If I had a dime for every instance the lay press has misrepresented science . . . 
In the sense that the most suited win the reproductive race, sure. But one hears some pretty weird extrapolations suggesting that selfish genes drive our behavior. As if while we ourselves are passively determined, these little gene packages run the show. Of course hyperbole should just be dismissed. You know what the say about wrestling with pigs.
Genes do drive our behavior. If those behaviors increase the rate at which these genes are passed on then selection will favor those genes. I don’t think I am going out on a limb in suggesting that part of our behavior is determined by our genetics. Popular examples include a common phobia of spiders and snakes. The behavior of eusocial species like bees and ants is another example in non-human species. Humans also have learned behavior, so it’s not like it is all or nothing.
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- My mother-in-law said her first-born son was a fussbudget from the day he was born. I didn’t meet him until years later, but I and many others can testify to his consistent cantankerousness to this day.
Sounds like most of what is on a few dedicated shelves at the back of our study (mostly free or cheap library discards). The shelves are devoted to unreliable tomes – science, philosophy, religion, badly mixing the above, etc. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be hugely surprised if something by Coyne is on them.
Nelson was the one that I read the most of that gave me that feeling “These [a canid and a dasyurid skull] look really similar” “Umm… the teeth are recognizably rather different to me from a side view of the skull, and I’ve only done intro college biology-level vertebrate anatomy.”
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Yes, that certainly is apparent in many cases. There are also a few “general rules” in biology more broadly I’ve encountered that I am dubious of being as general as purported, like anything that applies simple formulas to organismal or ecosystem-level biology (rarefaction curves being neat inverse decay curves, say).
One of my favorites is the idealized human cell. This model has a nucleus, but 80% of the cells in your body are red blood cells which don’t have a nucleus and certainly don’t fit the idealized model.
They are kind of like the ideal gas laws in that sense. On a related note, I have used an idealized inverse decay to measure both SERCA2 calcium uptake in cardiomyocytes.
Enzyme kinetics and population genetics also come to mind.
That is a claim that can be easily misunderstood. It is obvious that genes affect behavior, at least by setting wide limits to what is possible and increasing the probability of a particular type of behavior.
The other side of the coin is that genes seldom, if ever, dictate human behavior strictly. Human behavior is flexible and appears to have a two-way relationship with brain structure, if I have understood the research results correctly. We can and do modify our behavioral patterns by our habits.
Flexibility in behavior is a valuable trait because humans need to adapt to a wide variety of environments and social structures. A rigid behavioral pattern would probably be a serious disadvantage.
This kind of life-long flexibility is promising in the context of faith issues. Even the most stubborn persons have a potential to change, if they realize the need and are willing to change. In some matters, grace is also needed because there are limits to how much and fast behavior can change.
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We are both nature and nurture, as the old saying goes.
Does this mean Muslims have a hope of Christians worldwide coming to the realization that Muhammad is God’s prophet?
When someone realizes how wretched they are, I do wonder how they could put their trust in any one other than Jesus Christ and his righteousness. It’s wild how miserable we are. How easily we mislead ourselves.
I had an hour long Uber drive with a driver who was listening to a podcast about drug induced religious experience. We talked for awhile about our kids and at some point I brought up this subject from the podcast. And she seemed genuinely interested in how religious experience relates to our minds ability to create worlds and characters entirely on its own. It’s pretty amazing and perplexing how the unconscious mind relates to our experiencing world.
I suspect it is quite common for people of all faiths to wonder how anyone could believe differently than they do.
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That was my reaction as well, it just doesn’t address what we ordinarily mean by “our behavior”. There are lots of pulls and pushes to act for various reasons but to believe the real reason was reducible to genes would be to believe in some form of determinism. At that point much of our language ceases to track with what is really going on. That idea has no appeal to me and neither do I think it makes any sense except as you say very broadly in a way that could never help anyone behave better.
Even if it is reducible to genetics, development, and experience it could still be a form of determinism. We could even say that a bit of determinism is needed if we think helping someone can lead to better behavior.
