Richard Dawkins recants

[moderator1]

LBird wrote:

For my ideology, robbo, 'democracy' is an inherent part of 'socialism'.For your ideology, 'democracy' is not an inherent part of 'socialism'.Thus, based upon your basic absence of 'democracy', you need a political justification as to 'why' have democracy.The 'how' is merely a detail which follows from our opposed ideologies.My political justification is that 'socialism is necessarily democratic'. So, I don't agree with those who argue that 'socialism isn't necessarily democratic'.These are political beliefs which I hold.You don't hold my political beliefs, because your version of 'socialism' is 'individualistic', rather than 'democratic'.Since I hold that 'socialism is democratic', I also hold that all social production within a socialist society must be democratic.Since you hold that 'socialism is individualistic', you hold that some or all social production can be individualistic.Finally, I've said all this before, but you can't accept it, because then your individualism will be undermined. You must have a recourse to an 'individual reality', a 'biological necessity', a 'real world' outside of 'social production', which comes down to your ideology of 'materialism'.You can touch 'matter', and you won't have 'matter' voted out of 'existence', which it could be if we lived in a democratic socialist society, where 'matter' could be changed to something more suitable for our interests and purposes.Just like 'genes' could be.I argue that only society can decide these issues, whereas you, like all materialists, argue that 'individuals' decide their 'personal reality'.

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[moderator1]

robbo203 wrote:

LBird wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

…a complex social division of labour in which each and every one of us specialises in something that particularly interests us …

A good definition of socialism, robbo.'Each and every one of us will specialise in something that particularly interests us' – that 'something' being, of course, democratic social production.Of course, my ideological assumptions are democratic and communist, so I assume 'each and every one of us' is a collective, which aims to revolutionise social production, so that all of the collective benefit equitably, and 'equitable' is democratically decided.For you, though, being an individualist, 'each and every one of us' is assumed to mean as individuals.That's why you won't have the democratic control of social production, because you're really interested in your own individual production, and your own personal benefits, rather than what you are going to have to do to produce for others.That's the crunch in this issue – does 'democratic socialism' actually mean 'democratic' (and so 'individuals' can be voted into doing something that they wouldn't if left to their own personal choice), or does 'democratic socialism' actually mean 'bourgeois individual democracy' (which looks to 'individual sovereignty' in political decisions).That's what's at root in the debates about 'materialism' – individualists are elitists, and so must have something that is beyond democratic accountability, and for that they argue for 'matter'. They want something that they can 'touch', as an individual, and any argument that undermines their individual sovereignty over 'reality' is a political danger to them.So, the materialists, like robbo, won't have any talk about 'democratic production', within which all social products are subject to democratic controls.That is, we can decide whether 'genes' are produced by us, or whether we wish to have a different scientific explanation for our social activities, beyond the 'biological' and 'individual'.That is, we can change 'genes', rather than contemplate them. 'Genes' are a social product, produced by a specific society, at a specific time, for specific interests and purposes. 'Genes' are not simply sitting 'out there', waiting to be 'discovered' by 'disinterested scientists', and once 'discovered', are 'True' forever, as 'Facts' we must simply accept.End of a rather different political story, robbo…

  Another long winded attempt to repeat the same drivel and ignore  the same points made against you LBird.  Nice one.  But why am I not surprised ?  You are a past master in the art of deception and distortion. How  you can possibly deduce from that I said  that I am " really interested" only in what benefiits me and  not how I can benefit others,  I cannot imagine,  But then when it comes to a fertile imagination I defer to you every time L BirdNot content with fantasy you resorrt to fibbing as in this little gem ,  "So, the materialists, like robbo, won't have any talk about 'democratic production', within which all social products are subject to democratic controls,  Actually LBird I specifically set up a thread precisely to "talk" about the subject of democratic production in socialism which you conspicuously shied away from ,  See here http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/socialism-and-democracyMRI scanners, tins of baked bins,  and size 43 brown boots with reinforced toecaps are all "social products",  Could you explain to me in simple terms how you propose to involve 7.5 billion people in a "democratic process" of  deciding on the design and output of these things?  I'm all ears, LBird.  Or could it be that actually it is YOU who refuses to entertain any talk about the democratic production of these social products?The same argument applies to the question of genes.  Genes, you say, are a social product, and in a democratic society, any 'definitions' would have to be decided collectively by all, for the purposes of all, in the interests of all.,  So you propose that 7.5 billion people should "vote on the definition of a gene" –  yes? There are really only two questions I would ask, then,  since youve expressed such a keen interest in talking about this subject:1) Why does it matter so much to you that the definition of gene should be "collectively voted upon"?   If me and my buddy thought  a gene was one thing and you thought it was something else would the fact that you had been outvoted 2 to 1 cause you to change your mind about what a gene was?  Why? 2) How are you going to organise a vote among 7.5 billion people and who is going to organise it?.  Would the vote on the defintion of a gene come before or after the vote on the tins of baked beans once weve had the Revolution? What, in your esteemed opinion, do you consider to be the more pressing subject for the world populace to get to grips with just so I can know for sure where my priorities  should lie?Im sure you are dying to tell us  and I for one would deeply appreciate a direct answer to both of these simple questions

