Hate Mail - Someone Didn't Like Me Dissing Dawkin's Dumb Avian Altruism Asininity And I Thank Him For It

Oh, I'm so proud of that old post how could you have missed it the number of times I've linked to it?  

A hate-troll has led to me going back to look at my evisceration of Dawkins' "first bird to call out" fable I mentioned recently and, rereading Dawkins' claim has made me think of two several ways in which it is even more incompetent and absurd even as it is so widely taken as reliable scientific fact.  I wonder how many high school or college texts or classes present "first bird to call out" stuff as "proof" of or support of Darwinism, natural selection.  I have never checked but if anyone wants to steer me to titles or syllabi that present it as such, I'd be much obliged. 

Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them. Many small birds, when they see a flying predator such as a hawk, give a characteristic "alarm call", upon which the whole flock takes appropriate evasive action. There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk, but it nevertheless seems, at least at first sight, to qualify as an altruistic act by our definition.


Richard Dawkins:   p.6, The Selfish Gene,  Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2006

Passing up the opportunity to pass up the obvious fact that such "altruistic genes" as the story is invented to support are completely unevidenced - natural selection introduced non-observation into science in a really big way -  Darwkin's most famous example of and  claim for natural selection, his "first bird to call out fable"  is - 

A. mathematically incompetent requiring that a decreasing number of "altruistic, self-sacrificing birds" within a species result in a higher percentage of them in their species.

B. It is incompetent in terms of 4th grade physics (I mean the stuff you learn when you're about 10 years old, the speed of sound) because it requires a "flying predator" to hear the "first bird to call out" before other birds it's flocking with would hear it.

C. It's incompetent as scientific method, claiming something which is not evidenced in observation, that the "first bird to call out" would be the one more likely to die in the "flying predator's talons" than other birds in the flock, when no such observational evidence is presented (or exists).

[C - a]  I just thought while editing this that without a very large number of filmed examples from the wild (such films don't exist) that proves that the "first bird to call out" was, in fact, at even a "slight" statistically significant risk of being the bird preyed on, it's impossible to prove it as "genetic altruism,".  It's possible that such a "first bird to call out" would have benefited itself from setting off a chaotic flurry of birds who were closer to hear the call than the "flying predator" and being hidden from it.   It could work as a far better and more Darwinistically conventional example of getting someone else killed so you can benefit and live to breed.   Hamiltonian "selfish-genes" nowhere in evidence.  

[Not to mention, any such "first call" call might call the attention of a "predator" to that dumb bird's flock instead of that of a different species, near by.  Who said the "predator" was looking at that flock?  Something that occurs to me as I continue editing this after it's posted. ] 

Apparently Dawkins and his colleagues are so unskilled at self-criticism that this hadn't occurred to them, something which my reading of Darwin and his conventional disciples leads me to be less surprised to find than I would have fifteen-years ago.   They're stupid enough to believe you can do science without observation, after all, which is what any claims of "natural selection" in the hidden, unobserved, undocumented billions of years past is. 

D. It's incompetent in terms of Darwinian natural selection because such "altruistic, self-sacrificing birds) would be removed from the breeding population of their species - a rather glaring and direct contradiction to the very basis of what NATURAL SELECTION IS DEFINED AS BEING.

E. It would put the "altruism gene(s)" that Dawkins' reifies into existence at a disadvantage in the population of the species as a greater percentage of birds not having that would have a chance to breed the next generation(s).

I'll note in passing that the entire species of biological theory that Dawkins bases this on has the rather odd habit of forgetting that in order for "natural selection" to select anything others of its kind have to be not-selected.  That, for example, "non-altruistic birds" of the same species would be as well advantaged by any such self-sacrifice as "altruistic" ones.   Perhaps they don't understand that in order for organisms to be "selected" something has to not be selected, in which case, in all their many years of getting PhDed in evolutionary biology, they never really understood what "natural selection" claims.  I will not pass up the chance to point out that they also ignore that all birds in their scenario, "altruistic" and "non-altruistic" would have enormously varied complexes of other genes that would go with the dead birds and the ones who live and propagate.  Concentrating on these isolated, theorized "genes" ignores the genetic variability within such theorized groups would probably be as great as in the general population, any "traits" produced by those genes, as "selected" or not "selected".  

F. It rather obviously turns superior eyesight and hearing in any such "altruistic self-sacrificing birds" into a maladaptation because, presumably, the better they could see or hear the "flying predator" the more likely they would be "the first bird to call out" and so more likely to "die in the predator's talons" than any "altruistic birds" with inferior eyesight or hearing (perhaps intelligence, as well) and so all of the relevant problems with the theory already stated would kick in for those who had excellent eyesight and hearing and (perhaps) intelligence. 

G. That point about intelligence is one I didn't go through in my earlier treatment of Dawkins' ridiculous fable but it would complicate the definition of "intelligence" in so far as Darwinism makes claims about "intelligence" it is supposed to help animals escape predators and, so, make them more likely to leave more intelligent offspring.  In this fable intelligence could be reasonably believed might make it more likely that the intelligent, sharp-eyed-sharp-eared "altruistic self-sacrificing bird" would leave their "genetic intelligence" on to fewer and fewer birds of the next generation. 

As is typical of claims about natural selection, you are allowed to hold contradictory claims about what it is and what it does and definitions of things that are claimed to be true due to natural selection and the opposite is also held to be true.   It really is one of the most incredibly dishonest things held to be "the greatest theory in science" in history. 

H.  If you still believe in "selfish-genes" in line with Dawkins stupid ideas, they'd be best advised to not reside in such birds.   Maybe like selfish people, selfish genes are stupid. 

I.  What is really stupid are the biologists, etc. who have bought this bull shit, Hamiltonian altruism,  for the past sixty-years.

Hamilton was a Darwinist-eugenicist and scientific racist, just to gild the feces.

I'd better stop for now.  Every time I look at claims like this the more problems with them come up.