear to be finite beings misunderstand the concept of "infinity"...it extends backwards, forwards, in any direction our human linguistic invention of the concept of "time" might include...infinity implies limitless possibilities...
I'll continue to proceed with my life based on what "the best available evidence" suggests...if new and compelling evidence is uncovered I'm willing to turn on a dime...
a_bonoboonOct 21, 2015
A few years back Steven Pinker wrote a thing about the "false allure" of group selection based on muddy definitions: http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-the-false-allure-...
Jerry Coyne summarised the debate in NYRB: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/the-neighborh...
tylerjwilk00onMay 17, 2018
The gist of it is that survival strategies are only viable given the distribution of the behavior throughout the entire species or population. Similar to a finicial market, some strategies work only when a small percentage of the population exhibits the behavior.
A bonus is that, like the phrase Too Clever by Half, Dawkins is also British.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
snowwrestleronAug 5, 2016
Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.
Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.
Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.
dragonbonheuronOct 23, 2014
jepperonJune 7, 2015
I've read these books midway through high school, already interested in biology and medicine. The depth and complexity of how life forms handle evolutionary pressure is mind blowing. Why you favor relatives over strangers, the competition between mother and child, progress through collaboration of genes etc. You see the world completely differently (after reading many more books on geology, genetics, anthropology, anatomy, cellular biology etc) afterwards.
For a novel: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson,
Truely changed how I look at computers and encryption as a not mathematically inclined reader. Building a computer out of church pipe organ components etc.
jkhdigitalonMar 30, 2021
Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene, published just a few years earlier, is the clearest exposition that I have read of how this process probably played out in terrestrial life: the “semantics” encoded by amino acid sequences correspond to a molecule/cell/organism’s likelihood of surviving and replicating. For all but the simplest and most ephemeral replicators, this generally means accurately predicting environmental conditions. General intelligence, then, would conceivably arise simply due to selection pressures pushing organisms to live in the broadest range of environments.
In some sense, this process does sound more like an engineering problem, as the embodiment which “contains” the intelligence is probably not an optional component.
martythemaniakonSep 6, 2019
1) There's a general anti-tech sentiment that is a huge defining part of our zeitgeist. It's only a few years old and I'm already tired of it and articles like this one contribute to the fatigue.
2) The NYT is leaning very hard into this fad for a variety of reasons - good for their bottom line, good for their self-image, etc. There was a very funny one a few weeks ago where the NYT "took down" Google's terrible ToS - until someone (in the comments) pointed out the NYT one was even worse. If you're shouting and pointing at someone else, people won't have time to look at you.
3) Lately, I keep being reminded of the Selfish Gene, which has a few chapters devoted to Evolutionary Stable Strategies. In essence, Tech has gotten so big that being a "tech critic" has become a lucrative (high reward/low cost) position to take, like being a cheater in a monogamous population. Any environment can support a certain percentage of such defectors, though if there are suddenly too many, it stops being lucrative and a new stable equilibrium will be reached. I highly recommend it, it has really helped me make sense of these rapid shifts.
gregjoronOct 31, 2019
In evolutionary terms, individual organisms are optimized for reproducing and living long enough to give their offspring (more accurately, their genes) a good shot at survival. Richard Dawkins explains that in The Selfish Gene and other books. "Contentment," a human social construct, and classifying a memory as "traumatic" probably have little to do with what evolution has optimized us (or any organism) for. If we reproduce and pass on our genes, then slowly die a miserable and traumatic death, that makes no difference in terms of evolution.
pklausleronJune 19, 2017
mistermannonMay 13, 2019
> Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Critics regard memetics as a pseudoscience. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual.
> The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[2] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.
I believe memetics is one of the most impactful but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness.
schaeferonJune 25, 2019
If you have never read any of these counterpoints, but find that the conclusions of Selfish Gene have shaped your world view, please consider reading some of these counterpoints and seeing if they persuade you to consider new perspectives.
