An Analysis of Richard Dawkins's the Selfish Gene by Nicola Davis

Author:Nicola Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351353410
Publisher: Macat Library

Author’s Response

The fact that the second edition of The Selfish Gene was published with few changes in 1989 seems to suggest Dawkins was not taking the criticism on board. He did, however, address his critics in endnotes and in articles. For example, he responded to Mary Midgley’s criticism that he was using evolution to make a moral case for selfish behavior by explaining that “genes ‘determine’ behavior only in a statistical sense.”8 In an earlier article in 1981 called “In Defence of Selfish Genes,”9 he had addressed her criticisms more fully, informing her that she had misunderstood The Selfish Gene: a point other commentators agreed with him on.

He took the argument about The Selfish Gene oversimplifying behavior into his next book, The Extended Phenotype.10 Here he explained that he didn’t believe in genetic determinism*—the excessive importance given to genes in determining intelligence, behavior, and development—but that sometimes “it is necessary to use language that can be unfortunately misunderstood as genetic determinism.”11 To him the sacrifice of clarity had been necessary at times to reach a wider audience with The Selfish Gene.

His disagreement with Stephen Jay Gould dragged on for years—until Gould’s death in 2002—with Gould arguing that, rather than gene-level selection being an explanation of evolution, factors such as physical environment, chance, and species extinction needed to be taken into account. Their sustained argument even inspired a book discussing their ideas and opinions, Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest.12

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.