"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."

- Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis, quoted in the Edge's The Selfish Gene Thirty Years On special

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines... We are survival machines, robot machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

According to the Vedic worldview, the body and the mind are material manifestations, and are inextricably linked and interdependent:

The living entity, thus taking another gross body, obtains a certain type of ear, eye, tongue, nose and sense of touch, which are grouped about the mind. He thus enjoys a particular set of sense objects.

- Bhagavad-gita 15.9

The Vedic worldview explains that there is an "observer", who experiences the body and mind and is completely separate from the two. This observer is commonly referred to as "the living entity".

Bodies and their attendant minds are produced by material nature:

Material nature and the living entities should be understood to be beginningless. Their transformations and the modes of matter are products of material nature. Nature is said to be the cause of all material causes and effects, whereas the living entity is the cause of the various sufferings and enjoyments in this world.

- Bhagavad-gita 13.20-21

Commenting on these verses, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a 20th century commentator on the Bhagavad-gita explains (my emphasis to highlight points of congruence with Dawkins above):

The different manifestations of body and senses among the living entities are due to material nature. There are 8,400,000 different species of life, and these varieties are creations of the material nature. They arise from the different sensual pleasures of the living entity, who thus desires to live in this body or that. When he is put into different bodies, he enjoys different kinds of happiness and distress. His material happiness and distress are due to his body, and not to himself as he is. In his original state there is no doubt of enjoyment; therefore that is his real state. Because of the desire to lord it over material nature, he is in the material world. In the spiritual world there is no such thing. The spiritual world is pure, but in the material world everyone is struggling hard to acquire different kinds of pleasures for the body. It might be more clear to state that this body is the effect of the senses. The senses are instruments for gratifying desire. Now, the sum total — body and instrument senses — are offered by material nature, and as will be clear in the next verse, the living entity is blessed or damned with circumstances according to his past desire and activity. According to one's desires and activities, material nature places one in various residential quarters. The being himself is the cause of his attaining such residential quarters and his attendant enjoyment or suffering. Once placed in some particular kind of body, he comes under the control of nature because the body, being matter, acts according to the laws of nature. At that time, the living entity has no power to change that law. Suppose an entity is put into the body of a dog. As soon as he is put into the body of a dog, he must act like a dog. He cannot act otherwise.

- A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita As It Is 13.21 purport

Congruent with Dawkins' view of the body as a machine which dictates the terms of existence, Prabhupada explains that the body and mind are produced by material nature, and that once within the material body the living entity is on the agenda of the material body.

Dawkins explains that the agenda of the material body arises from genes, which are the mechanism by which the material nature creates various bodies. The agenda of the genes is survival by means of replication. This means reproduction of bodies which contain these genes. The primary agenda for the body therefore becomes gaining access to the resources necessary for the survival of the genes' survival machine, the body - namely food and shelter - and reproduction of the genes' container - the body.

While the living entity in the body may feel that he wishes to preserve his own life, and I'm sure we all do, the genes, inasmuch as we can attribute motive to them as a means of narrating the situation, wish to preserve themselves - which means that they are happy for their survival machine to die, as long as they are able to continue in another body.

As a result of this, we see that monkeys, when offered the opportunity with electrodes implanted into their brain will press a button to experience orgasm in preference to the activities needed for their continued immediate personal survival:

It was found that in male monkeys there were separate systems for erection, for ejaculation, and for orgasm. With an electrode in the separate orgasm system, the monkey would stimulate this region and go through a total orgasm without erection and without ejaculation. Given the apparatus by which he could stimulate himself once every three minutes for twenty-fours hours a day, the monkey stimulated the site and had orgasms every three minutes for sixteen hours and then slept eight hours and started again the next day.

- John C Lilly, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, p.90

The monkeys run the risk of dying due to this behaviour. We all want to live, and we usually act in such a way as to preserve our life. However, the genes in our body will continue to exist after the death of our body, if they can get themselves into another body, and this leads us to behaviours that ensure the survival of the genes, while "we" (meaning the particular combination of this body and the consciousness that experiences it) die. By the Vedic standard the living entity never dies, but this body will die.

Prabhupada gives a number of examples of animals which are lured to their death by sex desire, such as an elephant that falls into a prepared trap in a path after being tempted by a female elephant. Sex desire is so powerful that it trumps self-preservation. Dawkins gives the mechanistic explanation of why this is so, based on the concept of the selfish gene, which is an application of Darwin's big idea, the single simple idea of reproduction, variation and natural selection - an idea whose power lies in its ability to explain so much from such a simple principle.

