Notes The Selfish Gene

Category: Books

Read the original document

<!-- gdoc-inlined -->

Perspective shift! Gene’s eye-view of nature, instead of the viewpoint of an organism. (Shifting perspective as a critical part of decision making)

Discovering new theories and facts are one way to advance knowledge. But one of the greater ways is to discover a new way of seeing old theories and facts.

Necker Cube as an example of shifting perspectives being equally valid.

Taking academic literature and ‘popularizing’ it, making it explicable to others, often leads to more creativity (in learning to explain it well, Feynman would agree)

To the evolutionist, there is no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

Self deception is selected for - since deception is critical in communication, detecting deception is also useful. One easy method for avoiding the detection of deception is self deception - believing the thing yourself. This accounts for a slew of heuristics and biases. You mind will believe what is consequentially good for your genes.

“Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.” Rage against the dying of the light

Darwinian social theory as intellectual support for psychology

We are survival machines - robots programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is the truth, but extraordinarily hard to believe. It feels like science fiction.

Philosophy and most of the ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

Book’s purpose - the biology of selfishness and altruism.

A classic way to misunderstanding evolution - thinking that the important thing is the good of the species, rather than the good of the individual. The selfish individual gene is the driver of evolution.

A predominant quality to be found in a gene is ruthless selfishness. Yet there are special circumstances where a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a form of limited altruism.

Universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole do not make evolutionary sense. This is not to advocate a morality based on evolution, just a positive understanding of the world the way it actually is.

It is too easy to mistake a belief of what is the case with one of what should be the case (Thus, the reputation of Machiavelli)

By understanding the selfish nature of our biology, we gain power over ourselves that can be used to build a better world.

Altruism - increasing another individual’s welfare at the expense of its own. Welfare is defined as chance of survival, even if the effect seems small. Tiny influences on survival probability can have a major impact on evolution.

Altruism isn’t about intent or psychology - it merely cares about whether or not the effect of a behavior is to increase the welfare of another and decrease the welfare of the actor.

On closer examination, acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. That is not to say that the motives are selfish - the motives may feel completely selfless! The point is that the effect on survival prospects for the actor is to increase their welfare, even if it appears at first glance to decrease it.

Simple selfishness: refusing to share valued resources such as food, territory or sexual partners.

Honeybees - suicide stinging - as an apparently altruistic act.

Dawkins points out a misconception that I had - that evolution functions over groups, taking the tribe that is altruistic over the tribe that fights amongst itself and so selecting for the genes of the more altruistic tribe.

The counterargument is the game theoretical one - that each individual has an incentive to defect and not behave altruistically. Those individuals will be selected for. Any altruistic group will be invaded.

The group-selection theory has intuition pumps in the way that our moral and political systems work.

Altruism within a group often goes with selfishness between groups. Individuals are expected to kill members of other tribes knowing only that they belong to a different nation.

The humanist movement to do things for the good of the species is a new one, and gives us intuition behind misguided group selection.

There is a muddle in biology over the level at which altruism is to be expected. Family, community, sure. But larger tribes, ingroup outgroup, are harder choices. What about species? Should lions avoid killing antelopes, for the good of mammals? Ethically arbitrary lines.

The fundamental unit of selection, Dawkins will argue, is the gene. Not the individual. Not the group. The gene, the unit of heredity.

The Replicators

The survival of the fittest as a subcase of Dawkins’ ‘The survival of the stable’ - Does this help? Don’t we almost define stable systems as those that survive? Stable things are the things that we name, and it is rare to find objects in an unstable state.

Earliest form of natural selection was the rejection of unstable forms and an embrace of stable ones.

Simplicity as a form of stability - Taleb will agree, the complex is what is fragile.

A replicator - a molecule that can make copies of itself - came out of primordial soup containing amino acids (the building blocks of protiens) and stimulated by external energy (thunderstorms, volcanoes, light)

Nothing wants to evolve - errors in replication is selected against.

There are many arguments where no conclusion about the substance of the world is changed based in the outcome of the argument. Many of these are arguments about definitions.

Chapter 11 - Memes: The New Replicators

The opener is with language, and how it slowly changes over the generations. While each generation can talk to the generations above and below it, generations 200+ years apart would barely be able to communicate.

Follows up with the way the songs of songbirds evolve by mistake - termed ‘cultural mutations’. The adaptation of cultural memes has a different flavor among humans, where the ‘mutation’ process is strongly non-random. But we can save that property in animals that are less self-aware. Dawkins refers to these as ‘interesting oddities’.

