Dennett as Dramameme, and a Sad Anniversary
UPDATED: New entry in the WTF! category: “Maybe we need to keep evolutionary theory around for the laughs.” (William Dembski, Uncommon Descent, May 3, 2006). I guess that’s what passes for humor at the Disillusioned Institute these days, or else he’s wisely backing off his own countdown just one month later (See “What Dembski Said” at left).
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I did manage to complete some sentences with a few people at “Drinking Liberally” last night. Packed is right—I went to Arise! at noon to buy the book and that was a good idea. And then the musician came onstage to drive away the rest of the 331 lingerers just after I managed to sit down at the bar to actually eat after a few beers.
Thus trapped, I pulled out my trusty purse-sized book* (not Zuniga’s), and made a discovery: I totally recommend reading Daniel Dennett after having tied a couple on. (“There couldn’t be ‘real’ minds and ‘real’ selfishness without billions of years of hemi-semi-demi-pseudo-proto-quasi minds and mere ‘as if’ selfishness to drive the research and development process that has eventually yielded our minds.”) I could barely put the thing down to walk the three blocks to my house! It prevents hangovers, too. Yes, I had retained it all when I woke up this morning.
Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier to reject this false dichotomy of studying and drinking? From now on I intend to get hammered any time that I come across a difficult passage, and I think that sets a grand precedent for that private Catholic college which I’m about to enter this fall for grad school. Yes, indeedy! (The nuns are, I hear, very liberal. I just want to be a librarian, people, and it’s the only place I can go, so that's why, that's why.)
*Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
I highly recommend this book. But you know, all it’s missing is some acknowledgement by Gould (oh, Jesus, I'm becoming maudlin because it's nearing the anniversary of Stephen's death) of the contribution that Dawkins’ and Dennett's so-called “Darwinian fundamentalism” has truly made. I loved Gould, and feel grateful to him, and I miss him terribly as if he had been a friend (I never met him, either), but it was because of Gould that I put off reading Dawkins for so long. That’s unfortunate, for I find Dawkins to be so clear and so scrupulous in his prose that he has been added to my list of heroes—the list of people I have never met but who have become father figures for someone like me, who doesn’t have many real-life models.
Dennett is fast becoming a hero to me, too. Being a general reader doofus, I plan to just pile on the heroes without resolving in my mind their conflicts with each other. I cannot understand, after having read The Selfish Gene, what precisely bothered Gould so much, but I cannot respond with a rejection of Gould either, just with the sincere regret that he never acknowledged his mischaracterization of Dawkins. Nor do I resent Gould for misleading me in that area—it’s the fights with the creationist hucksters that are important. Life is short. I miss you, Stephen J. Gould.
------
I did manage to complete some sentences with a few people at “Drinking Liberally” last night. Packed is right—I went to Arise! at noon to buy the book and that was a good idea. And then the musician came onstage to drive away the rest of the 331 lingerers just after I managed to sit down at the bar to actually eat after a few beers.
Thus trapped, I pulled out my trusty purse-sized book* (not Zuniga’s), and made a discovery: I totally recommend reading Daniel Dennett after having tied a couple on. (“There couldn’t be ‘real’ minds and ‘real’ selfishness without billions of years of hemi-semi-demi-pseudo-proto-quasi minds and mere ‘as if’ selfishness to drive the research and development process that has eventually yielded our minds.”) I could barely put the thing down to walk the three blocks to my house! It prevents hangovers, too. Yes, I had retained it all when I woke up this morning.
Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier to reject this false dichotomy of studying and drinking? From now on I intend to get hammered any time that I come across a difficult passage, and I think that sets a grand precedent for that private Catholic college which I’m about to enter this fall for grad school. Yes, indeedy! (The nuns are, I hear, very liberal. I just want to be a librarian, people, and it’s the only place I can go, so that's why, that's why.)
*Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
I highly recommend this book. But you know, all it’s missing is some acknowledgement by Gould (oh, Jesus, I'm becoming maudlin because it's nearing the anniversary of Stephen's death) of the contribution that Dawkins’ and Dennett's so-called “Darwinian fundamentalism” has truly made. I loved Gould, and feel grateful to him, and I miss him terribly as if he had been a friend (I never met him, either), but it was because of Gould that I put off reading Dawkins for so long. That’s unfortunate, for I find Dawkins to be so clear and so scrupulous in his prose that he has been added to my list of heroes—the list of people I have never met but who have become father figures for someone like me, who doesn’t have many real-life models.
