Evolutionary psychology, the academic fad of the inventor of "memes", Richard Dawkins, is bull shit and, as was predicted by the Sociobiology Study Group in 1976, the very year Dawkins first published the book most of the blog-rat, comment thread, even talk show host kew-el kids got the idea from, it has quickly turned into both covert and overt eugenics.
One of the pieces I wrote that I got the most pleasure from was one I've reworked three times as I got into brawls with atheists over it, it was the one where I took one of the most pervasive of ideas from Dawkins' same book, The Selfish Gene and, if I do say so myself, I tore it to shreds. That was the idea of his Darwinian fable of "the first bird to call out" which is still widely considered by so many to be a scientific fact when there is literally nothing about the thing that stands up to the most basic requirements of science to the fact that it flies in the face of such physical phenomena as the speed of sound and the entire idea it is couched in, Hamiltonian "altruism" dogma, is mathematically irrational. I've challenged several people online and off to defend the thing, scientists and at least one mathematician and none of them was able to. That such an idea can be inserted into the public culture of the educated class of Westerners and likely others as "science" when it is literally irrational and dishonest is pretty scandalous.
I hedged my language a bit, even when I reworked it the last time, now I'm going to say that from the first claim contained in the statement, it is an example of obvious scientific dishonesty.
Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them. [Um, if the life was laid down, that's hardly a "slight risk for them", it's the ultimate risk. I'm always reminded that Dawkins is so highly praised for his way with words.] 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
The basis of Dawkins' claim is "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." I have looked for such "indirect evidence" and have found that there is no such evidence, Dawkins made it up, it is a "just-so" story made up to support his theory of gene selfishness and the fevered attempt of Darwinists to turn unselfishness, even the sacrifice of ones life for others, into an act of selfishness by genes supposedly held in common between those that the animal sacrificing itself shares with animals it sacrifices itself for. It is no more founded in observation than the story of the coloration of Jacob's sheep but it's considered science because it props up a. Darwinian natural selection, b. his typical, anachronistic, Brit-style materialism.
Despite all of the attempts to reconcile observable, knowable acts of self-sacrifice that disadvantage those who sacrifice themselves in the most unDarwinian of ways with natural selection (which no one can observe in reality) I think it's inevitable that such attempts will always run up against problems such as the speed of sound but most of all, against the impossibility to make it come out right mathematically.
Whenever an animal containing such alleged "altruism genes" sacrificed itself "at their instruction," the fact would be that the percentage of such "altruistic" members of their species would decline whereas members of their species which didn't contain those genes would have to increase as a percentage of the species. If such "non-altruistic" animals were not there, the entire reason for the fable, to support natural selection, would dissolve into a wash of irrelevancy. Not only that but the removal of "altruistic" members of the species would have to remove them from the possibility of competing in mating and leaving offspring as compared to the enhanced percentage of the species which didn't sacrifice themselves but went on to leave off spring. I've asked biologists and mathematicians to tell me why that isn't the case and have yet to have one who could explain the flaw in my reasoning.
I have also pointed out that such "altruism genes" would turn the classic Darwinian positive adaptations of better eyesight and hearing into mal-adaptations, as they would lead those with superior senses at a higher risk of seeing a predator, calling out and being selected out of the species by the predator according to Dawkins' fable.
But, as I said, the problem starts with the fact that Dawkins' was lying when he said there was "indirect evidence" that his scenario was real because there is, in fact, no evidence of that sort at all. The whole thing is a lie that no one should ever have mistaken as science for a second. If you want you can read my fuller criticism at the above link.
Over the years writing about this and, also, looking into things such as the thinking of Auguste Comte, I've developed a real dislike of the word "altruism", I much prefer "unselfishness" or, even better "heroic generosity". Since Dawkins' shtick was largely invented to turn the basic reality of all of our action into selfishness on the part of genes, you can't believe that without coming to the conclusion that unselfishness is a delusion. Which isn't surprising as it was the conclusion of many of the most prominent Darwinists who had Darwin's approval and of some of his critics from the same time. As I said, you can't possibly reconcile unselfish behavior with natural selection, no matter how much you want to. The idea turns selfishness and, as I've pointed out recently, even genocide into a law of nature. Depravity is an inherent part of it.
Dawkins doesn't deal in science; he peddles pop-sci. A zoologist who imagines he's a geneticist, a scientist who thinks "indirect evidence" is sound. In a court of law we call such evidence hearsay, and it is inadmissible. If science is less rigorous than that, then science is a sham.
ReplyDeleteI've come to believe that the entire idea of natural selection is based on such stuff and that all of the science that uses the idea is everything from distorted to, especially in the cases of the behavioral so called sciences, such a sham. I think it is exactly what Marx concluded it was in his reappraisal of the idea, Darwin and his largely wealthy, largely aristocratic colleagues in science, making the British class system the frame through which you were required to look at not only evolution but all any thinking about topics in biology impinging on such questions. That psychology and other topics sought their earliest academic acceptance at the time they did made their adoption of natural selection to boost their chances at being allowed into universities has produced enormous mountains of the most obvious of bull shit science and academia, including science, has bought into it, at first on its framing, then in the ways that academics with a professional interest in maintaining things will do.
DeleteAnd I think the consequences of the adoption of ideology within science doesn't stop there, as can be seen in not only current cosmology but, from there even within the profession of physics. The amount of such science as comprises string-theory-m-theory-multiverse-theories and the never ending ways of scientists like Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss to twist words into a means of enforcing atheism should be considered a scandal. I'm beginning to think that chemistry is about the only legitimate science that has escaped that cultural distortion and that's because it so seldom touches on such "ultimate questions" though it is certainly wide open to the most appalling financial incentives to produce evil it has to produce the molecules it claims to.
I also think that distortion is why, as Rupert Sheldrake pointed out a while back, theology has become so much more interesting than philosophy which is wide open to the same kind of nonsense. Daniel Dennett is only the poster boy for that. The total perversion of the very concept of "ethics" is one of its most dangerous aspects.