Talk:The Selfish Gene

message: This is only a brief article, which I think should be merged here unless this one becomes around 30kb or more. An adequate discussion of survival machines can probably be given here even then. Richard001 11:02, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Survival machine]]

message: :Image:Selfish Gene 3.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
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BetacommandBot (talk) 07:07, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone corrected this already. Fred Hsu (talk) 03:51, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Selfish Gene 3.jpg

message: :Image:How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.
If there is  other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page.  Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
BetacommandBot (talk) 23:46, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I added fair-use rationale to the image. But that is only for the article on the book, not The Selfish Gene. Perhaps we will need to remove this image from this article. Fred Hsu (talk) 03:51, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think.jpg

message: Quote: "The philosopher David Stove argues in 'Genetic Calvinism' in the book Against the Idols of the Age Published by Transaction Publishers in 2001, that The Selfish Gene introduces unsubstantiated metaphysics, and accuses Dawkins of establishing a religion."
The Genetic Calvinism here links to http://books.google.com.au/books?id=aZJIbcvhRj0C&printsec , a chapter on Google Books.  I'm not sure that this is according to Wikipedia guidelines. I would also like to include a summary of the arguments against Dawkins, including what makes this argument(s)"Ontological."  Glancing over the essay, it seems a bit too unfocussed (It starts by attacking the use of the word "selfish," which Dawkins actually spends a great deal of text explaining in the book.) Cuvtixo (talk) 16:54, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section Ontological criticism 

message: These three edits by Wotnow have introduced good material on what Gould and Eldredge thought about the gene as a unit of selection. Similar material is in Gene-centered view of evolution, which is the correct place to spell out the argument. I think the new text here should be drastically cut back, with a link to a suitable article, because it is not appropriate to rehash the issues about the unit of selection in an outline of a book. Comments? Johnuniq (talk) 02:42, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but that doesn't mean the entire subject of the gene as unit of selection needs to be detailed in this article - similarly the book is solely about living organisms, but the article does not seek to explain in great depths every aspect of a living organism.  Hence in an encyclopaedia there are different articles exploring different aspects of different disciplines, which may overlap to a greater or lesser degree, but are nonetheless treated distinctly, without every aspect being repeated ad infinitum in each article.--JohnArmagh (talk) 14:44, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unit of selection 

message: A recent edit added "citation needed" to "A more controversial example is aging, in which an old organism's death makes room for its offspring, benefiting its genes at the cost of the organism." I just had a look and I do not think there is anything like that claim in the book. There is an interesting section around p.40 including "Medawar first dismisses traditional arguments such as: 'Old individuals die as an act of altruism to the rest of the species, because if they stayed around when they were too decrepit to reproduce, they would clutter up the world to no good purpose.'" Note that the claim is dismissed and is certainly not proposed by the book, so I would be quite happy for the cn sentence to be removed. Johnuniq (talk) 04:04, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aging 

message: The anime Ghost in the Sell makes a cameo of this book being read by robots. Maybe would be smart to point it on the article. http://imgur.com/NcA3W.png  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 168.255.251.50 (talk) 23:24, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popular culture 

message: The article presents Dawkins as responding to critics (like Frans de Waal) as saying that he doesn't believe evolution should decide ethics, while this is right, it is not a response to De Waal. De Waal argues that Dawkins tries to seperate morality from biology, which is what De Waals disagrees with.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.146.248.139 (talk) 00:51, 29 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Frans De Waal 

message: I'm not sure I understand the significance of the example used to show an "intelligent" organism having a true battle with his or her genes. Aren't condoms and birth control pills quite common? How does this illustrate the "rarity" of an organism "struggling" against the interests of his or her genes? To me, it seems like abstinence would be the real struggle against genes, rather than just slipping on a condom or popping some pills. I am curious what the wiki community thinks about the appropriateness of this example. ExistentialBliss (talk) 03:02, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The article is paraphrasing the book, so the issue of whether it is sensible or not is not relevant. The book claims that selection acts on genes, and genes which cause their host to "succeed" (by passing the genes to the next generation) are "rewarded" by becoming more common. Birth control is a rare example of where the product of genes (intelligence) can choose to take actions that do not reward the genes. Johnuniq (talk) 03:41, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, that makes sense. I have only read quotes from the book, so I didn't realize that the example came right from the book and that the intelligence that the human animal has inherited is indeed rare and gives him the paradoxical freedom to "defy" his own genes. ExistentialBliss (talk) 02:37, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Power Struggles are Rare 

