Re: The Ancestor's Tale

[Colin McHenry <cmchenry@westserv.net.au>]

Pheret,

Richard Dawkins is an ethologist at Oxford.  In 1976 he published a book 
called the Selfish Gene, followed by  The Extended Phenotype (1982) and 
the  Blind Watchmaker (1986).  These books promoted a view of 
evolutionary biology that focused very much on natural selection acting 
at the gene level, and were enormously popular.

I didn't say I didn't like him (don't know the guy), but I felt his work 
focused too much on population level phenomena, and ignored larger scale 
evolutionary processes.  More to the point, I felt he was sometimes 
disingenuous in the claims he made for the explanatory power of his 
'selfish gene' view of selection.  Don't get me wrong, like most 
evolutionary biologists I think that most evolutionary phenomena do 
occur at the 'popultion genetics' level, and that natural selection is 
the primary agent for most evolutionary chnage.  But I also believe that 
evolution occurs at some other levels - processes that are often called 
'macroevolutionary', and that natural selection is not the only agent of 
change.  I think Dawkins allowed people to believe that the 'selfish 
gene' could explain abosultely everything of interest in evolutionary 
biology, and that he was aware of doing this.

At the time (1980s) evolutionary biology was healthily debated on both 
sides of the Atlantic.  The 'selfish gene', punctuated equilibirum, and 
a host of other conflicting (and not so conflicting) ideas of how to 
view Darwin's great idea spilled over into some very readable popular 
books  - read anything by Dawkins or Steve J Gould from the time.  To 
make a huge generalisation, the debate occasionally polarised into the 
pointy-headed evolutionary ecologists (Dawkins) who argued that natural 
selection could explain everything and that all evolutionary processes 
could be explained by looking at microevolution in a Drosophila lab, and 
the 'everything's interconnected' East Coast Marxist palaeontologists 
who would give status to fuzzy macroevolutionary phenomena.

Niles Edridge's 'Reinventing Darwin' (1995) gives one side of the story 
of those exciting times.  My personal experience was that the 'selfish 
gene' view completely dominated  the biology departments at UK 
universities in the early 1990 (I did an honours degree in evolutionary 
ecology) to the extent that it was stifling (a bit like cladistics in 
vertebrate palaeontology?).

That's a quick summary.  You could do a thesis on the social and 
scientific impact of "The Selfish Gene"....

The reason for my little barb is that some of what Dawkins seems to be 
talking about in the new book reminds me of the themes that Gould used 
to go on about (see, for example, Wonderful Life).  I'm sure Steve is 
chuckling to himself somewhere out there......

Cheers
Colin


pheret wrote:

> dorky me.  who is richard dawkins and why do we not like him?  feel free
> to email me privately so as not to get into a big to-do on the list!
>
> pheret (the ignorant)
>
>  

--
*****************
Colin McHenry
School of Environmental and Life Sciences (Geology)
University of Newcastle
Callaghan NSW 2308
Australia
Tel: +61 2 4921 5404
Fax: + 61 2 4921 6925

******************
Colin McHenry & Sarah Johnston
14 Summer Place
Merewether Heights  NSW 2291
Australia
+61 2 4963 2340
mob: 0423 081683

cmchenry@westserv.net.au
Colin.Mchenry@newcastle.edu.au