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