As far as I understand, a gene is just a portion of chromosome sufficiently small that it is unlikely to be split up during crossing over. (At least this is how Dawkins defins it). Roughly, a gene is then a sequence whose elements are one of 4 different molecules (g,c,a,t). A different sequence, or a shuffled sequence is then a different gene. Accidentally leaving out an element of the sequence or copying it twice (the sort of thing that happes on rare occasions during crossing over) creates a new gene.

Simon

The point is that there is a difference in the nature of mutations from crossing over and those from ionization induced disruption. Protein P53 addresses copying errors in normal somatic cell division. Genetic effects don’t actually involve taking copies of copies of copies endlessly like skin cells. Sometimes motion of DNA due to heat causes it to break, but the ends can be reconnected by P53. The ionization due to charged radiation causes more serious disruption than simple breakage.

The fact is, a woman has her genetic DNA in her eggs, which don’t get copied during her lifetime. So the main influence on those eggs are external factors like background radiation.

“selfish” in this context means only the following: those genes which act in a way that we might call selfish will be the ones that become more numerous in the gene pool. Nobody, including Dawkins, is suggesting genes have a brain or a purpose or any sort of long-term goal. Attributing human motives to them is merely a metaphor which aids our thinking (though as often as not confuses people).

The concept of selfish genes has become the orthodoxy in biology, after being introduced by dawkins in the seventies. That doesn’t mean you aren’t free to reject it of course, but make sure you understand it first. I repeat: nobody is claiming genes have any sort of goal or purpose. They are just bits of the DNA!

Note that cosmic radiation cannot considered to be the unit of evolution, because it does not self-replicate.

“In place of explaining this fuel for evolution, Dawkin’s chooses instead to describe the gene as surviving by being copied. That’s not evolution. All that can produce is selections from the original gene pool, hybrids and cross-breeds. Evolution of new species is driven by disruption to DNA, not it’s selfishness and preservation.”

Again, I’m not a biologist, but as far as I know the above is just false. The errors that occur during crossing over can include portions of the chromosome accidentally being copied multiple times, or perhaps left out alltogether. Probably much else is possible as well – that’s just the stuff I know about. I believe the above occur far more frequently than radiation induced mutations. Bear in mind that you might receive a lot of radiation over a lifetime, but it’s only one cell that gets passed on to your child.

Have you read Dawkins’ more recent ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’? It has a nice discussion of recent research on so-called ‘Hox genes’ which drove home to me that the above-mentioned copying errors really are sufficient to pruduce new species.

Simon

It’s a rephrasing of natural selection, which is the key non-random part of evolution. Obviously mutations play a part in evolution, and it is hardly “ignored” in his book. His illustrations in the book are constantly imagining some new gene popping up in a gene pool, and then thinking about its affects.

I’m aware of the disputes about evolution between Dawkins and Gould, and if you think Gould’s vision is closer to reality, that’s fine. I just thought it was over-the-top to say “…anyone scientific must utterly reject Dawkin’s selfish gene concept…”.

Yes I read it and I made the point that genes get passed on, accumulating more and more background radiation and mutating. Your statement

“Clearly, how many copies of a gene are in the gene pool, and how long the gene is transmitted down the generations, depend on how good the gene is at getting itself copied.”

is paraphrasing my comment 100 above, except for the error you now claim that the key is how “good the gene is at getting itself copied”. Actually, the key is whether the DNA gets damaged or improved by combinations caused by radiation and so on. It’s the continual changes in the gene pool which are being ignored here. In place of explaining this fuel for evolution, Dawkin’s chooses instead to describe the gene as surviving by being copied. That’s not evolution. All that can produce is selections from the original gene pool, hybrids and cross-breeds. Evolution of new species is driven by disruption to DNA, not it’s selfishness and preservation.

The consequence of evolution working at the gene level is that changes are discrete, depending on the discrete combinations possible in the four letter code, DNA. Dawkin’s regularly defended continuous variation (which was Darwin’s theory) over the punctuated evolution argued by Stephen Jay Gould (as explained in comment 4). Discrete changes may be obscured by variations in environmental variables such as food supply, disease, and climate, but all changes are discrete in origin.

Which is more likely? That you misunderstand the selfish gene, or that a great deal of biologists are not “scientific”?

