From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life

by David Haig, Daniel C. Dennett (Foreword)

How the meaningless process of natural selection produces purposeful beings who find meaning in the world.

In From Darwin to Derrida, evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection, a process without purpose, gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. The key to this, Haig proposes, is the origin of mutable "texts"--genes--that preserve a record of what has worked in the world. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

Haig draws on a wide range of sources--from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression--to make his argument. Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. A gene (considered as a lineage of material copies) persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment. Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, instantiated in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated. Life is interpretation--the use of information in choice.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Evolution, Biology, Nonfiction, Psychology, History

512 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

"An egg is both an effect of a chicken-that-was and a cause of a chicken-to-be."

This book is a tour-de-force uniting evolutionary biology and philosophy. It is a perfect book to read and discuss, one chapter at a time, with a group of friends. David Haig is a brilliant scientist and thinker, and I suspect you will find yourself pausing at many moments and thinking to yourself: "Wow, I never realized that... that makes me think differently about biology/life/evolution."

For example, in The Social Gene we learn that all of the sociality, strategy, and subterfuge happening between animals in a community are also happening between genes in a genome. Recombination has been a major topic in evolutionary theory for many years. Why recombine when you are in effect breaking up a “proven” combination of genes for an unproven set? Modelling predicts that recombination should disappear. But most large-genomed organisms have recombination. Perhaps recombination breaks up the “cabals of the few” by breaking up cliques within the community of genes so that all genes had a common interest in communal well-being.

In The “Gene” Meme, we realize that "gene" has many definitions. Is it a stretch of DNA sequence? Or is it that which makes a difference (e.g., between a red eyed fly and a white eyed fly)?

In Intrapersonal Conflict, we ask the following: is the dissonance we feel within ourselves due to (i) maladaptive side effects of evolution, (ii) an well-evolved “best strategy” for arriving at a decision by using adversarial means, or (iii) real disagreement between self-interested agents within our body? The short answer is: all three play a role! …and this is not just sophistry-- maternal and paternal genes are in conflict as evidenced by genetic imprinting, with likely behavioral consequences.

As the book progresses, our attention is drawn to a central point about genetics: A phenotypic effect may be viewed as both a cause and consequence of a genotypic difference. A molecular biologist argues that genotype determines phenotype through molecular chains of causality; an evolutionary biologist argues that phenotype determines genotype through natural selection. This point struck me: what else in life and society is so strongly both cause and effect?

Genetics is special because selection leaves a bread crumb trail. The evolving sequences of genes preserve a textual record of past differences that have made a difference.

A few more great quotes:

Ribosomes translate RNA prose into protein poetry.

Living things are replete with reliable reciprocal representation. Each strand of the double helix represents the other. A messenger RNA (mRNA) represents the DNA from which it is transcribed, and the DNA represents the mRNA. A protein represents the mRNA from which it is translated, and the mRNA represents the protein. DNA represents protein, and protein represents DNA. Extended phenotypes represent genotypes, and genotypes represent extended phenotypes (Dawkins 1982; Laland et al. 2013a). All represent what has worked in past environments. Natural selection creates complex causal dependence between past environments and processes within cells.

Life is a cycle in which text and performance are reciprocally cause and effect of each other. The circle is rescued from eternal recurrence of the same by mutation (origin of difference) and selection (generation of meaning by the erasure of difference). The stage props that have withstood the tests of repeated use are tools that organisms use to interpret their world.

The very end:

Must Darwinists live in a disenchanted world? When I observed a lark at break of day arising from an Oxford meadow in cascades of song, did the richness of the scientific vision impoverish the poetic image?

I saw again the skylark's flight,
Rising up on Solsbury Hill,
And once again my spirit rose,
My heart pounding with the climb. '"

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me three attempts to read this book, but I am very glad I did. It certainly helps to have read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, and be more than a little familiar with the major themes in the work of Daniel Dennett. Still, even with adequate prerequisite reading in biology/evolution, most of the first 200 or so pages were difficult to get through. I could anticipate where he was going to connect with Derrida with the discussion of genes as text and the emphasis on difference, which kept me going all the way. On a personal note, it was rewarding to see confirmation of my Saussurean interpretation of information!