A particularly thorough book detailing these counterpoints is Matthieu Ricard's book:
Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World
bloodorangeonJuly 15, 2013
Also, Lewis Carroll's quote:
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
still makes me think about how we use language.
w4tsononSep 17, 2019
All through school I never had much of an interest in biology or genetics. I think if I’d read this earlier it may have changed my mind.
Planning on reading the Blind Watchmaker at some point.
Spurred on by reading the former I thought I’d listen to A Brief History of Time. Wow that is a whole different kettle of fish. I had to stop because I realized it wasn’t the right format (Audiobook), for me at least.
gyomonMay 9, 2011
"Hey, that's just the way my genes made me : I'm selfish, okay, but that's, like, genetics, survival of the fittest so it's all fine and I don't have to feel bad about it ..."
The bad thing about the "Dishonest Minority" title is that is sounds like he's referring to a bunch of freeloaders who are abusing the system and ruining it for every honest tax-payer. From reading his excerpt, we know that it's not what he's saying at all. I like the shock value of using "Dishonest Minority", but sometimes book with titles like that nuance it by having a subtitle that goes like "How we all benefit from them" or something like that.
TriinTonJune 1, 2009
Enough of theories. Let us look at facts. There are limited resources, and we will fight for them. Like I said, I don't believe that we fight for what's good for the species. We fight for ourselves, our families and communities. We are still rather tribal.
bonoboTPonSep 3, 2020
> all biological entities were best conceived of as “lumbering robots,” programmed by genetic codes
Either this is just physicalism (which is quite well accepted among most scientists) or assumes the straw Darwinist is a genetic determinist and denies environmental effects, which is misleading.
> ruthlessly expanding their territory in an endless desire to propagate themselves
When Darwinists say something approaching this, they are talking about genes and not people and indeed it is merely a metaphor.
> that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior
No, quite the opposite. It's not about rational motives, the whole point is there is no intelligence behind it, no "intelligent design" no reasoning. The whole thing emerges from natural selection and the fact that gene proportions will change from generation to generation and this process is not fully random: some genes succeed more than others through the properties they lend to organisms.
Again, let's not conflate social Darwinism as an ideology with Darwinian evolutionary theory, of which Dawkins' book is merely a popularizer. Also, at the time of writing The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wasn't so obsessed with being a militant atheist as in the last ~15 years or so. The Selfish Gene is a pretty uncontroversial in a scientific sense, but it's quite unfortunate in its title and many people don't want to put in the mental effort of thinking about evolutionary mechanisms. It's the type of thinking we use for math puzzles or a hacking, and it's unpleasant to most people so they jump back to arguing about politics and "surely they actually mean XYZ, let's not bother engaging with the actual words in the book..."
And just on the side, I don't particularly like Dawkins as a person, I find his books on atheism quite dull and weak-manning religion, his tweets annoying and provocative in a cringe-inducing way, and his intellectual output over the last decade disappointing overall. Doesn't mean I feel the need to caricature the scientific arguments.
ethanbondonJuly 18, 2020
At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.”
The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment).
This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
QwertiousonDec 10, 2014
Put simply, you can't just jump from looking at individual survival to looking at a group's survival, because any individual could just be a free-rider. More importantly, what's actually been observed is that group selectionism simply doesn't happen in the real world.
So while anything I said about the rest would be mere opinion, there is at least one multi-paragraph section of his argument that is a GIANT heap of shit.
Fr0styMatt88onJan 29, 2016
I certainly don't view agnosticism as a weasel term either. I cannot be certain there is no god any more than I could be certain there is one (and note by god I'm not referring to the man with the beard and the pearly gates and all that.... something that I think can easily get lost in conversation on this topic). I think it's honest to just say "I don't know".
I have a friend who's in the process of discovering his own atheism and while atheism is not a religion, I can clearly see the similarity in passion. I was likely the same back when I was exploring it at first.
Have heard lots about The Selfish Gene but never actually sat down and read it.... should really do so. Is there a more modern version to read these days, or is TSG timelessly applicable?
ztonDec 15, 2013
The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether – it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely untrue.