Have you read The Selfish Gene? There’s a reason why Dawkins goes beyond the individual organism but stops at the gene. Organisms are individuals that eventually die. Genes can be passed on down the generations, with many copies of the same gene spreading through the gene pool. In this sense, genes have the potential to be immortal (metaphorically!). Clearly, how many copies of a gene are in the gene pool, and how long the gene is transmitted down the generations, depend on how good the gene is at getting itself copied. Thus, “selfish” genes, genes that get themselves copied anyway they can, are the successes, and the ones we find in the world around us. You can’t make that concept, or metahpor, work for background radiation. The gene is the logical end point.

On another point, I should make a correction about what I have been saying about Sean and pantheism. In reading some older blog entries, I found where Sean DID deal with pantheism, saying (in his Oct 2006 CV blog entry “The God Conundrum”):
“… Spinoza’s pantheism, identifying God with the natural world … doesn’t really mean anything …”.

I disagree. Einstein, a Spinoza pantheist, described (see Wilczek’s article in the Winter 2002 edition of Daedalus) the theory for which he searched as
“… a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no arbitrary constants … that is to say, nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally completely determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory). …”.

I think that it is quite meaningful that Spinoza’s pantheism gave Einstein “faith” that such a theory can be found, and I hope that someday somebody vindicates that “faith” by being motivated by it to search for such a theory and then finding it.

Jimbo said “… we scientific atheists … have got to be perceived as less militant …”.
Although I am not an “atheist”, I agree with “scientific atheists” on a number of points,
and I hope that an Einstein-type pantheistic view might provide some middle-ground by which “scientific atheists” can engage the vast majority of USA political leaders who identify themselves as religious.

As Jimbo said “… NC you are absolutely correct about radiation-driven mutations, to which our genes are enslaved …”.

As NC said “… the idea that genes drive evolution … is stopping off at an arbitrary point in the long chain of causality.
The only scientific thing … to do, … searching for ultimate causes, is to not stop at genes but go on a step and tell us about how ‘selfish background radiation’ drives evolution …”.

Once background radiation is brought into play, from a pantheistic view, you get to Dave Rothstein’s possibility of
“God intervening every time a [quantum event] measurement occurs”.

Although this is something as to which Sean in his CV blog entry “Natalie Angier’s God Problem”said: “Pretending that there is room for God in the unpredictable collapse of the wavefunction is neither good science nor good theology.”, I disagree with Sean on that point.

I think the facts that Sean reacted to the Rothstein possibility with what Sean himself characterized as a “snarky “arrrgh”", and that Sean gave no scientific refutation of the Rothstein possibility, indicate that Sean sees that the Rothstein possibility may not be scientifically refutable and that circumstance upset him.

If you push the search for ultimate causes further,
and if you consider math to be the language for scientific description of everything,
then
maybe B. had the right idea in her comments on Sean’s “The God Conundrum”CV blog entry:

B. said in comment 24 “… ask where the natural numbers ‘come from’ …”;

Count Iblis said in comments 27 and 57 “… That’s a good question and that has lead some people to postulate that reality is purely mathematical in nature. … You can define them [the natural numbers] recursively:
0 = {} (empty set)
1 = 0 U {0} = {0}
2 = 1 U {1} = {0,1}
etc. …”;

B. said in comment 68 “… in the end you’ll sit in this field of complex numbers, and every one of them is just a point in a plane.
Does C have a cause? …”.

If you want to continue the process, you might note that C is the real Clifford algebra Cl(0,1;R), and you can go from there on to real Clifford algebras of arbitrarily high dimension. Since bivectors give you Lie algebras, you get gauge-group-type things, and you might think of spinors as fermions, and think of the vector space as spacetime, and even try to put such things together to form Lagrangians … and see where Einstein-type faith might lead.

As Jimbo said “… someone (I think an Emeritus prof. or Sr. scientist type) must step up to the plate, take the heat, & present a moderate ‘platform’ of scientific aethism to the public at large …”.

I wish that Einstein were still around to present his view,
but since he is not,
I agree with Jimbo that it would be good to ask “… Sean, what’s on your calendar … ? …”.

