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Comment by dooglius | Hacker News Reader

Which book? The God Delusion was certainly full of that, but e.g. The Selfish Gene was much more interesting.

In retrospect, the Selfish Gene turned out to be simply wrong about its main thesis, that non-fuctional useless junk DNA was a major portion of the human genome (and of other multicellular organisms). Even worse, Dawkings tried to use that claim as some kind of 'there is no intelligent designer because an intelligent designer wouldn't have put all that junk DNA in the genome', and then when it turned out that non-gene-coding DNA had all these structural-functional roles, it turned into a creationist-vs-atheist debate.

Psychologically, I think Dawkins and his cohort are refugees from strict religious fundamentalist backgrounds who have retained many aspects of fundamentalist thinking while rejecting the religious part. They seem to think they've got it all figured out, but in many respects, their views are 100 years out of date, more in line with 19th century highly deterministic thinking about science and nature.

The central thesis of the Selfish Gene has nothing to do with "junk DNA", and when the book does talk about the subject it doesn't assume that it has no purpose.

(What it does say is "Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing" and "The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger".)

That wasn't it's main thesis at all. I don't remember his discussion on "junk DNA" specifically (perhaps I should reread as it has been many years), but the main thesis (to put it in my own words) is that a mental model of evolution as acting upon genes leads to more accurate predictions and better understanding than a mental model where evolution acts upon whole organisms. (There's also the discussion of memes and their roles in comparison/contrast to genes). When he talks about science and not rah-rah atheism I never found Dawkins to be fundamentalist in thinking, and I recall he would generally qualify when his thoughts were more speculative. (The author of TFA on the other hand, does give me that impression particularly with sentences like "Psychiatric drugs help some people in the short term, but over time, in the aggregate, they make people sicker")

There are a ton of errors and misconceptions in that view as well. Dawkins claimed genes were discrete entities only concerned with their own replication and kept on with that view despite the discovery of introns, gene shuffling, and about a dozen other major discoveries in the field, like epigenetic modification and others. This criticism of the hyper-reductionist approach of Dawkins is nothing new, either. See this from 1995:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1...

> "The intervening two decades between that volume and this have seen a major technological revolution in the science of genetics. Just how do these breakthroughs affect Dawkins's ideas about the origin of diversity? The answer, apparently, is not at all. Dawkins's descriptions of genetic processes are facile and outdated. According to him, the power of natural selection is still "almost limitless" genes are still discrete entities with "a flintlike integrity" that remains unaffected by their environment from generation to generation."

Similarly, the relationship between Charles Darwin and modern evolutionary theory is about as distant as that between Isaac Newton and modern physics, which is another concept that the Dawkins crowd (in which I'd include Charles Murray, Sam Harris, etc.) seems uncomfortable with.

Sorry but you're just grasping at straws here. There are valid criticisms of the gene-centric perspective but things like introns and epigenetics have nothing to do with it.

A few hours ago you were saying something completely wrong about the book and now you incorrectly act as an expert critic. I recommend you give it a reread (or a read) instead.

Yes, it turned out to be wrong, but not for the reason you cite. Dawkins completeliy dismisses the critical role of mutational fixation of epigenetic gene expression. He admits it exists, but dismisses its relevance in speciation.

Here's the gist of the argument's origins, from about a decade ago:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/the_desi...

More recent discoveries point to the genome's 3D architecture as being critical to its function, and large chunks of non-coding DNA appear to play key roles in keeping it stable.

The point, however, is that Dawkins is not a scientist, he's just a rather fundamentalist-minded ideologue, and that's true for the whole "New Atheist" cohort.

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