The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith.
fjhonApr 12, 2011
On the other hand I can see that there is an argument to be made for a set of shared ideas and terminology to communicate more effectively and help people find common ground in social situations. Anyway, I would be interested to read other people's thoughts about this.
On a different note, I am surprised not to see any of Dawkins' books on that list (I would at least add The Selfish Gene).
singingfishonOct 14, 2019
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
MichaelGGonApr 9, 2015
A Brief History of Time because it pretty much slapped any thoughts I had of a supernatural universe/god right out of my mind. I know it's not highly regarded, but for a rather ignorant guy, it woke me up.
The Selfish Gene (inc The Extended Phenotype). This is one I think is the most powerful, even for people that had OK education. Showing how life could possibly evolve, just with random mutations and non-random survival made it real to me that we live in a natural world. And not just that, but that since it's so obviously a natural world, it's up to us to decide what is right, what our purpose is. The earth and nature aren't going to help us there - it's our call, full stop. That is huge, and many otherwise seemingly well educated people don't seem to get it.
Heuristics and Biases. (Though Thinking Fast and Slow might be more approachable.) This book opened me up to the fact that I'm running on busted hardware. That I've got serious, unfixable, biases built into my brain. That a lot of what I do is a fast but inaccurate parallel system at work. (Interestingly, this is the essence of Taoism, wu wei).
Lately, LessWrong. (Available as a book called Rationality: From AI to Zombies). These sequences have helped me, well, get less wrong, slowly, at making decisions and general thinking. I try to be aware of when I'm being biased and incorrect. I make better predictions and actively try to update my priors, instead of just confirming my previous beliefs. As I get older (34) I find I'm unwittingly acting close minded on occasion, and need to actively work against it.
UdoonApr 26, 2016
I know this is veering wildly offtopic, but when I see misconceptions about evolution on HN, they're usually not being displayed by people with too rudimentary a science background, it's mostly people with an altogether unscientific background such as creationism or other religious and philosophical ideas that are in conflict with factual information.
> Incidentally, I've also spotted this on the TV show QI, many of whose clever 'facts' are misleading at best or just plain incorrect.
I'm not familiar with that show, but that's a common problem in science journalism now, and it's not even confined to "popular" science anymore either. Maybe it's always been that way, and I just notice it more nowadays.
VladimirGolovinonDec 20, 2013
As for the advantage, it seems pretty clear to me: higher chances at being the alpha-male(female?), plus the resource advantage due to not having the ability for reciprocal altruism (and the ability to get away with that).
All few human psychopaths I have personally met were natural-born leaders. One is now occupying a high-level position within a successful company that produces manupulative F2P games. Another was a woman who, despite her being deaf-mute, was able to organize a successful remote web studio (before it fell apart due to her politicking and other members, including me, bailing out).
Also, quoting Wikipedia: "In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country's 2 million people could be [Genghis] Khan descendants".
Edit: if I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene discussed cheaters (that is, individuals who didn't reciprocate) as being a viable evolutionary strategy, as long as they are in a minority.
mindcrimeonOct 3, 2015
The Selfish Gene - Dawkins
A New Kind of Science - Wolfram
The Singularity is Near - Kurzweil
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies - Hofstadter
Atlas Shrugged - Rand
The Fountainhead - Rand
Nineteen Eighty-Four - Orwell
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
Ambient Findability - Peter Morville
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software - Steven Johnson
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life - Albert-laszlo Barabasi
Artificial Life - Steven Levy
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman
not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html
Glasshouse - Charles Stross
Permutation City - Greg Egan
Neuromancer - William Gibson
The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner
The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky
The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - Eric Beinhocker
The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
fwiponMay 2, 2019
Consider a gene that promotes compassion, selflessness and sharing. While it may lower your individual fitness, groups with some individuals with this gene may fare better as a whole.
Same as autism. For example, say autistic people see connections that other people don't. Having a low rate of "different thinkers" is positive for the group as a whole, even if the individuals may be disadvantaged in other ways.
aaronswonAug 23, 2009
It's interesting to read this in the context of _The Selfish Gene_. Mary Midgley (who wrote a scathing attack on the book[1]) once suggested that she probably found it hard to appreciate its virtues because she'd read the ideas in it so many times before -- by the time the book came out they hardly seemed novel to her.