Although I disagree with Sean on some points, he understands science very well, is a good expositor (“Visible Matter as the Olive in the Martini of Dark Matter” is a classic turn of phrase), is at a first-rank university (Caltech, where he “love[s his]… job”), and has a pretty good amount of media exposure to the general public,
so
I second Jimbo’s nomination of Sean.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

I didn’t “identify” your arguments with those of Midgley. I noted that I think you and her both misunderstood some of his metaphors (though she perhaps misunderstood different ones from you). It is not a “straw-man tactic” – it’s a tangential observation. It was not intended to distract from my true reasons for diagreeing with you, which are summarized in #94.

I also don’t agree with the accusation that Dawkins is engaging in a “transparent attempt to have it both ways”. “Genes ‘directing’ how bodies are made” is a useful metaphor for Dawkins’ purposes in ‘The Selfish Gene’, and that itself (i.e. that such a metaphor is useful) is a dramatic and counterintuitive fact.

Maybe the following analogy would help: following the simple rule z –> z^2+z_0 and testing for convergence produces the Mandelbrot set. And it’s interesting and counterintuitive (to me anyway) that something so complicated and beautiful results from the ‘direction’ of such a simple rule. But ‘direction’ is only used here as a metaphor. The rule z –> z^2+z_0 doesn’t design the Mandelbrot set in the way that religious people believe God designed the universe. The rule is not an intelligent agent. So it’s not a counterexample to the idea that God-like designers should be as complicated as the things they design. And for similar reasons the behavior of genes is not a counterexample either.

Simon

Really? Have you bothered to look around and do some research on it and/or interview people about it? Tell you what. Why don’t you take a year off from physics, and instead, travel around and do some research into the miracles.

“Please stop trolling.”

I’m not trying to troll.

“If you haven’t read Dawkins’ book, I highly recommend it. If you are truly brainwashed into religion, I doubt you will get much out of it.”

Please don’t call religious people “brainwashed”. It’s untrue and insulting. I can only speak from my own faith and Church, and it appears as though being a priest is a lot of hard work and inconvenience, so if they really were trying to brainwash people, they’d be much more happier leaving the Church and perhaps get married and get a high-paying job or something.

Also, I do have to say that religion has contributed greatly to society through the advancement of knowledge in the sciences and engineering and with the charity work that happens throughout the world (assuming you count the poor, diseased, “outcasts” as being part of society). Of course, religion has been the cause of very gruesome things throughout history, but it has also provided many people with motivation and encouragement to help others and to try to make the world a better place.

Breck said:

“What about question 2, are religions “good for society”? I think answers to this question are arbitrary and completely dependent on how you specify what makes something “good”. You could go unlimited ways with this and arrive at opposite answers depending on how you specify “good”: “good” means more peaceful, more income, more scientific progress, etc. Because this question could be argued forever, I am not that interested in it.”

So are you saying that there is no such thing as absolute “good”, and that’s why we can’t tell whether or not religion is “good” for society? Well, then, why is everyone on religion’s case if we don’t know if it’s good or not?

Okay, gotta go to my Church to receive further instructions on what to say.

1. Regardless of all these micro-criticisms of Dawkins, `Selfish Gene & GodDelusion’, and the arguments pro/con about the impact of religon on civilization or W.societies, Dawkins is surely the `Leader & Standard Bearer’ of we scientific atheists, & we ought to rally round our leader.

2. We in the US live under the legal mantle of religon every GD day ! Different from Europe, no lawmaker can get elected to state or national office w/out being affiliated with some organized religon. Libertarians have tried, with dismal results. If we aetheists dream of a govnt. unfettered & undirected by religonists, or at least someone sympathetic to OUR cause, we have got to be perceived as less militant than Dawkins, and someone(I think an Emeritus prof. or Sr. scientist type)must step up to the plate, take the heat, & present a moderate `platform’ of scientific aethism to the public at large…A `Carl Sagan’/`Brian Greene’ type if you will, with charisma to burn…Sean, what’s on your calendar for EY `08 ?

Lastly, NC you are absolutely correct about radiation-driven mutations, to which our genes are enslaved. Wolfgang, I agree w/U about Teller, but what the hell did Von Neumann ever do that would classify him as an `evil’ aetheist ?
GodSpeed to All ! Clarence Darrow would be proud !

