On Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene Comparatively with Platonism

“We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator–molecules called DNA–but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machine to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.“

“The Selfish Gene” – Richard Dawkins

In this book, Dawkins offers us the gene’s eye view of evolutionary life. A body is only the gene’s way of preserving the genes unaltered. For him, the DNA molecules are the replicators. They generally, for reasons that we shall come to, gang together into large communal survival machines or ‘vehicles’. The vehicles that we know best are individual bodies like our own. A body then is not a replicator; it is a vehicle. There’s another analogy would greatly simplify the complex idea of Dawkins’ genetic view:

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeing. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course, they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

I can’t help but find there’s so much resemblance between the argument of Dawkins’ selfish gene’s view and Plato’s Theory of Forms. Perhaps, I would excerpt some paragraphs of Plato’s Symposium to explain the similarities of both:

“First, this beauty always is, and doesn’t come into being or cease; it doesn’t increase or diminish. Second, it’s not beautiful in one respect but ugly in another, or beautiful at one time but not at another, or beautiful in relation to this but ugly in relation to that; nor beautiful here and ugly there. Nor will beauty appear to him in the account or piece of knowledge; or as being anywhere in something else, for instance in a living creature or earth or heaven or anything else. It will appear as in itself and by itself, always single in form; all that, when other things come to be or cease, it is not increased or decreased in any way nor does it undergo any change. When someone goes up by these stages, through loving in the correct way, and begins to catch sight of that beauty, he has come close to reaching the goal.”

Of cause, Plato’s main aim is to give a general account of human desire (or love) in an extended sense. The mysteries suggest that philosophically based knowledge of the Forms provides the best possible route to human happiness or the realm of truth and thus the highest form of ‘love’. But to some degree, I would like to suggest that, Dawkins offers us a profound view of life that is grounded on the very single substance that gene is somehow immortality that is beyond the grasp of human senses. Apparently, Dawkins’ speculative theory is based on the very scientific view of inquiry, whereas Plato is much advocating some sort of mystic-affair view. Let us take another look at Dawkins argument of the “Immortal Gene”:

A gene is not indivisible, but it is seldom divided. It is either definitely present or definitely absent in the body of any given individual. A gene travels intact from grandparent to grandchild, passing straight through the intermediate generation without merged with other genes…..Another aspect of the particulateness of the gene is that it does not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is million years old than when it is only a hundred. It leaps from body to body down to generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death.

At last, there are only two words to describe the book: Fascinating and exhausting. Fascinating in the sense of how Dawkins’s profound and intriguing gene’s view of life still remains relevant and controversial in modern generations among academic intellectual and public. Exhausting in the sense that Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” is an epistemological centric book that argues about animal altruistic and selfish behavior to determine whether individual entities of survival machine’s altruistic behavior is responsible for the survival of the group species as some biologists coined it as a “Group Selection” theory that has so much contradiction with Darwinian orthodox “Natural Selection” theory. Nevertheless, I personally think this book is an influential work of Neo-Darwinism that will perpetually exist for another century.