Life: A Synthesis

Life: A Synthesis

I am going to attempt something both ambitious and modest: synthesize the various elements of the Dawkinsian view of life as we know it. We are familiar (I hope) with the pillars of the Dawkins’ world-view (zoological philosophy): the selfish gene, the extended phenotype, the genetic book of the dead (the textual body). Genes as immortal self-replicators, the organism as gene vehicle, the phenotype extending beyond the body, the informational content of the genes and the body in relation to past ancestral worlds—all of that. I will say nothing of this by way of defense or explication; my aim is purely to synthesize. How do the pieces fit together? The first thing I want to notice is that the addition of the textual body (and mind) supplements the picture of the selfish gene and the extended phenotype: for we now have the selfish textual gene and the extended textual phenotype. We already knew that the genes are symbolic (this is a commonplace in genetics) because they contain plans for the construction of bodies during embryogenesis—they symbolize bodies—but we now know that they also symbolize past worlds (sometimes lost worlds). They look backwards in time to ancestors as well as forwards in time to progeny. I would even say that they know the things they symbolize—they “cognize” them. They are thus selfish, symbolic, and cognitive (“the epistemic gene”). Genes (DNA) are both ruthless self-replicators (“selfish”) and avid story-tellers (“books”). They narrate and regenerate, represent and survive. The more they survive the more often they get to tell their stories. If they were people, they would write books and help no one but themselves—bookish egomaniacs. Literary self-advancers. In making copies of themselves they re-publish their own literary works (the information about past and future they carry). And they have a sold a million copies, to understate their market success. Not very nice maybe, if they were people, but undeniably prolific and powerful, unswervingly self-promoting. As to the phenotype (that was the genotype), its extension now includes its textual component: not just internal organs and skin but also a library of books about things. Since aboutness is a type of reference, we can say that the extended phenotype includes the reference of the symbols in these books—the things in the past that the symbols stand for. The reference relation is not “in the body”; it holds between internal symbols and remote-in-time real-world entities (e.g., deserts of the past). It’s not just beaver dams and anthills but also objects referred to—the extended phenotype stretches back in time (it includes that past desert emblazoned on the back of the horned Mojave lizard). We get the extended semantic phenotype, not merely the extended physical phenotype. The phenotype includes the external environment and reference to it. This is not the old model of a brute physical object, a biological atom; a life-form has words written into it, and their reference reaches back millions of years. We have the literary body as well as the literary gene. If the body were a person, it would be devoted to ancient history. Indeed, the outer products of an animal’s labor (nests, dams, bowers) themselves bespeak ancient worlds, containing records of ancestral life; we can read the past off them. The book of the dead exists outside the animal’s body as well as inside it—the textual extended phenotype. It’s like an actual library located some distance away.[1] That is what is getting selected by natural selection.

I would like to draw a diagram of life as conceived by these concepts, but I can’t (not here anyway). What I can do is describe a picture of life as so conceived—the picture suggested by the Dawkins biological philosophy. You are welcome to draw the picture yourself. First, draw a circle that will depict a nucleus (like an atom or cell): this will be filled with DNA molecules—genes, replicators, selfish little buggers. I see this as colored red. Write inside this circle “texts” and “me-me-me”, so that you notate the nature of the enclosed entities. Around this circle draw a larger circle named “organism” (I see it as beige); inside this circle write “vehicle”, “text”, and “mind and body”. This will be the whole organism as customarily conceived. The DNA sits inside it, protected by it, carried about by it. On the right, draw a broken line with an arrow pointing to the future: this depicts all the copies (replicas) produced by the genes sitting inside the organism. This is gene survival, the point of the entire contraption—it’s a machine for propelling genes into the future. Pointing left, we have a solid arrow harking back to the past; write next to this “ancestral worlds”. Both arrows together depict the story of the life-form in question—where it came from and where it is going. Finally, draw some arrows (two is enough) depicting the extended phenotype of the organism, perhaps with a fuzzy picture of what this might consist of (a nest, an anthill). You might notate these arrows with the words “external text” just to be pedantically correct. So, that’s it, drawing complete. It depicts a nucleus of self-replicators driving the machine forward, calling the shots, surrounded by an obedient casing of flesh and text, suspended between past and future. It is a dynamic not a static system. It is what evolution has manufactured—a device for preserving little chunks of chemical substance, ultimately. Not that the life-form is reducible to chemical substance, but the properties of the preserving body are geared to performing this task. Organisms are the result of chemical propagation, shaped by natural selection. That, essentially, is what the Dawkinsian philosophy tells us when fully synthesized.[2]

[1] The human extended phenotype actually includes our written products as well as our technology—libraries as well as locomotives.

[2] I have been reading Richard Dawkins from 1976 to now, from The Selfish Gene to The Genetic Book of the Dead and everything in between. I fancy I know his stuff pretty well. This is my brief attempt to bring it all together, neatly and comprehensively. I only wish I had more of an opportunity to discuss it with him.