What is success for Richard Dawkins?

The idea of selfish genes, capable of using the living organisms as molecular machines to achieve its own replication, was the most important XX century contribution to get Darwinism back to life. This theory appeared just at the same time Gould began to discuss some aspects of Darwinism in his Punctuated Equilibrium Theory.
Although the idea is not Dawkins’s, it is worth to him turning it one of the biggest materialistic claims nowadays. When you read Dawkins´ books you're prompted to think about Mettrie's man-machine, the best-known invention of the materialist writer of the Century of Lights. You're also likely to associate Dawkin´s ideas with Descartes’ man conception. Descartes thought animals were machines. They might (or not) be created in a particular God's creation act in the beginning of geological times. He never solved that point. There is a sort of immaterial little man inside human being, who drives the human machine at his will.
Dawkins´ DNA is also like a little man, but a molecular one. That molecular little man sets machines up to protect him against damage, so as he could persist in the being and make copies of himself. Dawkins´ idea is plenty of controvertible points, but I'm just interested in meditating on one of them. That is Dawkins´ concept of "success", usually accepted with no complaints even by his strongest critics. How does a gene turn out successful for Dawkins? Making so many exact copies of itself as possible. Let us imagine a gene codifying a red eye colour. This selfish gene would be successful if all the molecular machine descendants -machine made by the selfish gene for replicating itself- have got the red eye gene, even though the eye colour of the machine (more specifically, the eye colour of the animal who carry the machine) was green. I mean, the selfish gene only minds to persist in the being, although that persistence implied not being expressed by generations. Let us take this idea farther on. Let us imagine the gene goes on copying itself having been never expressed. In fact, this is the cheapest way to persist in the being. This is the cheapest way excepting the stones way, not even compelled to replicate. If the gene were never been expressed it would no longer be a gene, it would turn into trash DNA.
Provided Dawkins is right, the core of life would then be within genes. Greatest success of genes would be to persist. The gene just stays doing nothing. Genes would achieve that in a twisted way, assembling a body, replicating themselves. If they did not, natural selection would soon eliminate them. However, a trash DNA fragment is more successful than genes that keep as genes. A stone is even more successful, because it persist just being quiet.
Dawkins is not the only one who measures the success in conservative terms, but he is the only one who reduces it to the conservation of the individual gene. Somebody else think that the best way to avoid species extinction is to conserve its genetic identity in a gene bank. Perhaps the genes have created men so that men conserve genes in gene banks. Later, gene banks would become independent of men, and men would add their own genes to gene banks. Isn't this way to understand what success for living beings is weird? Is not rather success associated to the molecular machines made up by the genes for its own persistence and propagation? Those molecular machines change, evolve and sometimes think too. They transform the environment and make of Earth an almost living organization.
I refuse to find the core of life in DNA, because DNA seems to be the less changing, the less "alive" part of that dynamic process so-called life.

Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.

Why do evolutionistic biologists like to participate in creationistic debates?

If you look at the Web pages devoted to the polemic of Darwinism versus Creationism and Intelligent Design, you'll notice the great amount of biologists taking part in them. Many of the participant biologists back an undefined evolutionism, only partially Darwinist, sometimes incorporating punctuationistic or symbiogenetic elements. The way they participate is very interesting. In many cases, they begin with a friendly and pedagogical attitude, speaking of facts, of classic tests, also of the sense in which Darwinism and Creationism are or are not scientific theories. In time, their attitude usually becomes rather rougher, until they adopt a unionist way of speaking; despising anyone who "talks with no enough knowledge". They finally use expressions such as "obscurantism", "dogmatism", "pseudoscience", and any other qualification whose objective seems to be giving a sudden end to the debate, just to aboard "more interesting subjects". Nevertheless, they go on participating, and they attack again against all odds. Sometimes they write just a sardonic sentence and they stay at margin, but we still feel their presence.
Why does it happen? I can imagine a very simple reason: boredom. At least the more popular version of evolutionism -the 50’s Great Synthesis, that joined Darwinism with Population Genetics- has become boring. That is not for lacking of interesting elements. We'll not object neither its verisimilitude, nor its macro evolutionary achievements. That is not the problem. The problem is that Synthesis is able to explain everything about life almost successfully. That is horrible. Nothing is more horrible than to manage to reach the XVIII century Enlightenment goal: abolishing obscurantism, abolishing all shadow and all mystery.
What does a biologist who dedicates to count genes, to compare and to process arduous phyllogenetic trees in his free time? He looks for enemies. His task is a tough one. He will get to know in detail every living being branch sprout from the common ancestor's tree, he will manage to imagine how the first colony of bacteria appeared in the primitive soup, and later it will arrive to a Great Emptiness. Just when Evolutionism did that, it will quench itself in a fate of glory and forgetfulness. As the evolutionary biologist senses this is what is going to happen, he watches around and looks for enemies. He knows animals need someone to fight with. Since he has sublimated too much, along so much time, biologist come in the virtual space and shows his claws and his teeth thirsty of blood. He wishes to face a difficult struggle and looks for getting hurt, just linguistically hurt.
Perhaps, in the middle of the fight, something the enemy could say would surprise him, something that would save him from the torture of knowing everything about his speciality. Perhaps, he would do the same as those viruses, which carry along with them a part of the genome of the cell they have destructed. If that happens, the discussion has not been in vain.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved .

A necessary conservatism

Biology seems to be the only science that conserves, in an extended version, a more than one hundred years old Research program: Darwinism. Although it is not just the Darwinism of Darwin - who knew nothing about DNA, RNA or proteins- the persistence of this explanation about the origin of species is weird. It keeps on conserving a rigid nucleus that has survived an important crisis that took place at the beginning of XX century. The Neo-Darwinism of the Fifties has surpassed this crisis.
Recently, abolition of teaching of the Darwinism (or teaching it along with alternative evolutionary models) in Natural Sciences lessons of certain American schools has been attempted. From then, the idea of a beginning of fracture in a structure considered so impregnable has become popular. In the discussion were involved those whom, as Behe, were for the idea of an Intelligent Design. Popular disagreement has increased still more by taking knowledge of alternative models, such as Kauffman’s Complex Systems Theory, or as Margulis’s Symbiogenesis. That happened after years learning at school -in a clearly vulgarized and wrong way - that "Men descend from monkeys".
In consequence, certain Spanish Universities accepted to give conferences about Intelligent Design in its cloisters. Many scientists, who returned to Darwinian project, objected this.
Darwinism does not die by a generalized indifference due to this controversy.
This discussion has also stimulated the resurgence of alternative ideas proposing modifications in physic rules statements. These ideas invoke an astral plane of cosmic forces, named “counter-space", capable of creating atoms "from nothing". They also invoke the capacity of mitochondrion to operate like particle accelerators, capable to transmute pure chemical elements into others by means of a cold fusion process.
I’ m specifically thinking about an spanish engineer trained in the school of Rudolf Steiner called Francesc Fígols. This author develops a sort of wonderful coherent dream in which he joins all the commonly named pseudo sciences, like homeopathy, with other disciplines seated just in the periphery of science, like Gaia Theory. He claims that life had not an origin in Earth, because Earth was always alive. Mountains formerly had properties of fluidity and locomotion, as well as Earth has emerged from Sun, like a sort of developing embryo. Earth has sheltered embryonic living forms that ramified into "crystallized species ". For a while, a central human core waited for the proper conditions to lose its cartilaginous character in order to acquire a solid and perfect skeleton, with a maximum capacity brain, doing better than other hominids. This hominids were not more than degenerated forms of what was going to come. There has never been one more opposite position to Darwin’s, although it’s based on nearly the same evidence.
It is not too strange that a dream like this had appeared at a time of paradigm crysis like which Biology suffers nowadays. I say “dream” to oppose it to official science, understood like “vigil”.
It is not an original idea. Plato spoke of an involution of the species, and even then he sets humanity at the top of the living hierarchy. I only want to discuss two of the Fígol’s ideas, summarized from the reading of the book Cosmos and Gea.
In first place, his theory requires too many changes in other scientific disciplines to be accepted as an alternative project of investigation respect of Darwinism. For instance, he assumes the existence of forces coming from the totality of Cosmos towards the living beings. These forces would give them form in an astrological way. In addition, he accepts cold fusion and creation of stuff "from nothing". All this turns to be unacceptable due to which I would name a "necessary conservatism".
It’s a simple thing: if everything is allowed, nothing can be explained. The creation and the transmutation of stuff put ourselves one step behind which the own Darwinism would dare to accept in matter of hazard. Movement of life could even transcend the physical and chemical restrictions. There is no science without rules, nor rules without restrictions and principles of conservation. In a universe where a fact cannot be repeated (not even approximately), nothing is a fact.
Secondly, it is interesting that Fígol’s theory draw on to the same Darwin’s argument for the non-existence of a complex fauna in the Pre-Cambrian era: the soft bodies do not leave fossil traces. This is why men in cartilaginous or embryonic state have not been discovered. The common trunk from which has sprout the mineralized branches was constituted -according to Fígols- by that embryonic men.
All this does not mean that this charming work, mixture of science, magic and science fiction, lacks of some sparkles of ideas, sparkles of possible future scientific development. I would compare this Fígol’s work with Olaf Stapledon’s "Star Maker" (a novel containing an interesting anticipation of Symbiogenesis Theory).
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.