message: It is all very well to say that Dawkins coined the term "selfish gene".
That is about as far as his original contribution goes. 
Titles like Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think are hagiography, and about as objective as  making Edison the inventor of the light bulb. 
I am saying that more effort should be made to link the content of the book to the history of research by the people who actually came up with these ideas. --dab (𒁳) 15:49, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: distinguishing the importance of the 1976 book from that of the ideas it popularized

message: Here is a proposed summary of the enactivist position:
===Enactivist objections===
In Mind in Life philosopher Evan Thompson has assembled an extensively sourced enactivist objection to the "selfish gene" idea.1 The enactivist view  and others too take issue with Dawkin's reduction of "life" to "genes" and "information":
:"Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information"2
:::— Richard Dawkins: River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life p. 19
:"On the bank of the Oxford canal...is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air...It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth"3
::— Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker, p. 111
Thompson's lengthy discussion includes authors that point out the gene cannot operate by itself, but requires an environment, a cell for instance. Thompson quotes Sarkar:4
:"there is no clear technical notion of "information" in molecular biology. It is little more than a metaphor that masquerades as a theoretical concept and ...leads to a misleading picture of the nature of possible explanations in molecular biology."
::— Sahotra Sarkar Biological information: a skeptical look at some central dogmas of molecular biology, p. 187
Thompson follows with a well-sourced examination of the concept of DNA as a look-up-table and the role of the cell in orchestrating the DNA-to-RNA transcription, indicating that by anyone's account the DNA is hardly the whole story. Thompson's presentation goes on to support the fact that the cell-environment interrelationship has much to do with reproduction and inheritance, and that a focus on the gene as a form of "information [that] passes through bodies and affects them, but is not affected by them on its way through"5 is tantamount to adoption of a form of material-informational dualism that has no explanatory value and no scientific basis.6 The enactivist view, by contrast, is that information results from the probing and experimentation of the agent with the agent's environment subject to the limitations of the agent's abilities to probe and process the result of probing, and DNA is simply one mechanism the agent brings to bear upon its activity.
:Sources
:1}}
:2
:3
:4
:5
:6 Thompson, p. 187
===Comments===
Dicklyon has reverted this contribution to the (very extensive) existing subsection Reception with the one-line comment:  Inappropriate without secondary sources on Evan Thompson's criticisms. No Talk-page discussion was provided.
In response, there is the following:
:1. Evan Thompson's chapter in Mind in Life  pp. 166-216 is a scholarly discussion of 50 pages containing references to dozens of scholarly articles. It is replete with sources, and certainly is not the unsupported view of Evan Thompson.
:2. As a major topic in modern philosophy, the enactivist response deserves attention in this article.
:3. Evan Thompson is a very well known philosopher in this arena himself, and has coauthored several of the early papers on the subject with its founder Francisco Varela.
It seems that Dicklyon would like a fuller account of Evan Thompson's presentation to include his sources: I think this brief version alerts readers to the existence of the enactivist response to the The Selfish Gene without too much detail. At a minimum, the enactivist view deserves discussion in this article along with the other Responses. Instead of peremptory removal, perhaps Dicklyon could provide a proposal more to his liking that satisfies his desire for "secondary sources"? Brews ohare (talk) 16:39, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The enactivist rebuttal of Dawkins' thesis 

message: Dicklyon has reverted this contribution to the (very extensive) existing subsection Reception with the one-line comment:  Inappropriate without secondary sources on Evan Thompson's criticisms. No Talk-page discussion was provided.
In response, there is the following:
:1. Evan Thompson's chapter in Mind in Life  pp. 166-216 is a scholarly discussion of 50 pages containing references to dozens of scholarly articles. It is replete with sources, and certainly is not the unsupported view of Evan Thompson.
:2. As a major topic in modern philosophy, the enactivist response deserves attention in this article.
:3. Evan Thompson is a very well known philosopher in this arena himself, and has coauthored several of the early papers on the subject with its founder Francisco Varela.
It seems that Dicklyon would like a fuller account of Evan Thompson's presentation to include his sources: I think this brief version alerts readers to the existence of the enactivist response to the The Selfish Gene without too much detail. At a minimum, the enactivist view deserves discussion in this article along with the other Responses. Instead of peremptory removal, perhaps Dicklyon could provide a proposal more to his liking that satisfies his desire for "secondary sources"? Brews ohare (talk) 16:39, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments

message: The first paragraph of the subsection Reception addresses the topic. The subsection Moral arguments also relates to the reception of The Selfish Gene. However the section Other types of selection suggested and the section Unit of selection or of evolution do not directly address the subject of reception of the book, but instead provide rather inadequate guidance to alternative views of how evolution works, and do not clearly and directly take issue with The Selfish Gene. And of course, this section on Reception ignores entirely the direct arguments against The Selfish Gene contained in the Mind in Life discussion of The Selfish Gene by Evan Thompson. 
The section on Reception needs a serous overhaul. Brews ohare (talk) 03:33, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section on reception  largely not on topic 

message: The subsection on "enactive arguments" cites Evan Thompson's discussion in Mind and Life and summarizes its content. This discussion is not unique to Thompson, and his Chapter cites dozens of supporting sources, as well as challenging material. In addition, of course, Thompson is a pre-eminent spokesperson for the enactivist view, and has co-published with Varella and other pioneers of this 'ism. Antireductionism in general supports opposition to Dawkins' thesis on the role of the gene as the inanimate force of life. However, there is no better summary of how this opposition relates to The Selfish Gene than Thompson's. Brews ohare (talk) 15:21, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Enactive arguments 

message: Unfortunately I do not have time here, but the latest changes by Brews were rather doubtful. So, reverting this to an older version was a good idea. One should really support this. My very best wishes (talk) 01:36, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Last edits

