Effect and Cause

After Godel, Escher Bach, I decided I needed to know a lot more about each field where this strange phenomenon of Tangled Hierarchy occurs. Genetics was my first pick, and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was Google's choice. Usually, I prefer to defer my comments until I've finished from cover to cover, but I simply cannot resist. I've just finished with the first three chapters and I have to put this down.

One of the plethora of questions which bothered me when I was glancing upon the population statistics of developed nations like Japan, was the change this "intelligence" of humans has brought about in Evolution. All living things have been wired to reproduce, insofar as to lead us to define life that way. But the struggle for life given the limited resources of earth, has edged out the weaker ones. And this was all mostly true even after Humans came despite the aim of creating welfare states and nations. But, now that we are intelligent enough to try and understand our origins, I was beginning to wonder how it would impact the formerly instinctive process of reproduction and survival. In the past wars, diseases, and famines tried to see that the "survival of the fittest" was the order of the day. ( Hitler saw to it that the present state of Israel is fit enough to defend itself! The strongest of Jews and their progeny are now thriving ) But the past few decades has witnessed an unnatural world, where we have IMHO by virtue(?) of being "good" to others, altered this equilibrium.
I was just trying to comprehend what this could mean, or how it would alter the course of evolution and more importantly, which parameter we should work towards optimizing. What I mean is, at what level should we aim to duplicate ourselves - molecules, genetics, individuals, families, racial groups, national groups, the homo sapien level or transcending species? People, to varying extents, seem to care about all the above, but for me the obvious
answer is at the "individual" level. But to define an individual "I" is itself so complicated! But that it a whole different story.

Richard Dawkins says the parameter is at the genetic level, and us, the phenotypes, are just ways to transport genes through time. He tries to make sense of this by painting a picture of the formation of "life" using molecules which become self-replicators. And he also tries to support this view with evolutionary evidence. For instance, one particularly interesting one is the
"Why do old people die?" question, which was posed very well in the movie "The Man From Earth". An evolutionary answer to this by Sir Peter Medawar is as follows.
If genes were to try and make sure they could survive until they were passed on to an offspring, they will try and fight the mutations and diseases which could harm their inhabited body until the reproduction process is over. This try and fight is obviously in reference to evolutionary improvements to genes across thousands of generations. This process, in effect makes mutations ( which have a probabilistic occurrence ) causing organ decay happen at an older age. One theoretical example of elongating life ( of species, not instance ) would be to force everyone to reproduce only after say 50 years and not before. Over generations genes would have evolved to ensure that the phenotype is healthy at least until fifty and on an average much more.

As promising as this books looks, the author mentions that his aim is not to address the apparent reversal of cause and effect with our "intelligent" species. Look at the irony - The genes have evolved so much, that the "survival machines" they build up are themselves questioning the purpose of their existence and to some extent affecting the survival of genes!

I'll get back to the book.