It took a lot of effort to get to the part I wanted to read about (genes as text), but once the monster showed up the story was basically over, and there was no reversal (literature as genes, i.e. memes). That was where I was hoping the telos of this book was heading, but apparently that is the book I need to write. I can envision using this book in a humanities class on literature and natural selection with an emphasis on how memes replicate via literature and spread throughout a thinking community. We need more works like this!

[Andrej Drapal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a first true upgrade of Dawkins (1976) Dennett (1991) and Blackmore (1999). And that says it all.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unless you have some basic grounding in philosophy, evolutionary biology and cell biology, you shouldn't try this book. It will just frustrate you. The text does include explanations of basic ideas, but it dumps you into the middle of things with scant introduction, so that you have to slog along and then read and reread to get the basics. I have done some prior reading in these areas, and I am very interested in the intersection between evolutionary biology and moral philosophy, so this book seemed perfect for me, but still I found that it was often too dense to enjoy. Sometimes I would pause and reread, but at other points in the book, I just read along without understanding the details, though the overall thrust of the argument was always clear.

To the extent that the book has a central idea that can be described in a few words, it is that philosophy and biology are entwined in a way that cannot be fully disentangled. Philosophical decisions about what a gene is, how to understand causation, theories of interpretation and definitions of basic terms drive choices about scientific points of view and can form the basis for choosing one scientific theory over the other. Before I read this book, I might have told you that we got past all of that when we discarded Cartesian dualism and Plato's theory of forms and that the fundamental agreement on the Darwinian Synthesis among evolutionary biologists had taken us to a place where philosophical points of view were no longer relevant in biology, but Mr. Haig convinced me that philosophy is alive and well in biology so that we ignore it at our peril. Still sometimes the philosophical arguments in this book seemed like arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin and made my head spin with their convoluted complexity until I decided in some cases that there was no there there.

Apart from the main argument, there are lots of interesting discussions and thoughts along the way. The discussion of how each organism is internally at war with itself was fascinating. I had previously read about how this plays out between egg and sperm and between mother and fetus, but I hadn't taken in how this internal red queen's race is so fundamental to our understanding of genetics and reproduction. I also enjoyed the biological theory about why some decisions are hard for us to make. And there is much more that is equally interesting, but you have to dig through a lot of difficult writing to tease some of it out.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Examining what it means to have meaning, linking the genetic world with the human experiential world, and attempting to cajole the hard-sciences into questions and debates on the "why" questions (though mainly around meaning, not existence) they most often cede to philosophy and the humanities is the focus of this interesting tome from Harvard Professor David Haig.

To make this possible, Haig draws a line of interpretation that begins in the genetic world at the level of RNA and attempts a sweeping connection to the use of information in choice at the level of the human. This is most clear when he connects Dennett and Derrida toward the end of the work and I must say the connection seems quite tenable. That being said, this is a work that draws from so many fields and authors that it is quite slow-going for the most part.

At times he seems to be very much a Dawkins-influenced thinker as pertains to genetic propagation and then he will throw a philosophical curveball that takes you into the world of philosophy and human interpretation of the world. This is genuinely interesting writing that bears rereading and also requires a good deal of foreknowledge of the work of Dawkins and Dennett especially. Incidentally Dan Dennett gives a wonderfully cogent and enthusiastic introduction to this text which very well frames the ensuing discussion.