[1]: http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php...
"So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do."
Peter Singer is a good case study in this.
eneveuonFeb 15, 2011
Some of these ideas remind me of a book I read recently: "The Selfish Gene". In it, Richard Dawkins approaches these same questions from the gene standpoint, and uses game theory to explain how good / bad behavior evolves in an ecosystem, and why free-riding is not always the evolutionarily stable strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
wallfloweronJune 10, 2008
mudilonJan 11, 2014
What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
vibrunazoonJuly 5, 2012
Really? This is getting upvoted here? How disappointing.
"Evolution doesn't have a goal, it doesn't make future plans. Evolution is an accident."
- Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene
Did you know giraffes have a nerve connecting the points in it's head that are about 5cm apart? But instead of connecting those 2 points directly, the nerve goes all the way down through the neck, then all the way back up, to connect its end point. Is there any advantage in this design instead of just connecting directly? No there isn't, giraffes are that way only because, historically, that's how they evolved. Evolution doesn't make intelligent plans. Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all. Evolution is imperfect. Alluding there's anything intelligent about evolution is alluding to intelligent design and creationism.
temphnonMar 20, 2012
Many of the people angry about this incident will, in another context, back up someone like Richard Dawkins when he offends. Dawkins happens to be one of my favorite authors, but he is quite provocative. And Heroku advertises the Dawkins Foundation as a success story:
As an objective fact, The God Delusion is surely a book that many millions of people around the world are on the record as finding "offensive" [1,2,3].
So the issue is really not whether a statement is offensive or not, or how the apology is phrased. It is whether the group that is offended has the power to force an apology.
[1] http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/religious-debates/65603...
[2] http://richarddawkins.net/articles/628795-duking-it-out-over...
[3] http://mattgrube.com/seminary-writings/dawkins-god-delusion-...
lisperonMay 22, 2018
LucianLMZonSep 11, 2017
The signal and the noise - Nate Silver;
Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb;
1984 - Orwell;
Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl;
Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger (not only international politics but also deep-thinking strategy that can be used anywhere);
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius;
Superforecasting - Philip Tetlock;
Propaganda - Edward Bernays;
Pitch anything - Oren Klaff;
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond;
How to win friends and influence people& Stop worrying (both by Dale Carnegie);
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins;
Trust - Francis Fukuyama;
dalkeonMay 30, 2015
Less flippantly, I believe in 1980 it was for most people a better use of one's time to read "The Selfish Gene" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" than to learn Linear B, in order to think and reason differently. (I specify a date since the main ideas described in those books now pervade culture, so they would have less of an impact now.)
Regarding Scandinavian languages and gender, "Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter—except the Bergen dialect, which has only two genders: common and neuter." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language). Danish and Swedish have two grammatical genders, common and neuter.
Traces of a masculine gender remain in Swedish when used to refer to a male. For example, "den rika" could mean "the rich", while "den rike" means "the rich man". However, it's perfectly fine to use "den rika" for the rich man.
All of the Scandinavian languages have more of a gender system than English does, so I think it's a bit odd to use that property as an example. Could you explain why learning (say) the Swedish gender system helps one think and reason differently in any useful form, other than the obvious one of being able to comprehend Swedish and related languages?
Adam_OonAug 8, 2015
I was also thinking that a non-fiction book with no fluff and no injection of personality/flair from the author is a textbook. There are many outstanding textbooks (like Molecular Biology of the Cell) which offer pure information, but I think commercial non-fiction books are aimed at a more general audience. The author needs to fluff a book up a bit to make the material approachable. I also wonder how some non-fiction books would read if untouched by editors.
lkrubneronApr 28, 2018
"What exactly does science tell us about the idea of a human nature?"
Science can't tell you anything until you have a philosophy of knowledge which defines a thing called "science". So the argument becomes a bit circular here.
