The Selfish Gene, 30 Years On.



Okay, I'll get back to endogenous retroviruses in a little while. In the meanwhile I want to share this stuff.

30 years ago Richard Dawkins wrote a groundbreaking book that redifined how we think about evolution. It was called "The Selfish Gene." It turned the landscape of evolution upside down, and asserted that genes are the stuff of life, and we mere organisms are survival vehicles for them. It's an outrageous idea, and yet so amazing in its ability to explain evolution that it is considered a revolutionary idea today.

It was reading this idea in Dawkins' follow up book "the Blind Watchmaker" that lit up the lightbulb above my head about evolution.


So Edge Magazine has posted this audio file of a round-table event commemorating the 30th anniversary of this book. I want to quote something in the introduction, and then give you the link to listen:


"In the mid-1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard, Robert Trivers wrote five papers that opened the door to the scientific study of human nature. (Trivers also wrote the introduction to the original 1976 edition of The Selfish Gene, restored in the 30th anniversary edition). Since that time, Dawkins, by building on the work of John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton, George C. Williams, and Trivers, and by adding and incorporating his own original, ingenious, and mind-bending ideas, has revolutionized the way we think about science and redefined the role of the public intellectual in western culture. It's not just about science: it's who we are, how we are, and even, how we think.

It's not surprising that some people want it all to go away. Around the fifteenth century, the word "humanism" was tied in with the idea of one intellectual whole. A Florentine nobleman knew that to read Dante but ignore science was ridiculous. Leonardo was a great artist, a great scientist, a great technologist. Michelangelo was an even greater artist and engineer. These men were intellectually holistic giants. To them, the idea of embracing humanism while remaining ignorant of the latest scientific and technological achievements would have been incomprehensible.

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world — of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art — the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum — and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

Yet it's the products of this educational system that go straight from their desks at university literary magazines to their offices in the heart of the cultural establishment at our leading newspapers, magazines, and publishers. It's a problem that's systemic and not individual. Unless one is pursuing a career path in science, it is extremely difficult for a non-science major at a top research university to graduate with anything approaching what can be considered an education in science. I recently talked with a noted Italian intellectual, who is as familiar with string theory and as he is with Dante, and writes about both in his philosophical novels. In appraising this situation, he argued for restraint and compassion. "They just don't know," he sighed, "they just don't know." He might well have added, they don't even know that they don't know."


John Brockman -- Edge


Read the whole introduction and listen to the audio recording here:

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge178.html#selfish

endogenous retroviruses!!!!


So this is really cool.

There's the DNA of thousands (millions?) of viruses spliced into your DNA! Every cell (almost) in your body has the mark of millions and millions of generations of viral infections permanently etched into your genetic code.

When viruses attack, they splice their own instructions into the DNA of the host cell. If that cell is an egg cell, and that egg cell comes to term, the mutation can remain in the DNA of the offspring. That mutation survives as part of the new DNA of the organism, and all its descendents.

Scientists have isolated the DNA of over 98,000 viruses in the Human genome, and over 150,000 fragments of these viruses.

And one of the coolest things about this is it represents a seperate line of evidence for common ancestry. If a virus inserted its genetic code into a common ancestor of humans and chimps, that virus code is still there, in the same place in both the human and the chimp genome. The genes of humans and chimps have shifted around on the chromosomes, but the virus code most of the time is found in the analogous place in both.

Looking at our DNA, we can trace back our common ancestry with other animals living today. Scientists can chart the endogenous retroviruses in various creatures DNA, and use the similarities and differences to chart a taxonomic tree, and see how it compares to the trees built based on anatomy, genetic similarity, etc. It's a line of evidence that points to no possible conclusion other than common ancestry.

But even more interesting to me, it points to a mechanism by which evolution can be accelerated when a species is under stress.

I'll post more about that soon.

Read Carl Zimmer's story about this in the meanwhile on his blog:

http://loom.corante.com/archives/2006/03/13/the_sixtymillionyear_virus.php#comments

Archbishop of Canterbury: Pro-evolution.


We've been discussing the ways in which evolution is still compatible with Christian belief. News comes today that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, has come out firmly on the side of science -- as well as on the side of Jesus Christ.


"The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has stepped into the controversy between religious fundamentalists and scientists by saying that he does not believe that creationism - the Bible-based account of the origins of the world - should be taught in schools."

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1735730,00.html



We know that the Vatican has come down on the science side of the evolution debate, and now the Anglican Church as well. Those are the numbers one and three largest Christian sects in the world, representing 1,176,000,000 Christians, according to adherants.com


Here's my view.... if you put creationism, ID, young earth belief, whatever pseudoscientific hypothesis out there as confirmation of a very strict reading of the Bible, you in essence make Christianity falsifiable. Those are claims we can test in a lab. If it is a tenant of Christianity that the world is only 6000 years old, you've now shoved God into a laboratory where we can test for Him. If a Dinosaur bone is more than 6000 years old, you've disproved that brand of Christianity as demonstrably false.