Orgasm is usually associated with ejaculation, which is usually associated with reproduction opportunity. With two or three more vehicles (bodies), genes have increased chances of survival. Therefore, natural selection will over time filter out genes which create bodies with low sexual drive, as bodies with gene sets that produce higher sexual drive reproduce more (all other factors being equal), and thus spread those genes at the expense of the lower sex-drive producing gene combinations.

The result is that reproduction will become and remain an intense driving force for the survival machines - the "sex desire that typifies and perpetuates material existence" in the Vedic worldview (actually, identification with that desire, technically). While in the body, the consciousness of the living entity is subverted by the agenda of the genes, in the Vedic worldview, or merely exists to serve the agenda of the genes in Dawkins' worldview, which does not contain the concept of a separate observer with a distinct agenda that can be subverted.

As such, all human endeavours, such as language, art, science, and commerce, are Dawkins' "extended phenotype", genetic strategies that extend the influence of the genes on their future survival beyond the biological tissue of the survival machine (his self-nominated single greatest contribution to evolutionary biology, which I shall discuss in further depth in another post), or "material activities born of lust (rajo-guna)" in the language of the Vedic worldview.

I call 100% congruence, with gratitude to Dawkins for providing a rational mechanistic explanation to colour in and support the Vedic perspective.

I've added a new category to my blog: "Devotional Dawkins".

In this category I will be posting a series of articles examining the congruence between Richard Dawkins' empirical interpretation of the mundane world with the Vedic worldview that underpins Krishna Consciousness.

I personally think that while we have a number of congruences with Christian philosophers, on the matter of empiricism the Vedic worldview is more congruent with modern science than it is with Creationism as a scientific doctrine.

While it is tempting to join the Christian Crusade against Professor Dawkins, and many within ISKCON obviously think it a good idea, I personally will not be joining.

My observation is that many of the congruent points that we share with Professor Dawkins are points that Creationists would also wage war on us for - for example, the idea that there is a single common ancestor, and a limited set of common ancestors of all living beings, which I discussed in my previous post. This would be grounds for Crusade against our worldview by Creationists, whereas it is a point of agreement with Dawkins.

One of the major reasons why Dawkins' worldview is more congruent with the Vedic worldview than the Creationist one, is that Dawkins' area of authority is the phenomenological world of mundane experience. Just as Buddhist philosophy and psychology is compatible and very similar to Krishna Consciousness up to the point of nirvana, similarly Dawkins' worldview is compatible up to the limits of empiricism. His worldview does not contain the soul, and thus represents a subset of the total Vedic worldview.

Creationism, on the other hand, already has the soul within it. This is a point of congruence with the Vedic worldview. However, Creationism mixes the concept of the soul and the body, making it incompatible with both Dawkins and the Vedic worldviews.

The beginning of knowledge, by the Vedic standard, is understanding the difference between spirit and matter. Whereas Dawkins' biological worldview is devoid of the concept of spirit, and thus offers the potential for a synthesis, the Creationist worldview has the concept, but it is erroneous. Thus their world view offers neither empirical rigour, nor metaphysical rigour by the Vedic standard.

When I say empirical rigour, I am referring to what Dawkins calls "the explanatory power of Darwin's big idea.

Studying books such as Dawkin's watershed work "The Selfish Gene" reveals that Darwin's big idea explains the material world in terms that are congruent with the Vedic world view - the material bodies are machines manufactured by the material energy, and are vehicles for material desires which are a completely separate agenda for the higher-order beings (ourselves) who find themselves manifested within them for a limited span of time.

This is completely at odds with the worldview of Creationism - another powerful example of our affinity for Dawkins over the Crusade against him.

Professor Dawkins' statements about religion are outside the scope of his work on biology and empirical science, and fall more into the category of sociology and psychology. In many of those cases I also happen to agree with him. In the area of metaphysical statements he also exceeds the scope of empirical science, and these are again in another category. In that category I feel he speaks with more certainty than is warranted by the available empirical evidence, and also borrows from his authority in other areas to lend more credence to his ideas there, than they would otherwise merit in isolation.

Readers who made it this far in this article may also be interested in my category "Dawkins", where I posted two years ago a series of posts analysing Dawkins' debates with various religious representatives.

The Hindu Deity Prajapati, the progenitor of all living beings

We can be very sure there really is a single concestor of all surviving life forms on this planet. The evidence is that all that have ever been examined (exactly in most cases, almost exactly in the rest) the same genetic code; and the genetic code is too detailed, in arbitrary aspects of its complexity, to have been invented twice. Although not every species has been examined, we already have enough coverage to be pretty certain that no surprises - alas - await us… As things stand, it appears that all known life forms can be traced to a single ancestor which lived more than 3 billion years ago.

- Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, p 7

It is a remarkable fact that there must be a moment in history when there were two animals in the same species, one of whom became the ancestor of all humans and no aardvarks, while the other became the ancestor of all aardvarks and no humans. They may well have met, and may even have been brothers. You can cross out aardvark and substitute any modern species you like, and the statement must still be true. Think it through, and you will find that it follows from the fact that all species are cousins of one another. Bear in mind when you do so that the 'ancestor of all aardvarks' will also be the ancestor of lots of very different things besides aardvarks.

- Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, p 40

In the Srimad Bhagavatam the ultimate ancestry of living beings is variously ascribed to Brahma (SB 4.24.42), to Vishnu (SB. 10.40.13), and to Shiva (SB. 5.24.17).

The Vedic idea is that there is a limited set of common ancestors of all living beings, descended from the single common ancestor and called the prajapatis. The way the story is commonly recounted, the prajapatis are born of the original common ancestor, the prajapati-pati, and their wives give birth to all the various living species. The exact details of how they do this are not given, and trying to imagine how one lady gives birth to millions of different species can sometimes be a factor in someone going: "This is too fanatastic, I'm giving up this Vedic narrative for some rational science."

However, if you actually follow through on inquiry in the rational scientific school, and sit at the feet of the master of rational science, His Eminence Professor Richard Dawkins, studying his works such as River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, and The Ancestor's Tale, you will gain a scientific understanding of exactly how this is so. The Vedic literature compresses geological ages into sutras, and presents the conclusion in a way that can be comprehended by pre-scientific people.

All living beings of the various species that we see today have a limited set of common ancestors, and ultimately a single common ancestor.

The background stories in the Srimad Bhagavatam, about creation and the structure of the universe, are the same as the background stories in all the Puranas. They represent the cultural context of the civilisation that produced the Puranas. Their scientific understanding of the material world is presented in the poetic and metaphorical language that they used and understood. However, each of the Puranas differs in the metaphysical message that accompanies this cultural context. The message of the Bhagavatam is not about the prajapatis, and the prajapatis and the prajapatih-pati appear as background for specific stories, such as the Marriage of Kardama Muni and Devahuti (as SB 3.20), which carry the real import of the work.

Added a switch to the battery pack for the Shure wireless headset mic receiver, just in time for tonight's Harinam. 7pm outside Govindas, downtown Brisbane, Australia, every Friday.

Dedicated to Professor Richard Dawkins.

Mad props to DJ Vraj for the video.

I have a bunch of realisations from this tour, as well as my world tour that immediately proceeded it. Hopefully I'll get some time to write them down in the next few weeks.

Right now, though, I'd just like to say that the principle realisation from the tour with Amala Kirtan is that ability, or even lack of ability, is secondary to quality as a human being. That was the lesson that I learned from Amala Kirtan.

Currently broadcasting one of the best streams yet - the 12 hour kirtan in New Govardhana with Amala Kirtan.

Check out the feed on the Kirtan Australia Internet Radio page.

Sunday 25 July, 2010 9am - 9pm 12 hour kirtan New Govardhana

Current time and date in New Govardhana:

Here's the line-up:
11.30am Vrndavanchandra
12pm Binod Bihari
12.30pm Janna Griffith
1pm Jada Bharata
1.30pm Chandra Vallabha
2pm Mallika
2.30pm Mohini Murti
3pm Bhusaya
3.30pm Janardana
4pm Hari Bhakti
4.30pm Amala Kirtan
6.30pm Sridhama Navadwipa
7pm Krishnapada
7.30pm Sitapati
8pm Prema Yogi
8.30pm Vrajadhama

Ekendra is at the controls of the main mixer, a Mackie Onyx 1640i, which is also feeding a multitrack recording via firewire. I'm getting my feed via an aux channel on the desk and piping it through a USB sound card into a laptop running Fedora 11, then using darkice to send it via wireless 3G to a server in Los Angeles running RHEL 5 and Icecast, using Centovacast front end, and then it comes down to you, in whatever client you want, via a link on the Kirtan Australia Internet Radio page.

Ekendra running the main sound and multitrack recording

The computer being used for the webstream, via the 3G key on the left. The Tascam is doing a backup recording of the stream that is going to the web

This is a +12dB gain antenna for the 3G wireless key. I bought this after we had problems streaming the Canberra Maha Kirtan - "never again" ;-) (Krishna willing)