Dawkins dissed? no, defended by Darwinist authors (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 25, 2018, 16:18 (2244 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: An interesting defense of Dawkins selfish genes, by making assumptions against the presented evidence that 80% of DNA has some functions:
https://aeon.co/essays/our-genome-is-not-a-blueprint-for-making-humans-at-all?utm_sourc...

dhw: The article does defend Darwin (and I disagree with its presumptions concerning natural selection and random mutations), but I don’t know why you have to make him your headline when it is Dawkins who is the focus of its attention. And although it is an attack on ENCODE, I’d like to highlight a very different aspect of the argument:

It should have said Dawkins dissed. Changed.

dhw: QUOTES:
When looking at our genome, we might take pride in how individual genes co-operate in order to build the human body in seemingly unselfish ways. But co-operation in making and maintaining a human body is just a highly successful strategy to make gene copies, perfectly consistent with selfishness.
So why are we fooled into believing that humans (and animals and plants) rather than genes are what counts in biology? It is a matter of scale: the world we can see is too big to include genomes, and our lifespan is too short to see how individual genes come into existence, change, and disappear again, processes that unfold over millions of years.
Our genome does of course contain a human blueprint – but building us is just one of the things our genome does, just one of the strategies used by the genes to stay alive. In their selfish desire to leave offspring, our genes have evolved to form a society where they work together efficiently, dividing the labour to ensure that each makes it into the next generation. Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the genes in this society co-operate with one another not from a sense of fairness or design, but simply to maximise their own survival. From the myriad interactions of genes in this complex society emerge the striking biological adaptations we see in the living world.

dhw: If we substitute cell for gene, this is very much along the lines of the hypothesis I have proposed. Every organism is a community of cells which cooperate to form every multicellular organism that has ever existed. The point that the world is “too big to include genomes”, in our understanding of how life works as it does, is akin to Shapiro’s response to the question why people question cellular intelligence: “Large organisms chauvinism”. And the myriad interactions account for the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush of organisms extant and extinct, including humans. Of course the article does not take account of the astonishing complexity of a mechanism that can achieve this diversity and which a theist would understandably claim requires a designing mind. And it doesn’t specifically claim that genes/cells are intelligent. For some reason, all the emphasis is on selfishness – which is not always conducive to successful cooperation and communal life – but selfish, unselfish, cooperative, communal behaviour are all factors that suggest a degree of conscious intelligence, as maximised in us humans.

I appreciate your comment. The article is all fluffy reasoning based on an emphasis on survival. As I have stated survival is only one of the considerations as to how and why evolution works. And there is more than a degree of conscious intelligence in the universe.