Comment by tor825gl
6 hours ago
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollection of the book's main theory.
Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that.
Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?
edit: typo
> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?
Yes, the second word of the title.
Yeah, that's not really good enough, by the author's own admission:
From wikipedia: 'In the foreword to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, Dawkins said he "can readily see that [the book's title] might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene.[2] He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.”' [0]
Furthermore, your concept that genes should be thought of as having a plan is just in stark contradiction with the Darwinian conception of natural selection, which Dawkins was largely a champion of.
My own recollection was that he described how genes readily had the appearance of acting in their own best interest, but he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance. Evolution does not have any sense for the future, there is no planning evolved, and Dawkins understands that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
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