Dawkins view of evolution - true but opposable.

If the question is "can an atheist also be an altruist", then I think the answer is yes. Helping others, even at one's own expense, needn't be based on religious belief.

And, if I'm understanding Dawkins correctly from your summary, I agree with him!

Re: Dawkins view of evolution - true but opposable.

There's no "but" about it. As Dawkins explains in "The blind watchmaker", survival of the fittest under natural selection is the only viable explanation or why we exist. At the same time, just because we were produced by natural selection as a matter of fact, it doesn't follow that we as a society should mimick this mechanism in designing the rules we live by.


Sure. Altruism can be justified by principles that are completely independent of the existance of god. My own favorite justification is founded in utilitarian ethics.

-- Thomas

Re: Dawkins view of evolution - true but opposable.


If this Mr. Dawkins believes in a concept of survival of the fittest, than he has a seriously flawed view of the mechanism described by Darwin. Any individual which survives is by definition fit, and this survival of the fittest hoorah is a construction of a late 19th century lecturer who made a good deal of money peddling a second rate description of Darwin's theory, which missed entirely the central thesis. That thesis is that those individuals with the currently most promising survival mechanisms have the greatest breeding opportunity and will pass those on to their descendants, thereby increasing the probabilty that the particular genetic code written in their cells prospers. By no means does Darwin (nor Wallace, for that matter) ever suggest that the survival of the individual is ipso facto evidence of genetic success--Darwin speaks to the issue of traits within a species surviving based upon the most successful adaptation at the time of reproduction. This is only germaine to a discussion of human society in the age before a germ-theory of disease and the advent of good civil engineers and competent plumbers who can assure a clean water supply and efficient waste-removal, and the advent of the automobile, which removes horse manure from the streets, thereby removing the most ubiquitous vector of disease in human society. With the virtual elimination of the causes of high infant mortality, and death of adults in the prime of their reproductive years, the entire Darwinian concept is removed from mere physical considerations, and becomes the realm of a discussion of the ability of any one given social system to provide for the members those civil amenities which make survival and reproductive opportunity an odds-on probability.



I'd go along with that, and use the late 19th/early 20th century term, enlightened self-interest.

I tend to agree with Dawkins. I think though we need to differentiate between apples and oranges.
Survival to a genome is different than survival (and reproduction) of an organism, or an idea, or a society.
Societies with a low level of altruism have, and are being weeded out.
Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany are two which come to mind.
Since society is intended to benefit its members and since some portions of society will be the beneficiaries of altruistic notions a lack of this characteristic will eventually be a factor in removing that society from the world.
Therefore on a societal level altruism may well be a survival characteristic, even though perhaps detrimental to some of the individual members. (Tough Love?)
Consequently I can see no discrepancy between Altruism and Athiesm.
Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact!

Re: Dawkins view of evolution - true but opposable.

To his credit, Richard Dawkins is careful to ask "The fittest what?". Actually, he asks this right in the beginning of his very first book, "The Selfish Gene", and his answer is that natural selection favors the fittest gene. This is not only compatible with your description of what Darwin said about "traits within species". It also provides some foundation for altruism, because a gene that increases my likelyhood of helping my brothers and sisters promotes its own fitness -- my brothers and sisters are likely to carry the same gene too.

If you haven't read any of Dawkins' work yet, I cannot recommend it warmly enough. Especially his first two books, "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker".

-- Thomas

Thomas

When you write ...

" It also provides some foundation for altruism, because a gene that increases my likelyhood of helping my brothers and sisters promotes its own fitness -- my brothers and sisters are likely to carry the same gene too. "

...this is what I would call a "non-transcendent" position.

Speaking as an atheist my problem with altruism as "enlightened self interest" is where does the "enlightenment" come from? It seems to me that a sense of altruism involves empathising with "others" or in fact transcending the "self" in a pseudo-buddhist mode. I can live with this as a "coping mechanism" e.g. for conquering fear of "self discontinuity" at death but the "enlightenment mode" seems pretty close to what theists might ascribe to "divinity".

Please note the "some" in my original quote -- I put it in there for a reason. Evolutionary biology can explain why people help their relatives, especially close relatives. But it does not explain why I should help you -- we're not close relatives as far as I know. After he wrote The Selfish Gene, Dawkins got a lot of criticism from people who mistook his position as saying that I shouldn't help you because there's nothing in it for my genes. He responded that this is a fallacy. Just because the theory of evolution doesn't explain it as a matter of fact, it doesn't follow that it's not a good thing as a matter of ethics. In particular, it doesn't mean we shouldn't make any choices that extend or even contradict whatever benefits our genes.


As it happens, my own term of choice was "utilitarian ethics", not "enlightened self interest". In a nutshell, the core of utilitarian ethics consists of two beliefs. 1) It is virtuous to make as many people as possible as happy as possible. 2) Each individual gets to decide for himself what makes him happy. For illustration, lets say you take away my booze. This makes you happy -- you're a devoted Muslim for the purpose of this example; and it makes me unhappy -- I'm an alcoholic for the purpose of this example. According to utilitarian ethics, your act is virtuous if, and only if, it brings more happiness to you than unhappiness to me. In this particular case, that means it's probably not virtuous.

