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Essay on Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins, the acclaimed author of The Selfish Gene, takes as his theme the loss of romance that science evokes by demystifying what it touches upon. He sees poetry in science but it is more a construct of the mind than the artful turn of phrase in the written line. The book is subtitled "Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder." Frankly, "an appetite for wandering" might be more apropos. It is more a hodgepodge of ideas among and within chapters held loosely together by a thin thread of genetic evolutionary theory. Early on, he tackles the delusions of poetry (isn't much of poetry the expression of wishful thinking?) and those' of everyday life, astrology, and such. At the halfway mark he returns to the selfish gene. (Dawkins, 2000)
As one might expect he creates an opportunity to take a poke at Stephen Jay Gould on the way. Both Gould's and Niles Eldridge's punctuated equilibrium hypothesis (Eldredge, 2004) and Gould's interpretation of the fossils of the Burgess shale (Gould, 1990) come in for much negative comment. He expands upon the selfish gene and its role in a hard look at the Gala hypothesis which claims the global living world can be looked upon as a single organism and in which every species does its bit for the whole. This romanticized notion has taken hold among the deep ecologists who have carried the concept well beyond the metaphor that Lovelock originally postulated.
Dawkins reminds us that natural selection satisfies the demands only of the here and now, operating without foresight. Environmental conditions steer genetic drift. Changes in genes can lead to a more competitive organism or to a more cooperative one. At the bacterial level, mutualism has proved to be the better bet. Over time, co-adaptation among many species in the same environment has led to what appears to be a fully integrated system.....