However, anyone scientific must utterly reject Dawkin’s selfish gene concept; genes do not control evolution because external influences background radiation cause the mutations of the gene which lead to variations.

So if Dawkins is trying to popularise the idea that genes drive evolution, rather than organisms, then he is stopping off at an arbitrary point in the long chain of causality. The only scientific thing for him to do, if he claims to be searching for ultimate causes, is to not stop at genes but go on a step and tell us about how ‘selfish background radiation’ drives evolution.

Everyone gets 140 mSv over a lifetime, but because genes are copied, combined and passed on, their accumulated dose increases endlessly. Over a million years, DNA receives 2 kSv from background radiation, which is 200 times the short-term lethal dose to an individual. That causes a lot of genetic changes.

It’s ridiculous for Dawkins to claim that evolution is down to selfish genes. That’s like saying that a car goes because of the wheels, accelerator pedal, or engine, while ignoring the fuel.

It is NOT accurate to identify my arguments with those of “someone called Mary Midgely”. In doing so, Simon is using the “straw-man” tactic of attacking arguments that I did not make and with which I in fact disagree.

For instance, Dawkins says in his reply to Midgley:
“… Midgeley has …[stated]… ‘Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish …’ …”.
I do NOT take Midgley’s position,
and I in fact AGREE with Dawkins when he says in that reply:
“… We define altruism and selfishness in purely behaviouristic ways …”.
In that context,
I have no problem with Dawkins’ position that genes are in fact selfish.

Further, with respect to altruism, Dawkins says in his reply to Midgley:
“… The evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism …. The appropriate mathematics is the theory of games, as I illustrated in my simple explanatory model of three ‘strategies’ called ‘cheat’, ‘sucker’, and ‘grudger’ …
My game-theoretic analysis of ‘cheats, suckers and grudgers’ led to two alternative stable solutions. A population dominated by cheats would not be invaded (evolutionarily speaking) by suckers or grudgers. If, however, a population chanced to acquire more than a critical frequency of grudgers, natural selection would suddenly start favouring grudgers, until they became a runaway majority. …”.
I agree with Dawkins that with respect to altruism “…. The appropriate mathematics is the theory of games …”.
Although I might prefer something like a tit-for-tat Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy as an explanation of the evolution of altruism, I think that Dawkins’ use of game theory is the right approach,
and
I agree with Dawkins that “… Midgley’s misunderstanding of the theory of reciprocal altruism is a special case of her more general muddle …”,
so
PLEASE do NOT attempt to identify my arguments with those of Midgley.

Where I disagree with Dawkins is in his statement in “The God Delusion” that
“… any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. …”.

I feel that it is possible for simple things to “design…” complex things in the context of the world in which we live, and in fact that the evolution of life on earth is a clear example of such a process,
so
I don’t think that Dawkins’ argument of a complex transcendent G-d is a clear refutation of theism.
In fact, Dawkins himself seems to agree with me on that point, as he says in “The God Delusion” that the argument
“… comes close to proving that God does not exist …” based on being “… ruled out by the laws of probability …”,
and
“close to proving” is quite different from “proving”.

Further, none of the above arguments deal with my repeated statement that the arguments of Dawkins et al against G-d do NOT apply against pantheism, which includes the religious views of Spinoza, Einstein, and philosophical Taoism.
As said Adrian Burd said in comment 81, it may be that “… a careful reading of “The God Delusion” shows that Dawkins is specifically not considering religions like Buddhism …”,
but
it would in my opinion be nice if Sean et al either:
state that pantheism has not been shown to be false;
or
if they feel otherwise, to explicitly make arguments against Spinoza, Einstein, philosophical Taoism, and against pantheism in general.
However,
in this blog thread with almost 100 comments, I do not recall seeing any such arguments.

Maybe a discussion including pantheism
(and free will, which as Mark says “… is an interesting and difficult question that in some sense is more about the fundamental laws of physics …”)
might lead us beyond repeating various belief-mantras either pro or con religion, and get us on a constructive road toward what Arun described in comment 76:
“… This is not to say that human rights cannot be universalized – but there is a lot of hard work to be done then, to disentangle them from their particular origins, and to reinvent them. …”
which
might be a step toward reconciliation of views.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/