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[robbo203]

LBird wrote:

For my ideology, robbo, 'democracy' is an inherent part of 'socialism'.For your ideology, 'democracy' is not an inherent part of 'socialism'.Thus, based upon your basic absence of 'democracy', you need a political justification as to 'why' have democracy.

L Bird you should really  be ashamed of yourself,  Either you are a congenital liar or you are a sandwich short of a picnic. When I have ever said or suggested democracy is "not an inherent part of socialism"?    The issue  is purely to do with the scope and extent of democratic decisionmaking in a socialist society.   Its got nothing to do with the fact that there will be democratic decisionmaking in a socialist society which, as a socialist and a democrat, I fully accept. As a democrat and a socialist, however,  I see absolutely point or purpose in a socialist society voting on the defintion of a gene, for chrissakes.  The idea is just totally preposterous.  There are quite a few decisions in a socialist society that will require democratic decsonmaking but this is most definitely not one of them.  I have asked you to explain why you think a global vote on the definition of a gene is even neccessary and how you imagine in your wildest dreams such a global vote of 7.5 billion could conceivably even be organised. Your complete silence on the matter speaks volumes.  Until you answer questions that are directly asked of you in good faith, you will continue to be regarded as having more or less zero crediblity and as a troll whose only purpose on this forum seems to be to disrupt and derail any kind of serious discission  here

Quote:

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[Dave B]

I think there has been a shift recently towards the idea of gene expression or phenotype or whatever is more about the composite effects of several or many genes. It sort fits in, in a way, to the revival of Lamarkian epigentics or Darwin’s  Pangenesis. With genes being switched on or off and being passed onto the offspring. This recent one has set the house on fire although it follows on from earlier work done by an Australian Bod that got excommunicated for it. http://www.nature.com/news/fearful-memories-haunt-mouse-descendants-1.14272 It was mentioned by Professor Alice Roberts on the radio four infinite monkey cage a couple of weeks ago; where the scientist also said they didn’t believe in scientific truth. Dawkins sort of modified his position in other ways shortly after his selfish gene book with another emerging idea he plagiarised as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype  The content of the idea if not perhaps Dawkins precise take on it is that evolution animals change there environment and then start to adapt to that etc. On a macroscopic larger epoch scale that was always understood in the sense that 3 billion years ago or whatever plants changed oxygen of the atmosphere etc. In the co-operative social instinct and language or communication which is a derivative of the greek word for sharing and communism etc. Once it starts or the ‘social’ environment is created then better communicators and co-operators have an advantage of non co-operators and communicators. And language itself provides a platform or environment for the development of intelligence with a kind of evolutionary positive feedback mechanism. I got from Wittgenstein a connection between thinking and language. Language is formed out of and fit for purpose out of direct experience of the material world etc. And as such it can keep us in an intellectual box. We normally deal with it by falling back on allegories and metaphors.

[Sreal]

Surely, LBird, your repeated assertion that individualism is counterposed to collectivism is a non-starter. It certainly isn't what Marx thought: "The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.""We must above all avoid setting up ‘the society’ as an abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the social entity. The expression of his life… is therefore the expression and verification of the life of society."

[rodmanlewis]

ALB wrote:

Why did Dawkins agree to his book being called The Selfish Gene? No doubt because its publishers thought it would sell more with that title as opposed to The Cooperative Gene.  So, he played a role, unwittingly perhaps, in promoting "Thatcherism" and "greed is good".

Perhaps because it wouldn't have jibed with people's perception of the world they saw (and still do see) around them, that we are warlike; bad-tempered; impatient; selfish; self-centered, and don't pay all the taxes we should, and only co-operate when we have to, i.e. when we have to work to earn a living?We co-operate because we need to to survive, not because we necessarily want to. It's a practical decision, not a moral one or  "in our genes". It's only "in our genes" to the sense that evolution has given us the thinking capacity take an overview of a situation, and work out what we think is the best course of action to take in particular circumstances. Of course, that doesn't mean that we always make the best decisions.

[ALB]

Dave B wrote:

Dawkins sort of modified his position in other ways shortly after his selfish gene book with another emerging idea he plagiarised as well.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype

Exactly. Everything he has written since the publication of The Selfish Gene has been backtracking on what he wrote there. But the damage had been done since this is the most famous/notorious of his books.

