Reply #88: You need not convince me that "social darwinism" has little to do with Darwin's

[struggle4progress]

science, nor need you convince me that scientific theories are more or less irrelevant to moral theorizing. On the other hand, we have at least of century and a half of social propaganda that conflates Darwin's science with certain self-justifying views of the ruling elite, and that propaganda is not going to vanish any time soon, as far as I can tell. My post concerned choice of the book title, and the reasons the publisher was excited: "social darwinist" controversies did contribute to the interest in the book, and the publisher expected in advance that they would. Given that beginning, it is unsurprising that the title has had a long shadow career among laissez-faire enthusiasts who may indeed simply be sprinkling the title into their conversations without having actually read the text

Whether one regards Dawkins' book as a particularly good popular exposition of science is a different question. Of course, the gene is the fundamental unit of heredity, so one expects that changes passed to the next generation will be changes at the genetic level -- but the real story will be much more complicated. Although random drift and catastrophe affect the entire genome, the regular selective pressures do not really act at the level of genotype but at least at the level of phenotype; there was, for example, a nice survey article in the American Scientist about a decade back on some known mechanisms by which the environment affected gene expression in offspring (in some species), producing a temporary pseudo-Lamarckian inheritance effects. Unexpressed or only partially expressed genes may affect reproductive fitness, not of a single generation but of a lineage, so that at time scales exceeding the lives of individuals a gene might be neutral or even slightly harmful much of the time but might irregularly be very beneficial for the survival and reproduction of the individual carrying it. My point is that evolutionary pressure does not act directly at the level of the gene but at a much higher level, though the permanent trace is left in the genetic library