Why paint something when you can describe it just as effectively?

After having started to read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, my way of approaching literature and works of art has changed completely. Painters believe that art is a way of viewing human condition in a different way. Musicians believe that tunes and melodies are able to convey things that cannot be expressed through words. Writers believe that literature reflects the human condition, as well as society’s hopes and dreams.

In this book, Calvino uses a technique much like the one employed by Hemmingway, where they both start their works by jumping straight into the action without introducing the setting, characters, or giving a reader any sort of clue as to what the story is about. As a reader, you are left to look over the writing for any type of clues that will help you understand what is really going on and start getting a clear image of the events that are taking place.

However, this book goes beyond that. Not only do you have to draw conclusions from the limited descriptions offered by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan of each city he visited, you also get the hard task of deciding in what order you wish to start reading the book. There is a reason why Calvino chose to place the chapters in their respective order, but there was also a reason why he named some of the chapters the same, and why he placed specific numbers next to them as well.

This book can not only be read in many different ways, but it can be interpreted in various forms as well. Calvino describes his cities in such a way that the reader is able to imagine a part of it, making the experience of reading this particular book a completely different one for every person who reads it. 

“All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.”

I had never thought about animals having their own culture, but this chapter in The Selfish Gene made me realize how true that was. Dawkins starts talking about animal culture, and then proceeds to talk about genes and evolution in human for almost the first time since the start of the book. However, he gives the chapter a completely different approach than the one I expected by mentioning what he names memes. According to the dictionary, memes are “cultural items are transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.”

He exemplifies his point by stating that “God exists, if only n the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, ion the environment provided by human culture.” (pg 193.) Although highly controversial, this statement is completely true. There is no evidence at all that confirms the existence of a being such as “God”, he exists merely in people’s faith, which according to Dawkins I “blind trust, in absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence… Blind faith can justify anything.” (pg 198.) Who can tell you you’re wrong when you don’t need anything to confirm that you are right? I respect people that have such strong convictions, but I cannot personally relate. How can you believe in something you don’t know exists? How can you blindly trust some old papers that were written by people that would probably be considered insane in our modern world?

Dawkins ends the chapter by saying that our genes are survival machines, yet they were not created to be, nor can we expect them to be, immortal. They are bound to change because of the nature of evolution itself, but memes, on the other hand, can last for a longer time. They will not be exactly the same, since everyone changes ideas to fit certain circumstances and to fit their own understanding, but their essence will remain. Can we consider, then, that our ideas are more important than our bodies?

A Matter of Time

After reading several of the chapters from The Selfish Gene, I am not completely certain if I have learned a lot or am simply confused by the enormous amount of information, definitions, examples, and conclusions that Dawkins draws throughout the book. It seems as if sometimes, by trying to enhance his point he goes a little overboard using allegories in order to make the reader understand and ends up doing exactly the opposite.

In chapter ten, he addresses social insects, such as bee, wasps, ants, and termites that rely on cooperation and apparent altruism for the survival of their species. The individuality of these social insects is subjugated to the welfare of the community as a whole, not to their individual benefit. He went into great detail talking about how this works with bees, and how this is possible because most males have no father. They all have only half the number of genes and all of them come from their mother. It is weird to write about this in Mother's Day, seeing as those sterile male bees owe their entire existence to their mother.

Dawkins also mentions mutualism and symbiosis, the relationship of mutual benefit between members of different species. He states that the mitochondria in our cells were probably separate species from us a long time ago, but we became so dependent on each other that we evolved into the same organism, and if we were to eliminate all the mitochondria in our bodies, we would be dead within seconds. I find this type of dependency amazing, but a little contradictory to the whole “selfish gene” idea. 

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As I read chapter four, I noticed the increased use of examples by Dawkins in his attempts to illuminate the reader, yet I found that he lacked explanation on certain aspects which he implies without giving us a reason or telling us why he did so. After spending such an exhaustive amount of parallels, you can assume that his goal is to make his writing clear, so his elusive statements disconcerted me.

                

Dawkins states that modern survival machines have “evolved a property we call ‘consciousness’,” and then states that computers are designed beforehand to behave “as if motivated by a purpose” (which drives our consciousness). However, computers are able to predict possible outcomes, often times better than we can ourselves. How have human beings been able to instill such a remarkable property on inanimate objects? I believe that what I am truly asking is how and why computers “think” and although I realize that technology is not Dawkins’ forte, this specific example confused me a great deal.  

Outrageous?

The Selfish Gene, a book by Richard Dawkins, is a very interesting creation. I would never think that so many people would be interested in reading about biology, but then again I never imagined biology could be explained in this way. It is easy to tell that Dawkins knows what e is talking about, yet he addresses his knowledge in such a casual way that he makes it easy for the reader to understand the points he makes.

However, as simple as his book may seem for him to understand, he creates so many analogies, parallels and examples that if you are not paying close attention to his every word, it is easy to get lost andf have to backtrack in order to fully understand. As I was reading, I found a particular part of chapter three very interesting, as it was one of his attempts to explain why people before lived longer than they did today. He then expresses possible ways to expand the human life span, and says we should ban reproduction before the age of forty or fifty to avoid the passing down of lethal genes that kill before that age. As I read this, I remembered a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that we had read in class a little while ago, A Modest Proposal. Here, Swift suggests that poor Irish people could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for the people of the upper classes. Although this seems a little more radical, both statements propose outrageous ideas that go against liberties established in our modern society.