[twc]

What’s in a Name?Dawkins’s Selfish Gene is not, as its name might suggest, a theory about a gene for human selfishness.  It is not a theory of human selfishness.Instead it is about the [metaphorical] “selfishness” of genes—the genes, not us, are [metaphorically] “selfish”.The theory emerged in the 1960s as a dissenting view to current thoughts on the underlying mechanism of Darwinian evolutionary selection—the dynamic process of speciation through the differential survival and reproduction of heritable characteristics.Since genes express themselves as [heritable] characteristics, Dawkins decided to give genes their prominent due as the fundamental selection units of the grand process of speciation, instead of, as before, the gross biological organisms themselves. [The scientific merit of Dawkins’s move is not under consideration here.]Such an outlook, termed “selfish”, was preordained to offend social sensibilities.  But that was nothing new in Darwinian theory, which from the start affronted social sensibilities.  Darwin, like his contemporary Marx, confidently went his “own way, and let people say what they will!”***Further to understand Dawkins’s motivation…Darwin had drawn attention to the self-sacrificing behaviour of certain species, in particular, the eu-social insects [ants, termites, bees].  Evolutionary scientist W. D. Hamilton coined the equally affronting biological term ‘Altruism’ to describe self-sacrificing behaviour in the animal kingdom.The idea seems to have been spawned by evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane, who did the biological-kinship mathematics, and apparently joked he would lay down [self-sacrifice] his life for “two brothers, but not one; or eight cousins, but not seven.”To make sense of Haldane’s answer, recall that organisms share heritable characteristics with their nearest kin, and that evolutionary selection is entirely a process of the differential survival of heritable characteristics that confer advantage under changing environmental constraints — hence the survival of genetically close kin that share spots, stripes, long necks, etc.***ALB, who has studied its history, points out that Dawkins’s biological co-opting of the word ‘Selfish’ and promoting the phrase ‘Selfish Gene’ was very much in line with the temper of the time [Ardrey, Lorentz, Eysenck, …].  Dawkins added fuel to the battles that ensued, such as that against Sociobiology, which consciously extended genetical explanation precisely to human social behaviour. However, my current focus is much narrower and relates to scientific terminology.All scientific theories adapt everyday terminology, and migrate it from its familiar social environment into a quasi-unfamiliar technical environment, thereby giving common words a peculiar twist when they are re-employed in their unfamiliar scientific context.Literary art lives and dies by co-opting familiar words to unfamiliar contexts, implicitly relying on our ability to appreciate common words transported to uncommon contexts.  Just so, scientific contexts are non-literary, socially uncommon, contexts for most of us.Scientists, for want of a ready-made terminology, regularly describe uncommon phenomena in common everyday words.  Take force, tension, potential, energy, power, work, creation, annihilation, attraction, affinity, imaginary, rational, irrational, transcendental, labour, value, exploitation…Yet, when scientists break the mould, and deign to coin new terms, like entropy or enthalpy, they face the accusation of deliberate obfuscation by complainants who neither comprehend the novel concept nor exhibit competence to propose adequate synonyms.To all of the above carping over scientific terminology, the scientist can only reply with Hamlet “There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.***Science does not deal in Definitions—mere words like “Selfish”.Science deals exclusively with dynamical processes.  It only considers static things—stasis—as (1) moments in a dynamical process or as (2) invariants that persist throughout these moments, and so characterise that changing dynamical process conceptually as a persistent conceptual “thing”.Science subsumes definitions—mere words—under the process they feature in.  Its terminology is subservient to process.  Definitions—words—remain stillborn without a process theory to vivify them.My point is a minor one, yet it merits minor consideration.

[ALB]

twc wrote:

Science deals exclusively with dynamical processes.  It only considers static things—stasis—as (1) moments in a dynamical process or as (2) invariants that persist throughout these moments, and so characterise that changing dynamical process conceptually as a persistent conceptual “thing”.Science subsumes definitions—mere words—under the process they feature in.  Its terminology is subservient to process.  Definitions—words—remain stillborn without a process theory to vivify them.

That's a good point. Genes, atoms, etc are not things that exist in themselves. They are descriptions of observed dynamic processes, not things that already exist and waiting to be discovered (as one caricature would have it).  What scientists are doing (whether they recognise it or not) is describing these processes with a view to being able to predict more successfully how they will continue to work.I don't think we need as Socialists to get involved in the argument as to whether the unit of evolution is the organism or the gene, i.e to decide which is the better description. We can leave this to those who study the subject to argue amongst themselves, only intervening when they introduce arguments about capitalism and socialism. Interestingly or perhaps ironically, Dawkins himself took this view on last year's EU referendum, a view which will ruffle a few feathers:http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/eu-referendum-richard-dawkins-brexit-23rd-june-ignoramuses

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