The Selfish Gene

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:32:56 -0500

Summary

Dawkins argues that the fundamental unit of natural selection is at a gene level. He then continues to build the world from single genes into what we see today, explaining why many different behaviors that are confusing at first, when examined from the “gene’s eye view” they start to make sense. If you have heard of Darwin, then odds are you’ve heard the phrase “survival of the fittest”, but the question that this statement raises is, survival of what? The fittest claw? The fittest lion? The fittest pride? The fittest species? Dawkins makes the case that what is surviving is the gene and for this to work he defines gene slightly different than a geneticist would. He says a gene is the smallest single or collection of chromosomal material that lasts enough generations to act as a unit of natural selection. An easily understandable example would be the gene for blue eyes. On the face of it this definition seems circular, by definition he can’t be wrong. Genes — segments of chromosomal material — are the smallest trait-carrying units we know of, so if natural selection exists, it must start there. One might be tempted to ask why he didn’t define genes as a group or single quark that exists together long enough to be a unit of natural selection, but he spends a fair bit of time expanding this definition into less of a tautology and more of a theory. One interesting question the comes up is if natural selection is at the gene level and logically therefore all genes are acting selfishly (anthropomorphizing to help us think about the situation), then why would they band together with competing genes to form flesh suits, or elm trees? To answer this he brings in the concepts of replicators and vehicles. Another term he uses throughout the book was survival machines, this was a clever choice as it applies to anything that is alive, plants, animals, etc. Dawkins says that genes are the replicators and survival machines are their vehicles. So since we are already anthropomorphizing, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to picture a chromosome behind the wheel of a car on a speeding highway trying not to die, the car in this case would anything from single celled amoeba, to a giraffe. When we come back to reality of course this does not work in this way, as a single gene has next to no control over where a bat is going, or over the next word I type. But Dawkins chooses to zoom in on the “next to nothing” influence, because if you put enough next to nothings together, you just might have something!

The Bell Curve

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:14 -0500

This book was pretty long and mostly interesting. As one might expect it is fairly dense full of charts and diagrams. On the upshot is I now have a concept of what a standard deviation is. This book makes several statements:

Everyone has varied levels of intelligence and this intelligence can be measured by what psychometricians call ‘G’ for general intelligence. G is a subset of IQ, but I’ll just refer to it via IQ.
IQ has a high predictive power on various social outcomes including marriage, illegitimacy, salary, criminality and more.
It is easier to be successful in life with a high IQ than with a low IQ.
IQ is more important than how much money your parents had in predicting outcomes.
Colleges have gotten better at selecting for IQ and therefore Ivy League schools get a much higher percentage of the best and brightest than they did 100 years ago.
There is the emergence of a new class in America that they dub the “Cognitive Elite” these people are separated from the larger subset of the population in ways that were not the case 100 years ago. (i.e., private schools, rich neighborhoods, white collar offices, etc.).
This new cognitive elite wields an extraordinary amount of power over the shape of our culture.
IQ is affected by genetic and environmental factors
IQ is pretty much set by the time you are 6 years old
IQ varies between ethnicities in the following order from top to bottom Asian, White, Latino, Black. (They don’t really say why other than a combination of genetic and environmental factors)
All of our best efforts in education haven’t produced as large of improvements in student’s IQ as most people think.
The top IQ students have been neglected by government funding, which has instead been funneled towards the lowest performing students.
Affirmative action is a disaster After reading this, whether right or wrong this book has been helpful. It was so controversial that it initiated many research groups to be formed to try and ferret out the legitimacy of the claims that the authors make, which is more useful than everyone nodding their heads in agreement. Most of the criticisms of this book center around their statistical methods and their decision to look at the correlation between race and IQ. It is worth noting that (from what I’ve seen) almost none of the conclusions the authors make have been refuted. For example, there is actually an apparent gap between white and black IQs (as of 96) for reasons unknown. My professional(joking) opinion is that the correlations are very compelling and intuitively it makes sense that a “smart” person would be more successful than a “dumb” person ON AVERAGE. That is pretty much the entire book in a single sentence, and I am not sure what is so controversial about that. As for the race difference thing, it makes more sense to me to look at it with open eyes instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. So, if there is a difference, we should do more investigations on trying to figure out how to close the gap. The authors sound defeatist on this point saying that all attempts in the past have failed to produce much change, but that doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion to make from the data to me. In fact, the last section of the book was centered on what they would suggest for political actions based on this data and to me it was the worst part. As they aren’t political scientists it comes as no surprise their suggestions would tend towards the naive and whatever political bent, they brought to the table initially. Overall, I enjoy reading polarizing books because they are typically right at the center of important conversations.

Rating 7.5/10

Genetics on George's Blog

The Selfish Gene

The Bell Curve