An honest epitaph

I'm not sure that human beings are intrinsically selfish except in the 'selfish gene' concept, where genes (alleles) inhabit multiple related individuals (and this). But the rest seems spot on. Click on the image to make it larger.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-05-24

Some variant might work on  my headstone, I'm thinking.

Your illustrious medieval ancestors?

I caught a "Who Do You Think You Are" programme featuring Celia Imre the other day. She sought the origins of her son's radical politics and her own feminist feistiness in her ancestors. Here's what the program found for her:

"Imrie’s particular wish to uncover an ancestor to inspire her politically inclined son, Angus, unearthed a corker in her “eight-times grandfather” William, Lord Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford in the time of King Charles II. A leading Whig politician who truly had the courage of his convictions, Russell was such an intransigent defender of Protestantism and lover of constitutional liberty that he was accused of plotting to kill the King, and promptly beheaded.

"At Woburn Abbey, the Russell family seat, Imrie set out on the still more dramatic trail of Frances Howard, grandmother of the aforementioned William. A victim of one appalling dynastic marriage, and caught up in vicious courtly intrigues while trying to secure happiness in a second, she was packed off to the Tower of London with her new husband, accused of murder. Frances was eventually pardoned but history was not so forgiving."

So she had found her 'good genes' then? Not so fast, here's Richard Dawkins:

"For relationships as distant as third cousin, 2 x (1/2)⁸ = 1/128, we are getting down near the baseline probability that a particular gene possessed by [an individual] will be shared by any random individual taken from the population."

Celia Imre's “eight-times grandfather” William, Lord Russell, is nine generations separate from her and shares a relatedness of  1/512 = (2^-9). That distant relatedness could be greater if her lineage includes a degree of inbreeding - but it's unlikely to be more than 1/128 - Dawkins' rough figure for the genetic relationships of any two random ethnic English people.

So Celia Imre's traits for general lefty feistiness are certainly in her genes, but not through the good offices of those specific medieval ancestors.

More generally, you get a dilution down to 1/128 in seven generations. At four generations per century, you may assume that any specific traits of a specific ancestor more than 175 years ago (i.e. before c. 1839) have since been diluted out by Mendelian segregation and recombination. (Also more from 23andMe's reseaches here).

Genetic immortality? fuhgeddaboudit..

"The Selfish Gene" - Richard Dawkins

There are some books which have been around for so long, and which are so well known that it appears pointless to actually read them. Surely we know the entirety of their content in advance.

Reading "The Selfish Gene" for the first time I'm reminded - yet again - how wrong this prejudice is. Dawkins' writing is rational and sophisticated,  his arguments both counterintuitive and persuasive. It's deeply unfamiliar to think of plant and animal (incl. human) behaviour in terms of whatever works best to maximise a gene's (or more accurately, an allele's) inclusive fitness.

I have two quibbles. 

1. Dawkins has avoided maths in favour of a textual, metaphorical presentation - this succeeds in making his book something which can be read rather than studied. I would have appreciated, however, to have been told explicitly when there was a robust mathematical analysis supporting his many hand-wavy conclusions. 

Recall that evolutionary psychology is riddled by vaguely-plausible speculative arguments. I understand that there is a formal underpinning (population genetics) to Dawkins's book: I'd just like to know when it's being appealed to.

2. Dawkins, in common with other popularisers like Pinker, is keen to avoid the charge of genetic determinism. This leads to arguments like: 'I am not bound by my genes, I choose for example not to have children (by using contraception)'. 

This is a very sloppy argument as it's unclear what is being counterposed to the 'best interests of the genes'. It sounds like 'free will' but that isn't a concept within scientific explanation (not as long as we believe the laws of physics and discount magic). Dawkins' and Pinker's recourse to contraception is something which needs to be explained by biology, and I think it can be cast as the same kind of 'categorisation mistake' as in the adoption by a desperate mother of a genetically-unrelated child. Surely the alleles which permit it will markedly decrease in frequency in the future.

By evading a proper discussion of this point, Dawkins departs from his own high standards and is thus diminished.

"The Selfish Gene" is billed as an accessible popularisation but is not at all an easy read: the concepts are strange and counterintuitive, the argumentation is frequently sophisticated and subtle and the overall worldview driving the book unfamiliar. It requires engagement and thought by the reader, a personal growth experience which should alter the lens through which the affairs of the world are viewed. The resulting paradigm is far from conventional, let alone politically correct. 

You may observe once again how everyone pays lip service to Darwinian evolution, yet carefully avoids thinking through to the (unpalatable) consequences.