Re: popper, deutsch, dawkins and darwin

On 23 Feb 2013, at 02:47, hibbsa <hibbsa-/[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi DD - I was wondering...why did you list Dawkins as one of your four
> strands? I wouldn't say he's a historically important figure in Science,
> though certainly he's a v.significant contemporary of yours. But he
> hasn't produced important theories, or dramatically advanced any that
> are pre-existing, or has he?
> 
> He wrote a landmark popular science book about the gene-centric view,
> and gave it the 'selfish gene' label, but he was only writing about the
> gene-centric view, he didn't invent it. He did introduce the idea of
> memes, and that was his idea, so perhaps you elevated him because of
> that. But that would mean Darwinian Evolution - Evolution - wasn't one
> of the strands at all.
> 
> Or, if Dawkins was meant to represent Darwinism in its corrected 'New
> Synthesis' form, then do you still stand by that judgement call, or in
> hindsight would you now say the fourth strand is the modern
> manifestation of Darwin's idea?

I'm not an expert on the history of science. Aspects of it do interest me, but discovering who "really" thought of an idea first is not one of them. It's not very important whether the author of Shakespeare's plays was Shakespeare. As I said in The Beginning of Infinity, it wouldn't change much if it turned out that Einstein had written his relativity papers as a joke, and the same goes for if a historian were to discover that those ideas had all been knocking around for years before Einstein. 

Having said that, I think that Dawkins underrates the size of his own contribution. It is true that the theory itself had been there for a considerable time before he wrote The Selfish Gene and was not due to him. But that is like saying that the inverse-square force law of gravity had been there for a considerable time before Newton published his version. Or that Hilbert had written down Einstein's equations before Einstein did. There's postulating a theory, and then there's understanding it. Neo-Darwinism (the 'selfish gene theory') is quite easy to state as a factual theory but quite hard to 'get' as an explanatory theory. A token of that is, for instance, that Steven Jay Gould, who was very knowledgable and interested in the matter, never got it. And recently, it turned out that nor had E.O. Wilson, whom everyone had regarded as one of its most prominent advocates.

I could easily be mistaken about the history, and about who deserves credit. But the dedication page of my book is not about that. It's not the Nobel Prize. I just wanted to thank those four most prominent advocates of the four strands of the book, and through that fourfold dedication, to kick off my discussion of the four strands, which ends with pointing out the remarkable similarities between the ways in which those four people both succeeded and failed to get the respective ideas across.

-- David Deutsch