Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Gene
, that he is describing how things evolved, not how humans ought
to act. He is interested not in humans and human behavior but rather
animal behavior. So again, one must be careful how one reads and parses
his observations. But, having been tarred with the brush of genetic deter-
minism in critiques of the first edition of his topic, Dawkins is quite blunt
in his rejection of it: “It is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a
statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believ-
ing that this influence can be modified, overridden, or reversed by other
influences. ...We, that is our brains, are separate and independent
enough from our genes to rebel against them.”
24
The interesting part of this sentence is the identification of the self with
the brain. How one understands that will also suggest something about
freedom and how it functions. And we must remember that Dawkins,
like Wilson, maintains that we have the capacity to rebel against our
replicators, as he notes in
The Selfish Gene
. But again, one must seek for
the foundation or basis of such a capacity. Is this a capacity found gen-
erally in all animals, the focus of his study, or is it unique to humans?
One important part of the argument of both these authors is that any
discussion of freedom must occur within a context, one that is both
genetic and cultural. No one stands apart from such an environment,
and this environment must at least condition or qualify both our under-
standing of freedom as well as its exercise. But since both argue for some
capacity to transcend one's genetic program, we need to look carefully
for the basis of that capacity.
Altruism
Altruism is a word describing a noble tendency in humans:
actions on behalf of another with little or no regard for oneself or one's
interests. In the literature of sociobiology, however, it is the near equiv-
alent to a fighting word. Generally, altruism refers to some form of
behavior that promotes the fitness of another organism at the expense
of its own fitness. On the one hand, this is a
behavioral
term that por-
trays how natural selection occurs, not a depiction of
motives
. On the
other hand, Wilson, for example, argued that altruism is the central
problem of sociobiology. With this, he also brought a “particular philo-
sophical style: the coupling of scientific and moral notions;” he thus
looked for holistic explanations of behavior, leading him occasionally to
commit the naturalistic fallacy of describing moral norms from biologi-