Not so much when you once believed as they did… and yet there is still a place to wonder how they persist to say the things they do… a thought which has crossed my mind with Dawkins’ flying spaghetti monster, a beastly wonder of string theory 
When I first learned the theory of evolution in high school biology, I immediately saw that evolution would be accelerated in small populations on the brink of extinctions, when variations would have the greatest impact on the gene pool. And there is very little change in large stable populations. To be sure there is much gradualism where there are gradual changes in the environment. In dialogue with others, I realized that variation was far more the driving factor of evolution than any survival of the fittest. Anything which improved the introduction of variation into the genome would also accelerate evolution.
When I first read “The Selfish Gene,” it looked quite ridiculous to me – ascribing selfishness to the gene and making them out to be the director of evolution. I suppose it was Dawkins early attempt to subtract God from the picture with genes as a substitute. I would ever after insist that DNA and RNA was simply an information storage mechanism. And other critics quickly pointed out that these molecules do not self-replicate but require processes outside itself for this to happen. In short, Dawkins simply tried to shift the role of designer from God to these alleged self-replicating molecules.
Of course it was later realized that DNA and RNA was very likely not even the beginning of life but the product of a pre-biotic evolution. Such were “metabolism first” theories. Dawkins is frankly an old guard of evolutionary biology which often imagined the first cell and DNA/RNA simply appearing by accident. But as is often the case in science, our understanding of the scale of things extends in both direction to the larger and smaller. And so we now look to the origin of life in something smaller than the cell and smaller than DNA/RNA also.
I later came to appreciate Dawkins in his later books, some of which are quite good. But “The Selfish Gene” only had my contempt. Though truth be told this was after I had embraced theism and was well on my journey to becoming Christian.
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There was an apparently legitimate video I found which pointed to quantum tunneling as a process by which evolution could have also been directed.
Quantum tunneling has nothing to do with it. That is a purely physical phenomenon. Quantum physics is relevant, but it is simply the fact that there are no hidden variables determining many events, which means that physics is not a causally closed system. It is not proof. You can certainly choose to believe that these events simply have no cause (and in fact I believe most of them don’t). But if something non-physical is involved in causing physical events then this apparent lack of causality is exactly what you would expect to discover in physics.
Quantum tunneling is a phenomenon where physical particles and fields can go across barriers which would be impossible otherwise… kind of like getting through walls simply by standing next to the wall and there being a non zero probability that you will find yourself on the other side. It is hard for me to see what this could possibly have to do with non-physical causes… perhaps someone has imagined a barrier between the non-physical and the physical but we have no evidence of any such thing and there is no spatial continuum between the two anyway so it is hard for me to make any sense of this idea.
Maybe you’d like to see the video, because the evidence seemed pretty good that quantum tunneling allows for reactions outside of classical chemistry.
Ah well that is true by definition. Quantum tunneling certainly has a role in chemistry and it is by definition “non-classical.” But for me this is like saying electrons drives the chemistry of life. True but kind of like duh…
But quantum tunneling is even less of a directing agent than genes are and I am not buying into Dawkins idea about the latter. This makes even less sense to me.
comment after watching to key point of video…
The idea being that you have have mutations as a result of quantum tunneling alone. Interesting…
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Without selection you won’t have beneficial mutations increasing in frequency. It would seem that both are important. It’s a bit like arguing over what moves the vehicle, the gasoline or the engine. Obviously, you need both. One is not more important than the other.
That’s not how I understood it. Dawkins was much more focused on how selection occurred in sexually reproducing species like ours.
First, it does make a lot of sense to treat the gene as the unit of selection in sexually reproducing species. Due to recombination during meiosis you shuffle the deck each generation which allows genes to be tested by selection individually. Dawkins also argues that selection may favor kin selection, which makes a lot of sense. This is certainly the case in eusocial insect species where there is a lot of cooperation within a colony but competition between colonies within the same species.
We see patterns of sequence conservation in DNA genomes. Where do you think that comes from, and what are the mechanisms involved? The standard explanation is natural selection at the DNA level.
I’m not sure what that would have to do with the situations Dawkins is talking about.