Richard Dawkins Essay

Richard Dawkins main idea is that, we as ‘survival machines’ are designed to preserve and also designed by selfish genes (Dawkins,1989). In the book he described selfishness as altruism and unconscious purposive behavior. This means that there is no thought behind a gene's action is just genetic. He also describes selfishness as as a behaviour that increases another person's survival of genes in one person at the expense of another (Dawkins,1989). So therefore the genes behavior increases and/or decreases some genes survival. In this book, unlike with Lorenz, he uses genetics to explain this along with economics (Dugan, 2004) . He does this rather than assuming certain things that drive some genes more than others.
In the book Dawkins disputes Lorenz in their use of evolution by natural selection (Dugan, 2004) . Dawkins focus on genetics and takes a reductionistic view on things. Dawkins states that it's the good of the gene instead of the good of the group in evolution. He states that natural selection acts on the individual's genes instead of the affecting ht group as a whole (Dawkins,1989). All genes build survival or individual
Dawkins brings up the idea that a gene, theroretivaly, can influence behavior in addition to some physical biological functions (Dawkins,1989). Genes can not only just have multiple effects they can work together in an individual. In the book Dawkins uses a ‘rowing team’ to describe his point. Gene complexes or whole genomes may be responsible for certain patterns in behavior, whereas other genes code only certain components of the behaviour (Dawkins,1989). In Dawkins view there is only one slight issue with his reasoning on this matter. There has never been much research on this topic so this statement can only be described as a theoretical argument. This however does not mean that genes don't have behavioral effects. Genes environments must also be taken into account when studying this