DAWKINS’S SELFISH GENE THEORY
At first glance, it would not seem that evolutionary biology would have much to say to economists because in the former, organisms are proposed to optimize an objective fitness function while in the latter, agents are believed to optimize subjective utility functions.
This alternative stress on the objective versus subjective nature of value is a tension between these two fields that now exist under the same umbrella of game theory, although I have argued throughout Prisoners of Reason that value is treated as though it has primordial ontological status throughout most orthodox game theory. Evolutionary game theory is predicated on the view that the payoffs to games reflect objective conditions that must be met for individuals to survive and propagate their genetic programming into the successive generation of organisms.14 What follows from this is that nature acts as a consistent scorekeeper that selects for the rational behavior of individuals who must maximize objective fitness value as a condition of their survival.Dawkins presents a purely deductive model supported by circumstantial evidence providing anecdotes of organisms’ competitions for survival. He seeks to prove that natural selection does not permit agents to be selfless or to be selected on the basis of groups that could be composed of selfless individuals.15 The deductive model is based on identifying individual units, or actors, that optimize their acquirement of a value in competition with others. By Dawkins’s description, “We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”16 If we accept that evolutionary natural selection targets individuals to determine comparative fitness in the competition for survival, then Dawkins concludes, “it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish.”17
A profound question follows: What exactly is the identity of the individual who evolved through natural section to be selfish? In other words, given that the application of game theory requires identifying a player who optimizes a function, what entity or agent plays this role in evolutionary biology? We might consider an entire species, or kinship groups in a species, or individual members of a species, or perhaps an individual’s entire chromosomal DNA code, or perhaps a single chromosome, or a bundle of genes, or a single gene.
Dawkins answers the question directly:We saw that selfishness is to be expected in any entity that deserves the title of a basic unit of natural selection. We saw that some people regard the species as the unit of natural selection, others the population or group within the species, and yet others the individual. I said that I preferred to think of the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection, and therefore the fundamental unit of self-interest.18
Admitting his analytic derivation, the evolutionary theorist observes, “What I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot really help being right! ”19 In this passage, Dawkins alludes to the correlation between identifying the level at which the selection process works and simultaneously then specifying the unitary actor on which selection occurs. Among the many options available, Dawkins concludes, from analytic argumentation, that evolutionary selection operates on genes. Dawkins’s gene must behave as an entity that can be precisely duplicated so that it can exist across time in multiple generations, perhaps lasting for hundreds of millions of years.20 It is most important for Dawkins that genes, or replicators, that play the game of life according to the rules of noncooperative game theory “are the game’s pure strategies which are assumed to be copied (from parent to child or from originator to imitator) without error.”21 Genes function as strategies embodied in biological material, and they therefore have a connotation of immortality. Even though evolution is perceived to be about adaptation and transformation in time, Dawkins’s genes are identical to themselves and do not evolve or adapt.
Dawkins’s individuals, then, are bits of genetic code that propagate through time. It is difficult to understand what “selfishness” can mean if not proposed at the level of individual humans or animals.22 Genes are decidedly not conscious.
They group together, apparently in cooperation, to comprise bodies: “In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on [602] [603] [604] [605] [606] [607] central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.”[608] Somewhere between the Submicroscopic level of the gene and the macroscopic individual body, purposive agency seems to have been achieved. In Dawkins’s words, “One of the most striking properties of survival-machine behavior is its apparent purposiveness.” He does not care to distinguish between conscious action versus apparently purposive action “because it is easy to talk about machines that behave as if motivated by a purpose, and to leave open the question of whether they are actually conscious.”[609] Throughout the applications of game theoretic models, they are applied “as if” those agents being modeled exemplify the logic of strategic rationality.The apparent purposiveness that Dawkins alludes to is a quality of a machine with a measuring device installed that can direct subsequent action to achieve a specified state. For example, perhaps a machine built to run at 100 degrees Fahrenheit can control its temperature by burning more or less fuel accordingly, such as a system with a thermostat. This mechanical system would act as though it had the purpose of maintaining its temperature at 100 degrees. Dawkins supplies the example of a guided missile that flies as though it has the intention to strike its target.[610]
There are the gene, the gene’s biological container constructed with the cooperation of other genes, and the gene’s apparent purposive action to achieve or maintain a state.[611] Dawkins wishes to preserve the gene as the primary unit of evolutionary selection at the same time that he denies that groups of individual animals could be such a unit.
Similarly, he argues that no gene could have evolved to be purely altruistic, that is, to serve the lives of other animals or other genes.[612] The gene is the ultimate master of the survival machine.[613] A bit cryptically, Dawkins observes that “genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”[614] It appears that he means that genes control acts, much like a game theoretic strategy specifies what act to take in every conceivable situation. However, there is a bit of ambiguity in Dawkins’s selfprogramming genes. Whereas the implication seems to be that a self-directing program could modify itself at will to achieve a new outcome, Dawkins instead seems to mean that the gene tells the body what to do in every type of circumstance. Hence, genes do not modify themselves to reflect different behavioral traits over time to optimize an animal’s survival. Instead, a gene programs behavior that, if it aids the survival of the animal, will be reproduced in the next generation. The narrative Dawkins provides is that of characteristics (or predispositions for specific behavior) that are imprinted in genes and are perpetuated if they aid in an animal’s propagation and reproduction. The inference of selfishness is implied by the presumed competitiveness of biological existence: given the struggle for scarce resources, the genes that will be perpetuated are necessarily those that act efficiently to propagate themselves by accumulating more resources than others. In other words, it is presupposed from the outset that animals are successful, meaning that they have more copies in the next generation than others, by optimizing an objective fitness function in direct competition with others. The following section discusses how this view of evolutionary biology is directly deduced from noncooperative game theory.