Book Review – Can ‘The Selfish Gen’s’ Unproved Propositions Be Convincing?

Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gen explains the behavior of living things around the selfishness of genes, but many of its assumptions remain unproven. While the book offers an interesting perspective on evolutionary theory, its lack of logical support for its assumptions leaves room for criticism.

 

Why do humans exist? What is the origin of humanity and what is the meaning of life? Many thinkers and philosophers have debated and studied these questions. Multiregional origins theories, African origins theories, British empiricism, and Darwin’s theory of evolution and creationism from a religious perspective are just a few of the ongoing debates. In the midst of this debate, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which proposed the idea that life exists for the purpose of replicating itself, sparked a major controversy in the biological community and is considered one of the most prominent theories of the 20th century.
“My purpose is to explore the biology of egoism and altruism,” writes Richard Dawkins at the beginning of Chapter 1, titled “Why do we exist? Dawkins argues that it is not the species, nor the group, nor the individual that matters in the process of evolution, but the most fundamental gene, and that the world of genes is filled with unfair competition, deception, and relentless selfishness. Here’s what he has to say in this regard.
First, he establishes that the basic unit of selection, the basic unit of selfishness, is the gene, the unit of heredity. To explain the origin of the gene, he tells the story of the birth of the self-replicator. The first self-replicators were special molecules that “just happened” to be among the molecules floating around in the primordial soup. The offspring of these first self-replicators are the current DNA molecules. These self-replicators made errors in their replication, resulting in variants and the emergence of different species. However, the reproduction of different species inevitably creates competition for survival on the limited space of Earth, and eventually the replicators themselves built survival machines. In the end, it is argued that humans and all other animals are nothing more than machines created by genes.
He explains that everything we see in living things is the result of genetic selfishness, and gives many examples of how seemingly altruistic behaviors that we take for granted in our ethics and morality are actually strategies for genes to further maximize selfishness. In addition, symbiotic relationships that result in mutual benefit are common in the animal and plant kingdom. Even these symbiotic relationships are just a means of survival. It is interesting to observe the behavior of different animals to understand that the underlying purpose of their behavior is to serve the survival strategy of their genes.
What distinguishes humans from other species, which have evolved through genes in the same way as other species, is that we have developed culture. “Our genes are selfish, but they are not necessarily forced by our genes; they are governed by the influences learned and transmitted by culture,” he says, and argues that it is the role of memes that makes culture possible. He explains that while genes reproduce by self-replication through biological means, memes reproduce by self-replication from brain to brain through imitation. Memes are similar to the idea of evolutionary entities as genes. This explains why humans are different from animals, which are governed by genes.
Despite these radical claims, Dawkins organizes and develops his arguments in a very convincing way, using logical arguments and examples to support his claims. However, there are a few things that seem to be missing from this book, and what I mean is that there are a lot of assumptions that he makes that make it difficult to accept his theory. In order to develop an argument, it is necessary to examine the assumptions made at the beginning to see if they are correct. However, without such a process, the theory consists of unproven assumptions. In other words, there are many unproven propositions.
It is already known that genes are the smallest physical unit that makes up a human being, but there is insufficient evidence to establish them as the basic unit of selection, the basic unit of evolution, and the basic unit of selfishness. It can be explained by the behavior of various individuals, but there is no evidence that this proposition is true. In other words, Dawkins makes an assumption in the first part of his argument.
Even his explanation of the birth of self-replicating organisms, the ancestors of genes, is driven by several assumptions. Dawkins mythologizes the birth of the first self-replicator by using the word “chance” to describe it as if it were a fact, but what we are told as the basis for the “chance” occurrence is simply that “if you bet hundreds of millions of times over the eons on a bet with a very small probability of winning, you will surely win the bet at least once.” In other words, it could have occurred “by chance” over such a long period of time, outside of our human conception of time, which presupposes that even if the probability of this “chance” occurrence is extremely small, it must be possible. Nothing was said that answered my question, “How do we know if the probability is zero or not?” We have no way of knowing whether the fact that we have not observed or recorded this “accidental” event in the 4.4 million years of our existence is due to our short history compared to the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s age, or because it is not “accidental” but “impossible”.
We also make a number of assumptions about the evolution of self-replicators. First, that self-replicating organisms must make errors, that the variants must compete with each other, and that the survival machinery selected to survive the competition is all assumptions. We don’t know if they’re true or not, but these assumptions drive the thought experiment. The thought experiment is that the speed of replication, the accuracy of replication, and the longevity of the replicators will further increase survival. This thought experiment is plausible, but it’s hard to accept as fact.
Another assumption is about the possible contradiction in the unit of expression of genetic selfishness being the gene. The behavior of entities such as humans and animals is said to be explained by the selfishness of the genes behind them. So let’s look inside each individual human being as an independent unit of selfishness. There is no sufficient explanation for the possible conflicts of self-interest between individual genes within humans. In this book, we describe it as a gene pool, but even the existence of a gene pool is already an assumption.
The use of animals as a model for analyzing the behavior of most individuals is also problematic. It is possible that the intentions of an animal’s behavior that people analyze may not be what the animal actually thinks. Analyzing animals focuses only on their behavior, so it’s impossible to know exactly what they’re thinking. In other words, because they’re animals, there’s no way to know if the results of analyzing their behavior match their actual intentions. In other words, it’s an assumption that the results are true. But what if we were to analyze humans instead of animals? We could spend more time explaining human behavior and give readers a chance to observe and relate to their own behavior.
I have explained and criticized some of these unproven assumptions. Despite some criticisms, the book is very interesting for its idea of viewing evolution as a gene rather than a species or individual, and for its attempt to explain all of life’s behavior in terms of gene selfishness. This book, which explains the evolution and behavior of all living things from the perspective of genes, is not only interesting in an academic sense, but also thought-provoking by giving us a different perspective on understanding life. I hope this book will expand your understanding of evolutionary theory and the behavior of living things.