Postscript, 1994

Abstract

One puzzling feature of the response to "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality" has contributed to the direction of my current research on evolution. I was initially dumfounded by the willingness of philosophers simply to dismiss or ignore--as too radical to be taken seriously, apparently--my suggestion that we are survival machines for our genes, as Dawkins has put it. This surprised me, for in point of fact the biology on which I based my philosophical extrapolations is not even controversial. It is uncontested that human bodies, like the bodies of all other creatures, are products of a design process that tracks, in the first instance, the "interests" of the genes whose phenotypic expressions those bodies are. There are substantive controversies about the importance of this fact, but not the fact itself.