[Tim Dugan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry

This book may have contained a lot of good information

But it was so densely packed, the language was so much jargon, etc

I did learn a few things but mostly it was like wading through quicksand

[Yanick Punter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting stuff that I don't understand yet

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book, while not as catchy, SHOULD have been titled "From Darwin to Bateson: Selfish Genes, Embodied Selves, and Life's Information." While this book promises to reach the humanities, and points to Derrida (and does on occasion directly) this book doesn't directly fulfill its promises. This doesn't bridge evolutionary biological theory with Continental humanities of culture so much as it reaches the intermediary of "Information Studies" as a means to discuss culture and the meaning we give cultural information. Certainly there are all sorts of connections possible and hinted at, but there's not a direct line "from Darwin to Derrida" so to speak.

This is a direct line "from Darwin to Bateson." That is, this book facilitates a connection between evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary biology with a better idea of what "information" is about than the usual token gestures that evolutionary theorists have (problematically) given to cybernetics. This book does a great job of developing a concept of information that is fair and useful to a broader group of evolutionary researchers! I am supportive of this work interpreted as an "information" approach to evolutionary theory. Also I'm supportive of the liberties that Haig explicitly took in reinterpreting Richard Dawkins' work. He makes clear that Dawkins was mistaken about what his theory should have been. Haig reorganizes Dawkins into the distinction of a mind/body dichotomy in evolution that need not have been. Instead Haig opts for an evolutionary ontology reframed as an "information/material" concern. As such, he casts aside Dawkins' mistakes and moves evolutionary theory forward in such a way that better alignes with more recent concerns in historically anthropological cultural studies.

All in all, I'm very impressed! I just think Haig promises to connect more theory than he offers. Derrida is not well outlined or used here except as a curiosity to the author. It certainly is not owed space in the title.

[Niko Jaakkola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've recently come to think that the life sciences are perhaps the coolest, most-happening field of science at the moment. Physics is too easy, a problem practically solved in its unreasonable mathematical orderliness (with some exceptions, turbulence and the like). Chemistry, geology and whatnot give off a whiff of being very applied. Behavioural and social sciences are hunting big game -- but the game may be so elusive in its context-dependency and experimental intractability that they might have a better chance of spotting the Loch Ness monster. Life sciences, on the other hand, have just enough empirical tractability, and seem to always lie just on this side of the border of unfathomability, to keep things both exciting and -- perhaps? -- viable.

In 'From Darwin to Derrida', Haig, an evolutionary biologist from Harvard, has written a book on the philosophy of biology which demonstrates why the subject is so slippery. We humans understand how things work by devising conceptual frameworks and models of how our concepts relate to each other and how they interact. And we understand what things are _for_ by inferring meaning from how something functions.

Yet evolution is no engineer; it is instead four billion years of random hacks and hacks-on-hacks, an infinite self-supporting Rube Goldberg machine with no design principles and a system architecture of "whatever works" -- or, rather, "whatever worked". It is no architect either; the randomness of physical evolution implies there is no ultimate goal, just atoms jostling each other -- DNA recombining, biological entities developing, perhaps procreating, eventually dying. The watchmaker is blind. Yet, Haig argues, there is meaning.

The meaning resides in the self-supporting river of information -- on both environments and on individuals -- which flows down the evolutionary history of life. DNA is a text which is being interpreted by developmental biology as a phenotype; a phenotype is a text which is being interpreted by the environment as a genotype. The relative stability of both the interpreter(s) and the text(s) is what it means for meaning to arise from purely mechanistic interactions at the molecular level; much like the meaning you perhaps interpret from the text you are reading now (also a causal product of "just" vibrations in some quantum field). Haig thus tries to get at a deeper sense of what we mean when we talk about meaning, and argues hard that such meaning is at the core of biology. There is no plan, yet there is teleology of sorts.

The book delves into the gory details. Think you know how genes work? The cell is the hardware, and the DNA is the software? Genes are particular snippets of the DNA code, and they are selfish -- each statistically seeking (or "seeking", if you insist) to maximise the number of copies of itself in the next generation? Think again. Haig emphasises how the definition of 'gene' is quite mutable and depends on the context -- genes can be seen as material, informational, or strategic. Neighbouring genes may 'favour' each other if they are often copied together. Genes form teams, facing a constant trade-off between keeping a 'winning team' together versus seeking individual success via recombination. Sometimes nature breaks the rules of computer science and starts mixing up the hardware with the software, with particular snippets of 'code' making up a molecular structure which starts having physical effects on transcription. Sometimes the effect of a gene depends on whether you inherited it from a father rather than a mother. There are chapters which go deep into the functioning of the cell; there are paragraphs where I had to reach for Wikipedia at least once per sentence. All the same, it is often also very funny, in a Harvard-sort-of-way.