This is worse:
"If we take evolutionary biology seriously, then we certainly should reject any essentialist conception of it, such as Aristotle’s."
That is a large if. Here are some unsolved problems in evolutionary biology:
1. Why do people become gay?
2. Why do people adopt children who are unrelated to them?
3. Why does such a large percentage of the population suffer mental illness?
4. Why do people engage in acts of altruism, helping those they are not related to?
5. Why do people believe in gods, and why do they make sacrifices to these gods?
A famous argument against evolutionary biology was made by Richard Dawkins back in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene. As Dawkins says in that book: "We can rise above our genes; indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives."
Before we "take evolutionary biology seriously" we need to carefully consider all of the arguments against it. And since so much of this article depends on "take evolutionary biology seriously", the whole article is weak.
Mind you, I believe a strong case can be made for a human nature. But I wouldn't build that case on evolutionary biology, without first addressing the known limits of evolutionary biology. A stronger case could be built if one first argued for independent agency in the processes arising from genes. This is the "ghost in the machine" argument. But that argument would have something in common with the philosophers who are being criticized in this article.
kashyapconMar 8, 2021
Axelrod's work was also summarized in The Selfish Gene. (And more recently, in Behave, by Sapolsky.)
From the abstract:
"We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival."
[1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/robert-axelrod/the-evoluti...
machinecoffeeonSep 24, 2019
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also outlines the same idea, and tries to explain how we got that way. Read it when I was a lot younger, but the concept has stayed with me.
paulgbonJan 2, 2010
Some other books I read last year:
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. It was a great book, Pinker's writing is accessible and entertaining. Much more so than On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.
More with Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight by Paul Ciotti. I really enjoyed this one, it was the story of the first team to cross the English channel with human-powered flight.
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. I liked this one better than Gladwell's other books. There is less theorizing and arguing a point and more telling stories, which is what Gladwell excels at.
The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. If you are patient with what is sometimes (in my humble opinion) pointlessly arguing semantics, some of the sections are interesting.
jeffreyrogersonApr 4, 2015
With more technical books I find it is almost impossible for me to learn anything substantial from them unless I do the exercises, however, the exercises tend to take an enormous amount of time. So what I find myself doing is skimming most technical books and then then going more in depth on the few that seem relevant/interesting to me.
pfedoronJune 28, 2009
I am not a biologist, but according to (what I understood of) "The Selfish Gene" and the like, the natural selection takes place on the level of genes. Since the successful reproduction of a gene is usually (barring some exceptional situations mentioned in the book) tightly coupled with the fate of the individual carrying the gene, reasoning about natural selection that operates on individuals typically leads to correct conclusions. Reasoning about natural selection on packs is on the other hand typically incorrect, if it leads to conclusions different from the individuals-based selection.
In your example, if you imagine two genes, one that tells the low status carrier to accept starvation, and the other that tells its carrier to fight for dear life no matter what its social status, the second gene will win and the first one will go extinct, even if from the point of view of the whole pack the first gene could be better.
This is not to say that your hypothesis is invalid, as I'm sure it can be rephrased in terms of genes/individuals without losing the core message.
phaedrusonJune 15, 2010
aptsurdistonJune 13, 2010
I'll go and read The selfish Gene before I write more, but one more pesky comment about the experiment in the lesswrong.com article: I am suspicious of their conclusion that their case study disproves group selection. This does not seem to respect the vast scope of evolutionary time scale. Maybe group selection is like quantum tunneling - with large clusters of individuals, the chances of it happening are infinitesimal - you won't see it in the laboratory. But on an evolutionary time scale, infinitesimal chances do happen occasionally - and if they yield advantageous results, they will shape life's future. Maybe our love for music came about from freak genetic mutations that in fact didn't serve much purpose for individual survival, but this collective activity caused individuals to synchronize their behavior. Maybe this synchronization helps low-advantage/individual traits 'tunnel' probabilistically and exist long afterward because the same traits are high-advantage/collective traits. (?)
ideonexusonOct 23, 2013
lkrubneronJan 4, 2011
mindcrimeonJan 13, 2018
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell
The World Is Flat - Thomas Friedman
The Four Steps To The Epiphany - Steve Blank
The Game - Neil Strauss
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Ultra Marathon Man - Dean Karnazes
radford-nealonSep 22, 2020
vpribishonSep 2, 2017
Guns, Germs, and Steel -- how circumstance drove civilizations. Fun storytelling even if it's a bit too "just-so". definitely trains you to look at any situation and seek it's origins with less initial judgement.
