Name: Anonymous 2013-03-09 1:46
The Selfish Gene is not a scientific work but an ideological work that precisely embeds capitalist ideology into biology as a new biologism.
As science it's nonsense. The implicit teleology in the book (the goal is the replication of the gene, the organism merely the vehicle) would, in terms of the efficiency requirement in natural selection, create a situation where more complex organisms are inherently less efficient at the fundamental goal. So with that teleology there would be no increase in complexity through the natural selection Dawkins is at pains to protect as the driving force of evolution. in Dawkins' biologism, the more complex the organism, the less valuable.
This is the same as the capitalist move from use-value to exchange-value as the goal. Rather than the goal being to produce useful products, the beginning of the process is money as capital, which is turned into products only in order to create more exchange-value, more capital. The capitalist fantasy of a "frictionless" economy, i.e. the creation and sale of products with no cost friction, is mirrored in the idea of a "frictionless" conversion from exchange-value (genes) to more exchange-value (genes) without the cost of an organism.
This embedding of capitalist ideology into biology reduces the value of human beings and other complex organisms to nothing more than an unfortunate cost of exchange, which could ideally be done away with. As a result it also justifies the practical devaluing of human beings in a more fundamental way even than social darwinism. What's the issue with treating human beings as collateral damage in the quest for profit - they're nothing more than a vehicle for self-replicating molecules to achieve their goal of multiplying anyway.
As science it's nonsense. The implicit teleology in the book (the goal is the replication of the gene, the organism merely the vehicle) would, in terms of the efficiency requirement in natural selection, create a situation where more complex organisms are inherently less efficient at the fundamental goal. So with that teleology there would be no increase in complexity through the natural selection Dawkins is at pains to protect as the driving force of evolution. in Dawkins' biologism, the more complex the organism, the less valuable.
This is the same as the capitalist move from use-value to exchange-value as the goal. Rather than the goal being to produce useful products, the beginning of the process is money as capital, which is turned into products only in order to create more exchange-value, more capital. The capitalist fantasy of a "frictionless" economy, i.e. the creation and sale of products with no cost friction, is mirrored in the idea of a "frictionless" conversion from exchange-value (genes) to more exchange-value (genes) without the cost of an organism.
This embedding of capitalist ideology into biology reduces the value of human beings and other complex organisms to nothing more than an unfortunate cost of exchange, which could ideally be done away with. As a result it also justifies the practical devaluing of human beings in a more fundamental way even than social darwinism. What's the issue with treating human beings as collateral damage in the quest for profit - they're nothing more than a vehicle for self-replicating molecules to achieve their goal of multiplying anyway.