Ultimately, the book's meaning is that biology is too complicated a phenomenon to squeeze into a simple human-readable framework; and that 'meaning' is a concept which can help us forward in this maze. Conceptual flexibility, and the willingness to think deeper, think differently, is necessary. Indeed, the adaptationist theory of evolution suffers from residing in a no-man's land of a vicious war of attrition between two dogmatic sides. As Haig writes: "[a]daptationism is singled out for disapprobation *because* it reaches across a boundary. On the physicalist side, adaptive 'storytelling' is seen as polluting the pristine province of efficient and material causes with the messiness of meaning. On the humanist side, Darwinian explanations of human nature are rejected as hostile takeover bids by advocates of mindless mechanism. Both physicalists and humanists are happy with the border where is currently stands (we are not like them!). Territorial borders are historically contingent obstacles to freedom of movement across a continuous terrain. In terms of academic Realpolitik, Darwinism resides in the borderlands of Natur and Geist, a small principality wedged between hegemonic powers."

'From Darwin to Derrida' is too well-written and provocative to be called academic, yet too highbrow to be called pop science. In its wide scope and audacity, and also thematically, it resembles Douglas Hofstadter's 'Gödel, Escher, Bach'; although Haig's book lacks GEB's sense of being a unitary, unalloyed masterpiece by a precocious own-label upstart. Haig is more of an established artist, at the height of his powers, confidently writing a pop album after years of making art. Or perhaps a putting together a Best Of: two thirds of the chapters are revised versions of previously published pieces, stitched together into a coherent whole. This shows, here and there, as repetition.

But this is a minor flaw. I have a feeling I will return to this book again quite soon, even though I have many other books waiting for their turn. 'From Darwin to Derrida' is a wild intellectual ride, and one I highly recommend.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author follows the selfish gene theory at its worst.
The approach is reductionistic, deterministic and devoided of philosophical grounds. Although the title promises something related with Derrida, there is nothing valuable about it. You will not find rich theories counterweighed with different voices.

The author seemingly believes that the meaning of life, symbols and the cosmos are just within the mathematical spirit of genes.

Not everything is bad. I really enjoyed some sections, specially those where he attempts to defend Dennet and Hawkings. The best sections, nonetheless, are those tackling teleosemantics. Sadly, his insight is so limited...

I strongly suggest reading authors like John Dupre, Evan Thompson or Emanuelle Coccia. Good science needs good philosophical grounds and, always, avoiding superficiality and prepotence.

[LaanSiBB]

This book is a disappointment. The author seemed to cherry pick "metaphysics of presence" from Darrida to compare with Darwinist worldview, but neglected the priori of Darrida's critique towards Western philosophy, which is the definition of time since Aristotle. Quoting philosophical ideas without acknowledging the discursive history would only make one writing elusive. Although I didn't sense a sign of pretentiousness from this book, it would be much enhanced if the dimension of time is added to the study of meanings, especially those quantum mechanic experiments that disprove our reliance on biological causality.

[Pleiades · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about philosophy combined with biology. One should read at least once in a lifetime, this book gives you the not so obvious explanations of things in life and makes you say, “aha!”

I experienced some level of difficulty while reading due to jargons but nonetheless, a good read - a refreshing way to look at things.

[Ginger Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense and often technical, but with many enlightening insights.

[Ratheesh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Author was able to make most interesting concepts like the selfish genes into boring non understandable theories. Its a surprise, how he managed to do that. I am a great fan of selfish genes. I realized that how you present is very important apart for facts.