The Visual Display of Quantitive Information -- gets at the essence of communication and medium. more than it seems!
The Alchemy of Finance -- "reflexivity", but if you're also interested in Soros or some finance storytelling it's worth it.
The Selfish Gene -- as everyone else has said.
The Prize -- the history of oil. huh? yeah. Likely to change how you look at the history of technology, government, power, the saudis, and geopolitics.
hgaonNov 27, 2010
Biology in general is tremendously useful in providing you with a whole set of patterns and models of "things that work" (in the proper context, of course). Studying some college level general biology is recommended if you haven't already.
colechristensenonAug 29, 2015
You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.
jdmoreiraonJuly 11, 2016
"Super Forecasting" by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control" by Walter Mischel
"Precision: Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Horse Racing" by C X Wong
"Functional Swift" by Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra
__ DIDN'T FINISH __
"Thinking in Forth" by Leo Brodie
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick
__ QUEUED FOR READING __
"Porcelain" by Moby
"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
EGregonFeb 1, 2016
Listen, tons of features that an animal has are not correlated so highly to survival as to make enough selective pressure to make that feature come to completely dominate a population. I am very skeptical of the widely "held" assumption otherwise.
For example, lets say the human anorectal angle was specifically "evolved" for pooping while squatting. Is it a "just so" story or did the exact anorectal angle contribute SO MUCH to survival or reprosuction that it became the standard for bipedal humans?
Consider just how much relative advantage with survival and replication any given feature must have in order to come to dominate ALL the other features that are competing in the population. And this is in just one area. During a single reproduction, there are tons of genetic and epigenetic variables that could be selected for, which determine different things. Why would a specific feature in a specific part of the body, that provides merely a minor improvement at any given time, come to completely replace all other genotype expressions? I have never seen a good analysis of this, just hopeful handwaving, especially in popular books like The Selfish Gene.
CamperBob2onMay 18, 2012
The progress of a species does not happen for the benefit of individual members, and that's true for us as humans as well. In that sense, as long as someone makes it, we all make it.
(Which is why it bothers me that so much is apparently riding on this one mission. The job of carrying human spaceflight forward is too much responsibility for one man, one company, or even one government, and Musk might do well to remind everyone of that before the launch.)
david-givenonMay 30, 2015
With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.
Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.
To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.
Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."
Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.
The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.
heresie-dabordonMay 25, 2021
Perhaps you have read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. [0]
It is important to understand science, history, and human behaviour. The tendencies are clear. But biological reductionism has limited application for explaining complex systems. All you can really say is that people seek to maintain power and support favourable power structures. Whether this is because their microbiome "wants" this or it's simply better to be in control than to be a slave, I leave for other microbiomes to debate.
Woman remains a slave even in much of the modern world for reasons that have not changed. [1]
There is a political power structure allied with an economic power structure, and, in this case, an Abrahamic religion to blind the population and enforce conformity. If anything is capable of weakening the ideological power structure, it is the wealth generated by economic activity.
[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Is_the_Nigger_of_the_Wor...
neilconApr 1, 2008
ericdykstraonNov 28, 2018
The Revolutionary Phenotype describes the transition of life from protein self-replicator (no known current ancestors), to protein-RNA tangos (no known current ancestors), to RNA replicators (current RNA viruses), to RNA-DNA tango (RNA-DNA reverse transcribing viruses), to DNA replicator (biological life).
The next revolutionary phenotype (let's call it RT) would be one that replaces DNA, first via a DNA-RT tango (machines editing our DNA) and eventually with RT (the machines) replacing DNA completely.
