From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Gould versus Dawkins
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 06:54:34 GMT

In article <1i3ctlINN91f@agate.berkeley.edu> philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu () writes:
>Stephen Jay Gould's very negative review of Helena Cronin's book
>"The Ant and the Peacock" appeared in the New York Review of
>Books for Nov. 19, 1992.  Cronin is a follower of the "gene
>selection" theory of Richard Dawkins, and so Dawkins is the real
>target of Gould's ire.

[...] Here is the crucial passage from Gould's
>review:
>
>"...the replicator criterion is at best insufficient, and at
>worst entirely mistaken.  A simple appeal to vernacular usage
>tells us that a lower unit (a gene, for example) can't be an
>exclusive agent if all the action occurs at higher levels
>(organisms, for example) -- and the properties that generate this
>action are 'emergent' characters of the higher level -- that is,
>not a simple summation of features built by the lower units
>(genes).  Now, manifestly (and gene selectionists do not deny
>this) organisms are primary objects struggling for reproductive
>success in nature.  How, then, can "hidden" genes be the true
>agents if organisms are doing the fighting, cooperating,
>generating, and dying?  Gene selectionists respond that all the
>relevant properties of organisms can be described as results of
>the various genes involved in their construction.  Such
>properties, the argument continues, are therefore only the
>complex manifestation of genetic action.
>    But many, undoubtedly most, properties of organisms are not
>simple summations of contributions from several genes.  They are
>products of interactions among genes and therefore THEY CANNOT,
>IN PRINCIPLE, BE ADEQUATELY PREDICTED OR KNOWN AT THE LEVEL OF
>GENES.  Since selection acts on such emergent properties of
>organisms, genes cannot be exclusive units of selection."
>[Emphasis added]
>
>     Does this passage make sense?  According to neo-Darwinism,
>natural selection builds complexity by acting upon inheritable

I don't think this makes sense, at least for anyone who has read
Dawkins' book, The Extended Phenotype -- because Dawkins would be the
first to agree that it is not at all a matter of "simple summations".
He discusses how the effects of complex gene-interactions operate
inside cells, organs, organisms, combinations of organisms and
parasites, and in larger communities.  On the other hand, he also
explains many ways in which it is NOT only the organisms that are
"doing the fighting, cooperating, >generating, and dying;" such
struggles also happen within the nucleus, within the fertilized ovum,
etc., because there is plently of blocking (as well as mutual
enhancement) among groups of genes aas well as among groups of
organisms.  In Dawkins' view, which I find most reasonable, the
epidermal boundary that encloses a typical animal is not always the
most important functional boundary because there are too many
genetically influenced processes that go on inside and outside it.
Read his chapters about the evolution of fluke-infested snails, for
example, to see how a substantial part of evolution can involve the
conflict and cooperation between genes in different organisms that
share closely related problems of individual survival and differential
reproduction.  
  
   (Aside: when I hear the term 'emergent' I reach for my revolver.
Because emergence is not an actual phenomenon in the system being
studied.  On the contrary, emergents are artifacts that 'emerge' when
an observer does not understand how the system works. That is, an
emergent is something that a certain observer did not expect, because
of ignorance or inability to predict that outcome.)