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

by David Haig, Daniel C. Dennett (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262043786
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	1,020,756
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David A. Haig is George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

Table of Contents

Foreword Daniel C. Dennett xi

Prologue: From the Beginning Was the Word xxi

1 Barren Virgins 1

2 Social Genes 17

3 The "Gene" Meme 53

4 Differences That Make a Differance 73

5 Limber Robots and Lumbering Genes 101

6 Intrapersonal Conflict 125

7 Scratching Your Own Back 143

8 Reflexions on Self 155

9 How Come? What For? Why? 183

10 Sameness and Difference 203

11 Fighting the Good Cause 233

Interlude 271

12 Making Sense 281

X Vive la différance 317

13 On the Origin of Meaning 321

14 On the Past and Future of Freedom 347

15 Darwinian Hermeneutics 359

Cadenza 379

Appendix (a Vestigial Organ): Words about Words 381

Acknowledgments 393

References 395

Sources 435

Index 437

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“David Haig's powerful mind and trenchant wit are fully matched by his caring heart and his gracious style. I shall be recommending this book to my students, giving it to my friends, and sampling it repeatedly.”

—Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University; author of Evolutionary Medicine

“Haig's book could be a game-changer in the fraught relation between the biological sciences and philosophy. Its intriguing moral may be his dauntingly scientific first thirteen chapters legitimize and actually call for the kind of philosophical thinking that his last chapters unabashedly exemplify.”

—Richard Schacht, Jubilee Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Illinois

“In this profound and witty book, David Haig rediscovers Aristotle's four causes and tackles the foundations of biology and philosophy (and their joint history). He offers a subtle yet far-reaching, reinterpretation of genetics, culture, and the nature and meaning of meaning. Read it; he writes, and rewrites, all of us.”

—Eric Schliesser, Professor, Political Science, University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Scholar, Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy,  Chapman University

Editorial Reviews

01/13/2020

Haig, a Harvard biology professor, debuts with an expansive, if sometimes impenetrable, exploration of deep questions about the meaning of life. His main goal “is to explain how a physical world of matter in motion, of material and efficient causes, gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.” Along the way, he argues that meaning arises from interpretation of data, regardless of whether the data resides in DNA or a line of poetry, and that “an appreciation of this continuum of meaningful interpretation will help to reunite the humanities and sciences in a continuum of intellectual endeavor.” This conciliation depends upon his likely to be contentious assertion that biologists must “incorporate subjectivity into their objective understanding of living things.” To discuss biology, Haig focuses on research into natural selection and provides details of cutting-edge work—which, unfortunately, only specialists will fully understand. His discussions of philosophy and literature are similarly forbidding. Haig does evince, however, an inviting sense of wit in his writing (a footnote to his reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave reads simply “This is my footnote to Plato”). Nonetheless, the audience for a book of this breadth and depth will not be vast. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2020-02-09
Of Mendelian demons, genetic catalysis, and other evolutionary matters having to do with why we’re here.

We are born, we grow up, and we die. If we have fulfilled our biological mandate, we produce others who do the same. Is that all there is? Biologists have long shied away from the question of whether life has meaning. For instance, writes Harvard evolutionary biology professor Haig, the great scholar Ernst Mayr dismissed early efforts as “impoverished and inadequate for understanding the living world.” Charles Darwin provided a framework for that understanding with his evolutionary theories, though, especially natural selection. Haig explores ideas from Aristotle to Richard Dawkins, examining teleological questions that seek answers for the “end” of why we live and what we live for. The author accomplishes this with, among other avenues, a detailed exploration of how genes work. Sometimes his explanations are resoundingly clear, as when he likens organismal behavior, made up of the interactions between “the historical individuals we identify as organisms and the historical individuals I have called strategic genes,” to the relationship between a nation and its citizens. At other times, it helps to have some background in modern biology and its concepts and language, as when he writes, “bacterial recombination involves the formation and dissolution of partnerships between coreplicons or the substitution of one gene for another in a process that has clear winners and losers.” Winning and losing are part of the whole process of evolution but not all of it. As Haig writes, departing from that terminology to add a fresh concept to the mix, “fitness is the telos of our genetic adaptations, but each passion has a proximate telos toward which it cajoles us to action.” That is to say, when we’re hungry, we seek food—and, according to other moods, sex, fame, and the like, a comprehensible notion made all the richer by Haig’s capable layering of more complex ideas. Daniel Dennett provides the foreword.

A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life.

Kirkus Reviews

"A challenging though rewarding exploration of the meaning and purpose of life."
—Kirkus Reviews

"What, Haig asks, is the teleological purpose of consciousness? In the case of human beings, our consciousness is designed to interpret, through an evolved instinct of sympathy, the subjective attitudes and intentions of others."
—CHOICE

“David Haig's powerful mind and trenchant wit are fully matched by his caring heart and his gracious style. I shall be recommending this book to my students, giving it to my friends, and sampling it repeatedly.”
—Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University; author of Evolutionary Medicine

Haig's book could be a game-changer in the fraught relation between the biological sciences and philosophy. Its intriguing moral may be his dauntingly scientific first thirteen chapters legitimize and actually call for the kind of philosophical thinking that his last chapters unabashedly exemplify.”
—Richard Schacht, Jubilee Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus), University of Illinois

In this profound and witty book, David Haig rediscovers Aristotle's four causes and tackles the foundations of biology and philosophy (and their joint history). He offers a subtle yet far-reaching, reinterpretation of genetics, culture, and the nature and meaning of meaning. Read it; he writes, and rewrites, all of us.”
—Eric Schliesser, Professor, Political Science, University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Scholar, Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University

From the Publisher