UNIT 2 ASSIGNMENT: KOZOL AND DAWKINS: AN INTEGRATED CRITIQUE

Unit 2 Assignment: Kozol and Dawkins: An Integrated Critique



Dawkins' evidence for the activity of the "Selfish Gene”

Why are people?

Darwin made it likely for us to give a shrewd response to the inquisitive progeny whose inquiry heads this paper. ['Why are people?'] We no longer have to holiday resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems; is there significance to life? What are we for? What is Man?

The contention of this publication is that we, and all other animals, are appliances conceived by our genes. This adds me to the first issue I desire to make about what this publication is not. I am not supporting an ethics founded on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans ethically should to behave. ... If you desire to extract a lesson from it, read it as a warning. Be alerted that if you desire, as I manage, to construct a humanity in which persons help bountifully and unselfishly in the direction of a widespread good, you can anticipate little assist from biological nature. Let us trial to educate generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us realize what our own self-centered genes are up to, because we may then not less than have a possibility to distress their concepts, certain thing that no other species has ever aspired to do.

I will contend that the basic unit of assortment, and thus of self-interest, is not the species, neither the assembly, neither even, firmly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity. (Dawkins, 1976)

The Replicators

Was there to be any end to the stepwise enhancement in the methods and artifices utilized by the replicators to double-check their own continuation in the world? There would be abounding of time for their improvement. What strange motors of self-preservation would the millennia convey forth? Four 1000 million years on, what was to be the destiny of the very vintage replicators? They did not pass away out, for they are the past experts of the survival arts. But manage not gaze for them bobbing loose in the sea; they provided up that cavalier flexibility long ago. Now they swarm in gigantic colonies, protected interior gigantic lumbering robots, closed off from the out-of-doors world, broadcasting with it by tortuous digressive paths, manipulating it by isolated control. They are in you and me; they conceived us, body and mind; and their preservation is the supreme reasonable for our existence. They have arrive a long way, those replicators. Now they proceed by the title of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Immortal Coils

Our DNA inhabits interior our bodies, it is not intensified in a specific part of the body, but is circulated amidst the cells. There are about a 1000 million units producing up a mean human body, and, with some exclusions which we can disregard, every one of those units comprises an entire exact duplicate of that body's ...