The video I linked above goes over the consequences of this. The book will describe it in more detail, and is slated to be released next month.
crazygringoonJune 25, 2019
Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" is a scientific work about evolutionary selection at the gene level -- I don't recall him touching on psychology at all. (He provides evolutionary explanations for certain altruistic behaviors, but I don't recall him even starting on how they might be expressed via a psychological mechanism or at any conscious level.)
I can't quite imagine what either have to do with each other -- they seem to be such different topics. Or what Dawkins' work has to do with "western culture", or culture at all. At heart it's a quite mathematical/statistical argument.
I'm curious, what exactly do you see being refuted?
hackinthebochsonDec 19, 2012
The behavior of a female mating with a more "alpha" male while at the same time deceiving her mate has been observed in a plethora of animal species. That this behavior exists is without question.
What Evolutionary Psychology does is provide an explanation for a behavior given what we know about evolution, biology, economics, game theory, etc. It is quite scientific. Many EP theories are very much testable, albeit usually impractical. Science is always a game of probabilities and finding the best explanation for an observation given known facts.
>Dawkins' books are also largely philosophical in nature, not scientific
His first (biology) book, The Selfish Gene, which established him as a leader in the field, is 100% science. An Ancestors Tale is also purely science.
klodolphonNov 14, 2010
Complex configurations have more entropy than simple configurations. Life causes entropy to increase more quickly. You can think of living beings as agents of entropy if you like, but that implies that entropy acts with purpose, which it doesn't.
I remember having an argument at college with someone who argued that the laws of thermodynamics conflicted with the theory of evolution. So asked him what entropy was. He gave a bunch of different layman's definitions, such as comparing it "disorder" or "chaos". I wrote down for him, "S = k log N" and told him that if he doesn't know Boltzmann's equation, he has no business lecturing me on thermodynamics. This person also said that there was no natural process that created information. I wanted to tell him that the laws of thermodynamics, combined with Boltzmann's equation, and used in combination with Shannon's definition of information, imply that the amount of information in a closed system must always increase. Interpreted physically, mutation increases the entropy/information in genetic code.
If you want to know more about entropy, talk to a chemist. Chemists have to know entropy or they can't do their jobs.
As for the linked blog post, the idea of applying theories from evolutionary biology to the study of information is usually attributed to Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene". This is the book that coined the term "meme", and I recommend it.
scott_sonOct 2, 2014
Pruitt and Goodnight don’t propose a mechanism by which the colonies boomeranged back to their original state. And without such a mechanism, some researchers argue that the results could be due to ordinary selection acting on individuals. “I think they over-interpret [the results] as evidence of group-level selection,” said Andy Gardner, a biologist at the University of Oxford. “Natural selection may factor in the needs of the group, to some extent, when it hones the adaptations of individuals. But group fitness is not the whole story.”
I understand Gardner's point to be that even if the selection pressure starts at the group level, it can still go down to the individual, and then down to the gene. In that sense, we're still selecting the gene.
Actually, upon reading the actual article, the authors say basically the same thing in the first paragraph:
"In societies in which individual fitness is tightly linked with the performance of the group, the theory of group selection predicts that evolution will favour traits in individuals that aid in maximizing their group’s success—which, in turn, are predicted to increase individuals’ long-term evolutionary interests. Here we define group selection as selection caused by the differential extinction or proliferation of groups1. This represents a broad definition that is not in any way adversarial to the importance of kinship selection for social evolution."
Assuming I understand the authors correctly, they mean that the "fitness" of an individual cannot always be considered to be in isolation. In order to determine the fitness of an individual, we may have to consider the combination of the individual, and the group in which they live. I see that as consistent with the notion of a "selfish gene", as I understand it.
scott_wonJan 22, 2012
While total "nice guys" tend to finish last in a population of "bad guys", a localised population of "fool me once guys" can, given time, push out the "bad guys", and become a dominant population.
