Saturday, July 2, 2011

The Selfish Gene - Not so much!

For those that see The Selfish Gene of Richard Dawkins as a master piece in the subject of Evolution, they must review his opinion. There are some things that kill all the reasoning of it. And some of those things are:
  1. When writing about Why Sex evolved in the Chapter Immortal coils, he states:
    "This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer. Most serious attempts to answer in evolve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. I am frankly going to evade it except to say one thing."
  2. And the one (big) thing he has to say is:
    "Whether or not it benefits all the rest of an individual's genes is comparatively irrelevant. Seen from the selfish gene's point of view, sex is not so bizarre after all"
  3. A good question is that, if it is irrelevant, why bother so much with the esoteric asexual examples after all?
  4. Plus, there is a misconception between Group Selection and Species Selection in the Chapter Why are people?:
    "The quick answer of the 'individual selectionist' to the argument just put might go something like this. Even in the group of altruists, there will almost certainly be a dissenting minority who refuse to make any sacrifice. [It] If there is just one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the rest, then he, by definition, is more likely then they are to survive and have children. Each of these children will tend to inherit his selfish traits. After several generations of this natural selection, the 'altruist group' will be over-run by selfish individuals, and will be indistinguishable from the selfish group. Even if we grant the improbable change existence initially of pure altruistic groups without any rebels, it is very difficult to see what is to stop selfish individuals migrating in from neighbourning selfish groups, and, by inter-marriage, contaminating the purity of the altruistic groups."
  5. By definition? He completely forgets to mention Sexual Selection, and he is blind to see that, by definition is of the domain of Sexual Selection, not Natural Selection. So, it not matters if some one is selfish, what it matters is if some one is attractive and nice to the Species, or by other words, less degenerative of its own species. This is the Species Selection that he constantly avoids to mention it, maintaining the clumsily Group Selection argument easy to disrupt;
  6. His book has 81 results for "Natural Selection" and 10 results for "Sexual Selection" a ratio of 8,1 times, almost the same we get in a Google search ("Natural Selection" vs "Sexual Selection")! Now, do you still have doubts about the reality of the existing Status Quo?
  7. The despair is so great, that for the extraordinary difference in size of the genome, he says that is a noncoding DNA, without never realize, or explain, why that hypothetical difference between Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes remains nevertheless.
In conclusion, Dawkins is a fanatic fellow when it came to genes as the absolute Unit of Selection.


I'm absolutely right!

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