These are beliefs I hold, but they don't require me to believe in any kind of divinity. I admit I don't have any other particular reason for holding them either. I just hold them, period.

-- Thomas

Thanks for that thumbnail sketch of utilitarian ethics.

Allowing for the brevity this does seem to place "virtue" in the arena of cultural relativity, which Dawkins shuns. (Ref: The Devil's Chaplain 2003).
It still seems to me that Dawkin's wants "absolutes" even he suggests we oppose evoluton on the grounds of "wastage", and he certainly maintains "scientific truth" to be the Grand Jury in matters of "progress". Interestingly, another popularist, Steven Pinker, (Language and Cognition) also denigrates cultural relativity and subscribes to what I feel is a naive concept of "truth".

I suppose that the gist of my argument is that the reliance on "absolutes" cannot but allow for the concept of "deities" being the "logical" supreme among such absolutes.

I was the one who used the term "enlightened self-interest" and the enlightenment comes from having the sense to know upon which side one's bread is buttered. I'm an atheist, without quibble, qualification or apology--so any source of enlightenment must, perforce, be internal to he or she who is enlightened.

When Spencer created the 'survival of the fittest" metaphor, Darwin did adopt the term in his later 2 works and thus the start of the ovious tautology.
in a purely biological explanation, natural selection is a 2 step process involving
A The production of variation ( meiotic division,recombination, .mutation, and just good-ole sex

B. Selecting out the variation by nonrandom aspects of survival-the phenotype lives and achieves success in the present environment, and by demonstrating this success, reproduces

Everyone is discussing this a single step process by inference and thats incorrect.. dAwkins, although prolific a writer and summarizer of his own "evolutional absolutism" is not taken too seriously among all the major evolution (and Creation0 camps for a major reason.His (SIGMA) reasoning has been clandestinely circular. He has stated (as his works evolved) that the gene is the central point of evolution and all else is mere consequence. Then, hes stated that "the gene can be defined as an organism" His own personal dogma of the "extended genotype" is more akin to the old Sen Aikens statement that the best way to have ended VietNam was declare victory and leave.
the reason ive stated the two step process of nat selection is that is how modern evolution synthesis presents it. Darwin wasnt much aware of the interaction and "culling' that occurs on the genotypic and phenotypic level, but he defined the mechanism in what has been described (arguably) as the most profound scientific thought of the millenium.
The interaction of the entire organism in the environment allows its own gene compliment to be handed out with a new novel genotype produced. (and so on and so on and so on), and as Gould said, genes are the scorecard to let us know the history of the game, or as he stated 'cosmic bookkeeping"

Thanks Farmerman, that clarification is needed here. I always take exception to the "survival of the fittest" crapola, because of the abuse to which such a concept is so prone to lend itself. Quite apart from that, the tautology should be self-evident, as simple survival of the individual is evidence of "fitness." The profound contribution for which Darwin is credited, and for which Wallace receives almost no credit, is in the establishment that some mechanism (even if only poor discerned) is present, causing species to change in response to the evironment.

To be honest, I don't see this in Dawkins work, and neither do I see it in Pinkers work. But of course, I haven't read every single book by either of them, so could you, maybe, give us some quotes to illustrate what you're talking about? There's a lot of essays by both authors available online, so you might be able to post a link to what you mean as well.

-- Thomas

Setanta, I have to agree with your comment about wallace.in that vein I had heard that some of the newer texts are crediting him by calling the theory the" Darwin/Wallace theory of natural selection "

Quite agreed, simply because it's a fairly profound (though seemingly innocuous, to many) misconception of the foundation of the most elegant and profound biological ideas ever developed... As to who came up with it -- I've no doubt many people would have come to the same conclusions before too long (despite the millions who were and are dumbfounded by them).

As to the connection between theism and ethical (or "altruisitic," which frankly has a bit of a masochistic tinge to my ear) behavior -- pah. Very often, the former simply seems to serve in the absence of the latter, not to engender it...

Set, I think you make some good points, but it misses the point, in my view, that survival also depends upon our environment. ergo, without food and water, the ability to reproduce is moot. c.i.

Thomas

In his essay "What is True?"(originally published in Forbes Magazine 2002) Dawkins writes "...it is simply true that the desk on which I am writing is made of wood...not a local truth denied in another culture...and the same can safely be said of many scientific truths even when we can't see them with our own eyes.."

My counter argument (expanded elsewhere in threads on social reality) is that "wood-ness" is mutually dependedent on " particular man-ness" i.e. a function of cultural relativity.

Or when Pinker ( "The Blank Slate") dismisses the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (that language influences thought) with claims about the "mythology" of Eskimo's numerous words for snow, he fails to recognise that cultural relativity (which nowadays may be lessening as a force) is the logical extrapolation of species relativity.

Thus for Dawkins "Man" with his cognitive urge to predict and control sees "truth" supported by "successful prediction". But Dawkins et al fail to aknowledge that "control" leads to a particular rationality leaving the way open for theists to embellish that rationality when that control inevitably fails to be perfect.

I should point out at this juncture that I am taking a Devils Advocate position at least with respect to Dawkins whose views I generally agree with.