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A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis
Anyone who thinks that Dawkins' ideas have anything whatsoever to do with Rand's has no idea wtf Dawkins was talking about. Dawkins was using the term "selfish gene" as a metaphor for a mathematical construct that helps to explain how the relative abundance of an inherited unit can evolve over time. This has exactly nothing in common with Rand's thesis. To compare them is not even wrong; its conceptually incoherent. In fact, Dawkins wrote an entire book (The Extended Phenotype) as a rebuttal to all of the critics who labeled him as an advocate for cynical selfishness, and he added a chapter to the next edition of The Selfish Gene explicitly advocating for social cooperation. This author should maybe read more than the first line of Dawkins' Wikipedia page before he decides he's an expert and spouts this nonsense for everyone to read.
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JakobVirgil · 4681 days ago · link ·
Oy I think he is talking about how the selfish gene is used not about dawkins intent.
The Book did put a kibosh on the idea of group level selection something that is just coming back into the fringes of evo theory.
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I don't think so:
- Dawkins implied that this was all you needed to know to understand human nature, and the idea quickly led to an explosion of selfish gene-based explanations for every aspect of human behavior.
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JakobVirgil · 4681 days ago · link ·
that does not changed how it was used in the laziest of all sciences social science.
Darwin did not intend social Darwinism. Marx did not intend Leninism.
we do not choose our descendants. How do I say we agree?