And that's a very crappy test for God. God, if He exists, is much, much bigger than that.


Thoughts?

Do we get our morality from evolution?


This was a question Ron asked in comments, and I think we should break it into its own thread, for ease of discussion.


Someone anonymous wrote:

"Great answer, I do think that science has it's own moral code though that still puzzles me. I havn't seen a cat that would not hunt the mouse but what I did see on one of the animal shows was a crocodile that attacked a small deer like animal and a near-by hipo attacked the croc, gently placed the deer in his mouth and carried him to safety and tried to nudge him back to life. Even the people on the show said that they did not have an explaination for this.

Another show showed two male cobras in a turf battle and said that they will intentionally not bite each other because they have a built in understanding of the fatality in the bite. When one of the cobras is penned he must leave. I realize that my understanding could be skewed but to me that sounds like morals."


I think both of those are great things to discuss.

As I see it, there are two questions here:

Did humans get their morality from evolution?
Do animals exhibit behavior that we might call morality?



Let me try to answer the first one.


Did humans get their morality from evolution?

Here's where we get into an area where religion and religious belief has something to say. Religion says that at least SOME of our morality came from the sky in the form of some pretty famous stone tablets. Evolution has nothing to say on whether or not those stone tablets are the word of God. Religion also says that a famous carpenter brought us some really great moral guidelines. Evolution is silent on that question as well.

I'm not going to wade into those possibilities here.


If you ask if morality came from evolution, I'm going to say, well, our brains came from evolution. Our bodies came from evolution. Our hearts came from evolution.

Did God use evolution to create morality? Good question. It's a religious question which science cannot answer.


But we did evolve morality. Chimps have their own form of what you'd call "chimp morality," that is, a set of social rules by which the family group gets along, settles disputes, looks out for one another, protects the weak and ensures the continued survival of the family.

All social animals have social rules they follow. Dogs in packs have a pecking order, an alpha dog, etc. Dogs imprint on people and treat their owners as the alpha dog in the pack.

Geese will imprint on a human owner, as if it's a parent, and will follow them in a gaggle.

Sometimes animals will adopt an animal of a different species, even when normally that animal is food. We've seen that in cute stories in the news where a pet cat has a parakeet. Sometimes the mothering instinct is so strong in an animal that it will adopt the young of a different animal. I remember a story about a wild lioness that adopted different baby gazelles for short periods of time (before the other lionesses in the pride killed them for food).

All of these instances are examples of social instincts in animals. There is no evidence to suggest that our social behavior isn't, at least in part, instinct-based.

Thylacines!



In comments, Texan wrote me about the Rat-Squirrel, which was thought to be extinct, found.
Thanks, Texan.

I had read that, it is really fascinating. There are so many animals that are extinct that I would wish we'd find!

One of my favorite is the tasmanian tiger, or thylacine.

http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/

It was a carnivorous marsupial that was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century.

What an amazing animal.

This is the place to discuss Ron's comments about evolution.

In previous posts Ron asked:

"I really respect your thoughts and I think that you offer a great intellectual response to questions that are on the mind of Christians. If you don’t mind I have another one for you that I am still pondering. If evolution is true and their is no truth to creation, then why have some creatures not evolved with others? Like the Coelacanth caught in 1938 and again in 1998?"


And


"Thanks but I was unclear with my original question, so I was misunderstood to be asking about an evolutionary change over a short period of time. The species was thought to be extinct and was discovered in 1938 and 1998 unchanged over the course of 80 million years.

My intent is asking questions is to get an honest atheistic answer in a kind manner and I know that myself and other Christians are asking some tough questions that I truely wonder what the other side of the idea world replies to.

Charles Edward White recently wrote an article using math and science to prove the existance of God. In it he quotes a formula from Jacob Beckenstein and Steven Hawking that says that the chance that the universe is created at random is one 10 to the 10 to the 123.

The second number that points to God comes from William Dembski. He says that there are 10 to the 80 elementary particles in the Universe. The fastest they could mutate would be Plank time or 10 to the -42 seconds. If every particle in the Universe had been mutating at the fastest possible rate since the Big Bang, there still would not be enough mutations. He says that for Darwins theory to be right the Universe would have to be a trillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times older than it is.

The other number that White says points to God is the formula e pie i (I do not know how to make a pie symbol on my computer).

His science my be flawed, like I say I am just curious as to what the other side to this is."



Let's set up this post to discuss this outside of the forum for Off The Map.