Examples of Memes:

1. Tunes
   1. Song - ‘Auld Lang Syne’
   2. Symphony
2. Ideas
   1. God / Religion
      1. Jewish Religion Laws
   2. Life After Death
   3. Threat of Hell
   4. Faith - Belief without evidence
   5. Celibacy
3. Catch-phrases
4. Fashon
5. Engineering
   1. Ways of making pots (aesthetic)
   2. Ways of creating arches (aesthetic)
6. Language
7. Songs of Songbirds
8. Diet
9. Ceremonies
10. Customs
11. Art
12. Architecture

Chapter 11 Idea List:

1. Memetic evolution is much faster than genetic evolution
2. Memes can be seen as alive, if life evolves by the differential survival of replicators.
3. Memes are parasites, in that they use their host to survive and reproduce.
4. The emergence of the meme as a new replicator is akin to the emergence of alien life on our planet.
5. The name meme comes out of ‘mime’ - from the imitation that memes use to spread.
6. Standards for memes:
   1. Longevity
   2. Virality / Fecundity
      1. Creation of Desire to Spread
         1. Value Added
         2. Psychological Appeal
      2. Ease of Spread
         1. Simplicity
         2. Attachment to other memes in cultural environment
      3. Creation of Need to Spread
         1. Ex., Hell
   3. Copying Fidelity?
      1. Empirically, memes are constantly modified and blended, certainly at a low level of abstraction
7. Memes often have Hierarchical Structure
   1. Memes exist at multiple levels of abstraction
   2. Memes have higher fidelity at more abstract levels
8. Memes can be thought of as active agents, working for their own survival. Memes defend themselves, invade others, etc.
9. Memes compete over limited resources.
   1. Attention
   2. Memory
   3. Time (Ex. Radio / TV Time)
   4. Space (Ex. Billboard Space, Newspaper Column-Inches, Library Shelf Space)
10. Interaction with Cultural Environment
11. Many memes are closely linked and share their selection outcome
    1. Ex. Organized Church, with architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, writings.
12. Memes can hijack other memes to propagate themselves.
13. Explanation for behavior that doesn’t have a grounding in evolution
14. A gene for celibacy could never survive, but a meme for celibacy can.
15. Memes can oppose evolutionary success of the human carrying the meme
16. Ex. Celibacy, Life after Death
17. There is stability in the meme pool, which new memes have to invade. Pool goes to evolutionarily stable solution.
18. Genetic longevity through children as weaker than memetic longevity.
19. We don’t need to look for biological survival value of traits like religion, music, dancing, etc. - we just need to show that the memes have properties that advantage their own survival.

All these evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution, but really has nothing to do with genetic evolution.

Foundational property of life - all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The entity of replication could be the gene. But it calso could be something else on other planets.

Memes are parasites, in that they use their host and they die when their host dies. The most dangerous memes use their host to propagate themselves.

The emergence of the meme is akin to the emergence of alien life on our planet. A new type of replicator.

The name comes from mime - from the ‘imitation’ that memes use to spread themselves.

The survival value of a meme comes out of its value. For example, God provides superficially plausible answers to deep and troubling questions about existence. It allows for tribal cooperation. It suggests that injustices in this world will be rectified in the next. The attached ‘life after death’ meme allows the parasite to propagate itself through means that endanger the life of the host.

Imitation leads to much faster self copying than in generations of evolution through genes.

Standards for memes:

• Longevity
• Fecundity - Ability to produce offspring (virality)
• Copying-Fidelity (Shaky ground - memes are not high fidelity, not clear that this is important to the meme)
  • Memes go through continuous mutation and blending

Memes have hierarchical structure. Take a symphony - how many memes is that?

Memes can be abstracted out, and so have high fidelity at the abstract level even if they lose fidelity at the lower levels.

Holy fucking shit. Memetics is what allows for general intelligence, more than evolution! You just need a platform on which you can run culture - a platform for memetic mutation and differential selection!

Language as dramatically speeding and entrenching memetic growth. There were probably pre-lingual memes.

The ‘evolutionary’ people have it half right - the replicator is the right mechanism, but it’s over the wrong building block! You need to get to a structure that you can run memetic evolution on! (Perhaps this is what is important, rather than the ‘generality’ of the mind - it’s not clear that our minds are completely general, just more general that the minds of other animals)

Memes an be thought of as active agents, working towards their own survival.

The competition landscape for memes is attention and memory. Dawkins says “Storage space limitation, and time.” Ex. Radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, library shelf space.

Many memes ar eclosely linked together, and through association share their future. Many memes co-adapt into stable sets of mutually assiting memes - ex. Organized church with architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition. Also, memes can hijack other memes to proagate themselves.

Hell and God as memes reinforce one another.

A gene for Celibacy could never survive, but a meme could. And so memes and genes can oppose one onther.

Memes interact with the cultural environment, a world of other memes being selected over. The meme pool has some stabliity, which new memes have to invade.

Genetic immortality though children as weaker than Memetic immortality.

ZOMG - We don’t have to look for biological survival values of traits liek religion, music, dancing, etc., though they may exist! We just need to show that the memes will take turns that are advantageous to themselves!! Everybody’s pointing to improved cooperation to explain the success of religion and tribal memes. And that may be true. But often, memes exploit quirks of the cultural environment or psychological traits to accomplish their spread. They’ll spread by force or by fear, or by simplicity (which leads to ease of imitation).

Difference between the evolutionarily stable strategy and optimal outcomes, but for memes. Lack of self-awareness / foresight for memes (I don’t see why selection over time wouldn’t get something akin to ‘foresight’ in the memes that exist in the environment)

Upside - humans have foresight, and can work to defy the selfish genes of our birth and the selfish memes of our indoctrination. One choice is to turn against our creators, and cultivate pure, disintrested altrusim - something with no place in nature and which has never existed. (Predicting the Effective Altruism meme)

Source: Original Google Doc