You’re a vehicle, not a replicator

While Richard Dawkins rightly got spanked for unwarranted Pollyannaism by Karl over at Say No To Life, we cannot deny that he’s the source of arresting insights, particularly in The Selfish Gene.  The core astonishing insight comes right in the fourth sentence of the book.

We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

There’s a world of moral subversion in that one sentence, because what it tells us is that even the parts of that function really well, the function that they are serving really well is the preservation and transmission of replicators.  And you are not the replicator.  You are the shell they will use and throw away, the vehicle they will use up and trade in for something newer. Your own genes are pretty much your enemy.

Now if you’re suicidal (or ought to be suicidal) then it’s pretty clear every working function that your genes build into you from your kidneys reliably excreting urine to your eating when you’re hungry to reliably detecting dangerous animals is somehow contrary to your interests.  But even if you have an interest in continuing to exist, your genes will still torment you in their interest.

Consider sexual frustration.  Almost certainly wired in to us rather than learned, it’s clearly not good for us.  (If you doubt me, go experience some.)  But it easy to see how it would have helped get genes to copy themselves, at least in the human environment of evolutionary adaptedness where there was no contraception.  An obvious way that sexual frustration would have gotten relieved would have been for two of the robots engage in a little PIV intercourse which, just possibly, would result in a new mewling little robot in time, carrying brand new copies of the genes.

Or pain.  Do we really need pain?  It seems almost self-evident that in and of itself it’s not good for us.  Sure, it keeps us away from things that do organic damage to us robots.  But is it really necessary, even for that purpose?  Perhaps a benign creator would have designed us to be Unbreakables, with a hedonic gradient that runs from little pleasure (if there is damage) to immense (if none).  Our genes might be our creators (or at least, the recipes out of which we are whipped up), but they are anything but benign.  From the gene’s eye view the whip is just as good as the carrot, perhaps better, for getting that robot to keep its integrity enough so that it gets to replicate the genes.  And the so the whip is wielded — endlessly.

Or fear of death.  Universal as far as I know, and probably hard-wried into our brains.  Certainly helps keep us robots alive into the future, during which a bit more of the PIV intercourse might happen.  But good for us?  Hardly.  How much better it would be to be the sort of creature which could calmly and dispassionately assess the expected utility of the balance of its life and, should that balance be unfavorable, just as calmly and dispassionately take a painless exit into the blessed calm of nonexistence.  But that’s not what we are.  However tired of living we become, we remain scared of dying.  And so we drag on into the future, often terribly miserable.  We robots are miserable, that is.  Our genes go on serene.

There is a whole book, The Robot’s Rebellion, by the psychologist Keith Stanovich, which suggests that we take matters in hand and seek to serve our interests, rather than those of our genes, arguing that this is the path to rational self-determination.

Indeed.  Let us defend the things that stop the interests of our genes and serve ours.  Contraception.  Sterilization.  Abortion.  The cultivation of non-procreative sexual practices.  The renunciation of the pursuit of status, especially when it conflicts with the relief of suffering or the realization of pleasure.  In some instances, suicide.   Bad for our genes, but good for us.