In the final three chapters of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins analyzes conflicts between individuals of differing sex, investigates a variety of social interactions where individuals are different species, and proposes a new replicator in the modern world: the meme. The idea of memes is especially interesting, and much of this post will be concerned with that final chapter.
Chapter 9 deals with the “battle of the sexes.” Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows: “If one parent can get away with investing less than his or her fair share of costly resources in each child… he will be better off, since he will have more to spend on other children by other sexual partners, and so propagate more of his genes. Each partner can therefore be thought of as trying to exploit the other, trying to force the other one to invest more” (151). As most know, females are far more exploited than males, because females are limited by the uneven amount of investment they must put into creating large egg cells, (in some species) giving birth, and (in some species) caring for a child. Thus, Dawkins reasons that “natural selection will tend to favor females who become good at seeing through such deception” (167) from males who can “pass himself off as a good loyal domestic type, but who in reality is concealing a strong tendency towards desertion and unfaithfulness” (166).
Chapter 10 looks at a variety of social interactions which take place between different species. Dawkins makes a familiar group selectionist argument that “if animals live together in groups their genes must get more benefit out of the association than they put in” (179). Hence, we see so many cases of symbiosis in nature, and we may even argue that our own cells are the result of a symbiotic relationship that occurred billions of years ago and that we are really just giant colonies of symbiotic genes. Dawkins makes a case for the evolution of social insect societies, but many of these ideas which revolve around haplodiploidy have been rebuked. But Dawkins does make a great observation that “true warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects” (191). He concludes the chapter with an analysis of how a good memory is necessary to remember those who may have cheated you and thus not help them. He makes a quick allusion to how memory helped shape reciprocal altruism in humans. We may also realize how mathematics could have evolved as means to either cheat or to reason whether we should help another person, and also that money is just a “formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism” (202).
Chapter 11 on meme theory is perhaps Dawkins’ most audacious aspect of the book. He begins his argument by stating that humans are unique. The usual argument for this is that humans have culture, but Dawkins shows that “cultural transmission is not unique to man” (203) with the example of saddleback bird calls in New Zealand which can be shown to evolve by non-genetic means. He makes a bold step “by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution… Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene” (205). He states that it is law that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities” (206) and that the gene, a DNA molecule, is the entity which exists on this planet.
Dawkins proposes another replicator, which “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmisson, or a unit of imitation” (206), which he calls meme, an abbreviation of “mimeme.” He states that “just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (206). He believes memes to be replacing gene dominance, since “whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in now necessary sense be subservient to the old” (208).
We may ask ourselves then, are our behaviors and morality a consequence of memes or genes? Dawkins does not really address this, but for now, in that this project is so young and I am still quite naive on the subject, we can suppose that morality comes from an interaction of genes and memes. In his final paragraph, Dawkins does address what is so unique and so exciting about the human capacity: “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination… We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (215).
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins may be purchased here from Amazon.com
Moral Musing 