4 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. we also challenge in the book The Very concept of selfishness itself

      for - book - Understanding living systems - challenging selfishness - critique - of Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene

      • Ray Noble points out a contradiction in Richard Dawkin's use of the word selfish in his "Selfish gene".
        • Unless there is purposefulness, choice and agency, there cannot be any concept of selfishness
    2. for - Denis Noble - Ready Noble - evolutionary biology - critique of Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene theory - critique of gene centrism - book - Understanding Living Systems - human agency

      summary - In this informative interview, brothers Denis and Ray Noble discuss their new book - Understanding Living Systems, and - dispel the 70 year old narrative of Gene centrism and the selfish gene as determining the high level behaviour of living organisms

  2. Oct 2022
    1. this course considers at the very end the question of the essence of thereligion: Through all this change, does anything remain constant?

      Religion co-evolves with the people, places, and times in which it exists. Much like human genes, it works at the level of the individual, the local group, the larger groups and communities (of both the religion itself as well as the polities around it), and when applicable at the scale of all people on the planet.

      The Selfish Religion: How far might we take this religion/gene analogy with respect to Richard Dawkins' thesis (1976). Does religion act more like a gene that is part of the particular person or is it more like a virus which inserts itself? The latter may be closer as one can pick and choose a religion rather than it being a core part of their genetic identity.

      (highlight: anchor only)

  3. Jan 2022
    1. The scientific consensus has shifted so much that Richard Dawkins, in the 30th-anniversary edition of “The Selfish Gene,” wrote that he could just as accurately have called his book “The Cooperative Gene.” Perhaps decades of our economic and political lives would have been much less harmful if he had.

      I do like the more positive framing of "The Cooperative Gene."