Thanks, I enjoyed reading this! I read The Selfish Gene some years ago and your post made me realize that my mind hasn‘t yet settled on how to think about all this.
One thought that came up was that we might want to distinguish between evolutionary processes and genes? This is related to the saying „Don’t hate the player, hate the game“, only that the players/the genes are not even real agents with intentions, like you argued. And furthermore we maybe shouldn’t even lay blame on evolution, as it’s just a non-agentic dynamic that probably sprang to life randomly at some point.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading this! I read The Selfish Gene some years ago and your post made me realize that my mind hasn‘t yet settled on how to think about all this.
One thought that came up was that we might want to distinguish between evolutionary processes and genes? This is related to the saying „Don’t hate the player, hate the game“, only that the players/the genes are not even real agents with intentions, like you argued. And furthermore we maybe shouldn’t even lay blame on evolution, as it’s just a non-agentic dynamic that probably sprang to life randomly at some point.