The Shellfish Scene

[zorkan]

Respect what you say, but I sense holes appear in any theory sooner or later.

Try the video on this one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryofIdeas/comments/jc6ghh/the_self_is_not_always_selfish_mary_midgley_takes/

Science is always work in progress.
Nick Lane would accept that.
Dawkins wouldn't.

https://nick-lane.net/chapters/power-sex-suicide-part-5-murder-suicide-troubled-birth-individual/
https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/news/darwin-college-lecture-series-nick-lane-interview/

[billy rubin]

hard to say about bacteria, as whatever an individual is doesnt really apply to them. but dawkins didnt apply his theory to anything that produced itself asexually.

shoot, we cant even define a species clearly among organisms that reproduce asexually, let alone make up out minds about what an individual is.

but within the taxa of sexually reproducing organisms, the selfish gene theory is alive and well. group selection at the species level simply cannot be shown to work, aside from within carefully crafted scenarios within specific populations.  ive never seen a sound argument that could distinguish secondary selection pressure on an individual from primary pressure on a gene. dawkins theory holds that th eindividual became a packet of convenience long ago, grouping genes together into a more complex expression of joint traits. his idea was that once the bundling became dominant, the primordial soup was quickly used up and converted to individuals. but they continued to compete based on the genes that made them up, not on the basis of the packet that contained them.

[Icarus]

^ A certain real estate baron has carried the universal genius notion to an extreme.  His influence has impacted societies more forcefully than the works of Dawkins. He lends credence to the idea that wizards need to stay in their own damned lane.

[Dark Lightning]

^ Indeed. 

[zorkan]

Trivial point maybe, but would any other biologist have called it the selfish gene?
All genes do is encode proteins.
Would life exist at all for this long if it did not increase entropy?
There has to be a universal physical explanation.