This works when the benefits of working together outweigh the benefits of screwing over the other guy. While a population of bad guys is busy screwing each other over, the fool me once guys are busy working well together, unless they get screwed over, in which case they can refuse to do business again. An outcome that makes it harder for bad guys to keep screwing people over.
dalkeonJune 16, 2012
My point is that neither Chomsky (and now neither Dawkins) fits your description ... unless you say that people 30-40 of age are already old?
My other point is that most successful scientists don't shift into topics drastically outside their interests when they were young. Dirac? No. Erdős? No. Barbara McClintock? No. Von Braun? No. Karl Sharpless? No. Jocelyn Bell Burnell? No. Just take the list of Nobel prize winners for science and see how few of them got into politics later in life, or for that matter moved into topics markedly outside of their original area.
Yes, of course some do. But car dealership owners, and chefs (Samak Sundaravej, PM of Thailand, was a television chef for 7 years), and priests and singers also get into politics. So my last point was that there's nothing of note about a few scientists getting into politics as they get older, because people of all sorts of different fields go into politics as they get older.
Hence, my comment that there are strong biases which affect your parenthetical observation.
dredmorbiusonJuly 18, 2020
meme (n.)
"an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gene
confluenceonNov 15, 2012
See the problem with the terms "intrinsic worth" and "dignity" is that they are almost meaningless and very fuzzy. What do you mean exactly?
> “All lives have equal value”
Melinda Gates repeatedly emphasized the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s deep belief that all lives have equal value and everyone should be given the same chance.
I've come to the exact same conclusion that she has with harder terms. We need to give people the same chance because if done so - we are all better off.
lbrandyonMay 15, 2009
A professor at Oxford and the man who wrote The Selfish Gene, one of the best science books EVER, is many things. Nimrod is not one of them.
> Outside of the US, there is nowhere on the planet where that belief system comes close being 40% of a population.
This is patently false. Alot of europeans think this. They think this is a uniquely American problem. I have no idea where this myth comes from, but I have my suspicions: they are a victim of poor media coverage and a sense of cultural superiority.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4410927/...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4648598.stm
39% of people in the UK chose "creationism" or "intelligent design". One in three believe the earth is under 10,000 years old. These numbers are slightly, but not substantially, higher in the US.
xiaomaonFeb 11, 2016
If for example you wanted to discuss The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, the first step would not be to "not use the ideas described within (e.g. genetics and biology research)". Ignoring the topics within and attacking the author for what he later wrote about Atheism or how he behaved in interviews would a mindblowingly terrible way to critique his book about biology.
When discussing or critiquing an essay, the first step is to actually address the ideas inside of it. Attacking the character of its author or other things they may have said about unrelated topics is not a rational substitute.
In this case, geofft's comment is flawed on multiple levels. Aside from making a purely ad hominem argument against the 2008 essay How to Disagree, its specific attack was the author's twitter usage that occurred more than five years later.
ZigurdonJune 26, 2013
There is a similarity between Pinker (at least in The Blank Slate) and Gray in that they both paint their targets with one big flaw before bashing them. Gray's template straw man is a humanist who didn't read The Selfish Gene.
Allocator2008onMar 26, 2009
Sorry but no. Read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Selection does NOT act on the level of a bee colony, it acts on the level of the individual genes to be found within that colony. So sure some bees are infertile, but they are in service of the genes of the fertile bees. They are in effect enslaved by the genes of the Queen bee for instance.
Some types of ants will raid the colonies of other ants, and kidnap their children, bring them back, and the kidnapped children were grow up in service/servitude to the colony which had kidnapped them, and join in on future raids of what was once their home nest. The kidnapped ants are in service to their captors, to the genes of their captors. Say for instance the kidnapped ants were black, and their captors were red(or the other way around), so, even though the kidnapped ants do not have the "red" gene, they are helping to promote the selective advantage of the "red" gene by joining in the hunt for the colony of their captors. It is not a matter of "colony a" being selected for over and above "colony b". It is rather the genes of either colony getting selected for over other genes. All life, from viral to the naked apes like us, are subject to "the tyranny of the selfish gene".