God’s utility function

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:

For nature, heartless, witless nature
Will neither care nor know

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

…

Richard Dawkins, here’s the link. I recently read that Leslie Nielsen has died. The day he did, so did more than 150.000 other humans alone.

The Selfish Gene

I have been reading and am now finishing Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, the 30th anniversary edition. Here’s Wikipedia’s article about the book.

Dawkins’ title of the book is aptly chosen (at least it was much better than the alternatives he mentions in the book, ie: ‘The Selfish Cistron’ or ‘The slightly selfish big bit of cromosome and the even more selfish little bit of cromosome’) and in the book he makes a very strong case in favour of a gene-centered view on evolution. According to Dawkins, individuals don’t evolve. Species don’t evolve. Evolution takes place in the genes. The ‘selfish’ genes.

Dawkins’ writing is both clear and systematic. He is very careful to define his terms and the book, even if it is a ‘popular science’ book, never feels like it’s been excessively dumbed-down. I must say I was positively surprised about this. His approach throughout pretty much all the book’s chapters is to start out with establishing a set of first principles, after which he extrapolates and introduces several subleties and variations on the common theme to ‘get more to the bottom of things’. He uses game theoretical themes implicitly in a big part of the book, and although I would perhaps have preferred explicit equations here and there (there is not a single equation in the book), I must admit that his communicative strategy was probably close to optimal given his target group; he’s done a very good job making people who are interested in biology and evolutionary theory, but who are completely unfamiliar with gametheoretical concepts like backward induction, equilibria, mixed strategies ect., still being able to follow the main ideas and arguments in the book.

In short, I found the book highly enlightening and very much worth a read. Reading it also made me consider once again acquiring The Blind Watchmaker.