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Richard Dawkins: Philosophical Dead Ends
John Dupré reviews Richard Dawkins’s “The Genetic Book of the Dead” and Sara Imari Walker’s “Life as No One Knows It.”
Group selection has remained controversial, but philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, in their 1998 book Unto Others:The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, showed definitively that there is no objection of principle to such a phenomenon, and it seems increasingly likely that it is actually important. David Hume proposes, in his wonderful Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion(1779), that in infinite time, every possible structure would come into existence, and the stable ones ultimately would have the chance to survive. The exasperation comes to a head one page from the end with the suggestion that “[u]nderstanding is muddled across the seemingly disparate concepts we refer to as ‘matter,’ ‘information,’ ‘causation,’ ‘computation,’ ‘complexity,’ and ‘life.’ Assembly theory is an attempt to see all of these as the same thing.” This strikes me, to put it politely, as complete nonsense.
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