Dennett is fast becoming a hero to me, too. Being a general reader doofus, I plan to just pile on the heroes without resolving in my mind their conflicts with each other. I cannot understand, after having read The Selfish Gene, what precisely bothered Gould so much, but I cannot respond with a rejection of Gould either, just with the sincere regret that he never acknowledged his mischaracterization of Dawkins. Nor do I resent Gould for misleading me in that area—it’s the fights with the creationist hucksters that are important. Life is short. I miss you, Stephen J. Gould.
posted by Kristine | Wednesday, May 03, 2006
6 Comments:
I’ve just started “Freedom Evolves,” but that roller-coaster passage I referred to is from the book that I mentioned (“Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think”). Great book so far. Dennett has a chapter, Michael Shermer has one, and even Dawkins’ first wife, zoologist Marian Stamp Dawkins, weighs in with a moving tribute. (How could she let the guy get away?) ;-) There are some criticisms of Dawkins, too, that are intriguing. This was the first sampling of Daniel Dennett for me—haven’t finished anything else by him yet.
Last night I started reading “The Panda’s Thumb” again (with red wine), and while I will always credit Gould for helping this small-town girl navigate between the creationist icebergs as I grew up, I am more confused than ever by his statements about The Selfish Gene. I don’t think that Dawkins ever denied that natural selection works on individuals. I don’t think that Dawkins ever insisted that single genes work in isolation (Dawkins usese the word “gene” for “allele” anyway), that genes don’t collaborate, or that there is a “gene for this” and a gene for that, etc.
Sorry to go gushing on about Stephen, when you want to discuss Daniel; Dennett is new to me, whereas Gould was a big, big influence. I have ambitions of reading Consciousness Explained very soon, but first I want to get through Dawkins’ work, being that I was quite misled about it by Gould.
I wonder what the nuns at St. Cate's will make of Dawkins.
Actually, I have mixed feelings about Gould now. So many people have charged him with misleading the general public about evolution, and the general public is in the category that I belong. What I considered to be his greatest work, "The Mismeasure of Man," has come under attack for being downright inaccurate. And when he says, "Not only do we need a one-to-one mapping between between gene and body [for the Selfish Gene thesis to work], we need one-to-one adaptive mapping," I feel that I'm in over my head.
Dawkins' book made sense at the time that I read it, and yet when Gould insists that natural selection cannot "see genes and pick among them directly," I see what he's saying. What do I know? I'm essentially a glorified secretary--I read this stuff for fun. Because I have a strange idea of fun.
Tell you what: when you get to it, in Panda's Thumb, read "Caring Groups and Selfish Genes" and tell me what you think.
Here's Gould: "Mutation is the ultimate source of variation, and genes are the unit of variation. Individual organisms are the units of selection. But individuals do not evolve...species are the unit of evolution." It's been a while, and I don't do this for a living, but I now sense, after believing him when I read this a gazillion years ago, that he's wrong. However, I cannot argue against it--is he wrong?
[Laughter] I just finished his chapter “Our Greatest Evolutionary Step,” in Panda’s Thumb and it ends thus: “It is now two in the morning and I’m finished. I think I’ll walk over to the refrigerator and get a beer.” He is (was) one of us!
Of course I don’t think that Gould would ever deliberately mislead anyone, but he did seem to be projecting his own concerns onto Dawkins, accusing Dawkins of being a genetic determinist, etc., and I think it’s possible that Gould was really fighting his own battles within himself. Earlier in the anthology he comes very close to drawing a parallel between Dawkins and Alfred Russell Wallace, whom Gould asserts championed natural selection to the point of it replacing the Creator in a new religion. Gould goes on to contrast Wallace’s new form of “creationism” with Darwin’s “middle way,” thus setting up his later argument that Dawkins is a natural selection fundamentalist like Wallace, whereas (and this is never explicitly stated) he, Gould, emulates the caution and scrupulousness of Darwin.
I have no doubt that Gould truly believed this, but I do find, again, Dawkins to be so careful and thoughtful that I think it is Gould who was not exerting the requisite caution.
After reading Gould again, I need to re-read Selfish Gene because I’ve lost the understanding that seemed so clear from Dawkins. For me, understanding science is a little like what others describe as a mystical experience, in that I can see something very clearly one minute, and then, after some time has gone by, I lose the vision. (I don’t mean to imply at all that I’m employing mystical means to understand science, just that I can have a metaphorical or poetical view that does not last.)
You know, as a young girl, I had dozens of imaginary playmates. Sometimes I think that these writers and scientists who occupy my mind as personalities (apart from the ideas that they put out there) have become, well, something quite similar! That’s what happens when you look to renowned people for father figures, I guess. I miss Carl Sagan, too. I used his words and concepts to try to explain evolution to my own father, who literally believed in a 6-day creation.
Thank you. I am decidedly not a religious person. ;-)
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