I say, in the language of Dawkins: embrace and glorify our genes. Don’t rebel against them.

The Selfish Gene, Social Darwinism,

 and Human Cooperation

by Toby Baxendale

It took me until my 43rd year to read The Selfish Gene, written in 1976 by Richard Dawkins. In many respects, it is a testament to its success that I felt no compelling desire to read it. What I perceived to be its central message had been absorbed into the very fabric of our culture. I thought the message was simply put. To summarize: we are driven to survive by our genes and via competitive and selfish natural selection; we follow our own self-interest in order to survive and procreate; genes that adapt more quickly and better to the competitive world survive at the expense of the others, and so forth. The state of nature is a Hobbesian nightmare of there being “no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It is survival of the fittest for most, but armed with this knowledge, we could overcome some of these rough edges of life.

This message became his new self-christened “meme” that has seeped into our own cultural way of thinking. Also, armed with this knowledge, Dawkins concludes we should restrain our biological drive and build a more cooperative world.

Needless to say, the book is rich with information on Darwinian evolution and easily communicated to the intelligent layperson. However, I think that he has at least one thing the wrong way around: we should not restrain our genes to build a more cooperative world, but embrace them and their phenotypic effects. As I will suggest, successful phenotypic effects are not as he assumes them to be when it comes to the catallactics of the market place.

The view of Dawkins — that we need to put restraint on our genes to effect a more cooperative outcome for all — would imply that if we do not, we get what is called social Darwinism which is as natural as the selfish gene itself. In the closing lines of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to rebel against this natural disposition.

“It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism,” Dawkins writes. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth. ... We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism.”

Dawkins then concludes that this ability to force ourselves to work well with others is “something that has no place in nature.”

Being new to biology, I thought I should read some Darwin to see if it really does follow that if you accept natural selection you must move, as night moves toward day, to the whole of human society running itself as a group of individualistic selfish replicators.

Social Darwinism has nothing, seemingly, to do with Darwin himself. He never advocated a social policy of promotion of the natural tendency to the survival of the fittest. He thought that appropriation by others was the key in advancing man in society.

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Read more here: mises.org