Gene propogation machines
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"I am a machine built to propagate my genes. Not yours, not society's best, mine. That's what I'm built to do, that is my purpose, my raison d'etre. This is why I want to have my children with my genes. Any other arrangement, whether rational or not, simply won't be acceptable. End of. Jack Hughes (talk) 15:54, 10 January 2011 (UTC)"[1]
- <monotone> Errrrr, I am Lumenati ReasonDiva 8000. According to my sensors your lumenator has malfunctioned.</monotone> You don't seem like one who would consider themselves to be a "social darwinist" so this must be some new fashionable scientificish evolutionary theory? Could you please explain how you came to the conclusion that you are "a machine built to propagate [your] genes"? ~ Lumenos (talk) 21:55, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Lumenos, I am only going to say this once. You are a fucking nut.
Read the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. It gets even more interesting though. It turns out that there can be interchromosomal competition between genes in the same organism. In highly polygamous species the male chromosome often develops genes that try and over extract resources from the mother, while the mother's chromosomes try and suppress this.
I can dig up some specific papers on this if you want. One of my favorite demonstrations of it was two sub-species of mice, one was highly polygamous the other monogamous. They could interbreed though. If you took a polygamous male mated with a monogamous female you wound up with giant babies, if you did the reverse you wound up with scrawny under nourished babies. This gets into the Red Queen's race issues of signaling, but its intra-organism selection.
Que? I don't know that mice have any understanding of the future consequences of who breeds how and when, thus I don't understand how that proves that Jack Hughes is programed to propagate his genes.
Is it possible Jack has been programed by some sort of "education"?
Individuals are a product of genes, the traits that genes encode for are traits that increased the propagation of the gene that encodes that trait.
No, it is like saying computers are the product of the machines that built them. You might try looking up the meanings of the words "genotype" and "phenotype."
But, Teacher, I thought we were talking about the behaviour and value system of one particular "computer".
And ultimately behavior is a product of proteins.
Lumenos
Seriously I would expect most people on this site to be aware of the contents of "The Selfish Gene" even if they haven't read it. Check it out, it's an important book, possibly more than anything else Dawkins has written.
Nobody understands human behavior enough to prove genetic determinism, biological determinism maybe (perhaps this equivalent to atheism), but not genetic determinism. But I can prove that everything me computer does is determined by hardware! Do you know why?