message: Chiswick Chap, in regards to this edit, in which you stated, "au contraire, the contents are the primary structure of the work, and need more detail, not ignoring them completely .. adding chapter summaries", it is my responsibility to tell you that chapter lists are almost invariably useless or inappropriate content in an article about a book. Unless it is the kind of book that has received such detailed commentary that the individual chapters have to be named, it is irrelevant what the chapters are titled. As an editor with a reasonable amount of experience in summarizing the contents of a book, I can reassure you that it is generally perfectly possible to do this without listing its chapters or giving their names. Furthermore, listing all the chapters of a book, in the way they appear on a contents page for example, is very likely a copyright violation. The point has arisen a number of times in my experience. This is a serious matter and I may have to ask for administrator assistance if it is not resolved. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 21:58, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  : Um, I haven't added a list, I've used the [Dawkins] headings to organise my chapter summaries. I appreciate your concern, but for critical purposes it is entirely acceptable to say "in the chapter named x the author talks about a, b, and c" - there is no way that that is a copyvio. Every book review in every literary magazine and review journal does something of the sort. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:07, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've got the book open in front of me. You have listed the individual chapters of the book and their titles. As I said, in the great majority of cases, that's completely useless and irrelevant information. There might be special cases where it is necessary or appropriate for some reason, but this certainly isn't one of them. Obviously an article about a book needs to summarize its contents but we don't need "chapter summaries" here, just as we don't need them in most articles about books. Trying to summarize a book's contents by organizing things around the titles of its chapters is a terrible way of doing things. A proper summary of a book's contents generally doesn't involve listing chapters in any fashion. The last couple of sentences of your comment miss the point completely; the point is that it likely violates copyright to list all the chapters of the book in the same basic fashion they appear in that book. Book reviews almost never do that, so what are you talking about? FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:14, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Calm, please. I am speaking plainly and simply. The article explicitly says that here is a summary of the chapters, so it can be no surprise that there is a summary of the chapters there. It is entirely a helpful thing for our readers to find a brief synopsis of the book, structured as the author saw fit to structure it. That way, readers get an idea of how Dawkins was thinking when putting the book together. I do not think you are right in your assertion that naming chapters in order to summarize them is any kind of problem; for a start, publishers and authors often list their chapter headings on their websites, so not much is being given away there. Further, the titles constitute only a very small percentage of the overall book (if indeed they count as text at all): it is permitted under fair critical use for reviews to use small portions of a reviewed work when describing and criticising it, as long as the source is clearly indicated and acknowledged, which it is. A difficulty can arise with very short works like some poems, where even a few couplets might constitute a large percentage of the work, but we are nowhere near that situation here. I suggest we put this to bed for the night now (at least, it's night in my time zone), reflect quietly on the article, which I believe is in a good state, and discuss it further in a day or two's time. Hope that's fine with you. Good night. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:32, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  I did not expect you to start edit-warring, given that you began this discussion, and I am sorry to see such a thing from an experienced editor. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:34, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  It is not relevant what the chapters of a book are titled. The simple fact that someone writes a book and gives its chapters certain titles does not mean that we have to reproduce that information for the reader, because it is trivial. You are simply wrong to think otherwise. See WP:PROPORTION: we don't include information just because we can, but because it is of real relevance. A proper synopsis, conveying substantive information, can be written without such trivia, as I've already noted. It is simply wrong to beieve that we need to give the names of the book's chapters to give the reader an "idea of how Dawkins was thinking when putting the book together"; there are other and better ways of doing that. It might pay to remember that a book and an encyclopedia article about that book are two very different things, and that the article about the book does not have to be "structured as the author saw fit to structure" the book. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:56, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  My edit warring consisted only of removing the unnecessary information you added; I didn't remove anything of substance. The point was just to show you that substantive information about a book doesn't have to be organized around the titles of its chapters. I am quite happy to discuss things from here. I reverted myself in response to your moaning, but it remains my view that your additions to the summary of the book's contents have to be moved and/or rewritten. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:56, 18 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  If there isn't going to be any agreement on this issue, I am simply going to restore the "contents" section to its state before both my edits to it (removing it altogether) and your edits to it (making good faith but unhelpful additions). FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:47, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chapter list 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hi Andrewgprout and Johnuniq. Thank you for your ‘good faith’ comments on 21st Dec. I would be grateful if you could tell me why my proposed inclusion was ‘synthetic’ and in what way it needs a secondary source. I understand that Wikipedia is a repository for established knowledge and should not include opinion, speculation, new research, novel data, or un-referenced claims. But I thought it could include authenticated facts. What I wanted to do was to state the fact that Bergson was a very early proponent (almost certainly the first, but one can never be sure) of the concept of the ‘gene-centred view of evolution’ which, along with the work of Williams and Hamilton, is the corner-stone of Dawkins argument, as expressed in The Selfish Gene (see first paragraph of main article). The authentication of Bergson’s insight is the quotation from his book, which perfectly expresses this concept.
‘Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former endeavouring to continue itself in a new germ'.
H. Bergson, L’Évolution Creative. 1907. English translation A. Mitchell, Creative Evolution. 1911. pp 27-28
I do not see in what way a secondary source expressing the view that this is what the quotation means would add to meaning of the quotation, since its meaning is quite clear. Please can you advise? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mountain9 (talk • contribs) 20:35, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The issue concerns this edit. The point is that this article is about a book, and I don't think Bergson is mentioned in that book. To add this text would suggest that the author of the book used an idea by Bergson without attributing it to him—that's a pretty serious charge. The world is full of cases where multiple people have been found to have come up with a similar idea, with some of the statements being more soundly based than others. Per WP:SYNTH, a secondary source would be needed to associate Bergson with the topic of selfish genes or this book. Please click "new section" at the top of the page (might be "+" in some skins) to add a new topic. Johnuniq (talk) 22:06, 22 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Henri Bergson 

message: I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years. 
-Jane Goodall
Benjamin (talk) 06:24, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: This page is to discuss improvements to the article based on reliable sources. However, the above text is a complete misreading of the book. Anyone who read the book would have noticed its extensive discussion of altruism and how it arose, along with cooperation, in a manner that is explainable by the gene-centered model of evolution. Johnuniq (talk) 07:19, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Is Jane Goodall not a reliable source? Benjamin (talk) 07:22, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Do yourself a favor and read the book rather than blogs or wherever you found the above. Johnuniq (talk) 08:01, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jane Goodall 

message: I believe the lead could be enhanced by summarizing more what is in the actual article on the wiki page -BayleyPlumb (talk) 00:13, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lead