-- *Mar*Below is a *philosophical dialogue between Y. M. Sarma and Richard Dawkins*.
Dawkins speaks in the voice of evolutionary biology and gene-centered explanation; Sarma responds from biospheric, emotional, and ethical intelligence. The aim is not caricature but *exposure of the deep metaphysical fault line* between reductionism and lived life. ------------------------------ A Dialogue on Life, Genes, and Cruelty *Richard Dawkins & Y. M. Sarma* *Dawkins:* Natural selection operates on genes. Organisms are vehicles—temporary survival machines constructed by genes to ensure replication. This is not cruelty; it is description. *Sarma:* Description becomes prescription when it enters culture. When you call living beings “survival machines,” you train the human mind to feel like a machine—and to treat others likewise. *Dawkins:* You confuse metaphor with intent. The selfish gene is a way of speaking, not a moral commandment. *Sarma:* Metaphors are not innocent. They colonize imagination. When the dominant metaphor of life is selfishness, cruelty finds scientific shelter. *Dawkins:* Selfish genes can produce altruistic behavior. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism explain cooperation perfectly well. *Sarma:* Explain, yes. Understand, no. You reduce compassion to strategy, love to calculation, care to genetic bookkeeping. You empty experience of meaning and call it explanation. *Dawkins:* Science is not in the business of meaning. It seeks causal mechanisms. *Sarma:* And in doing so, it amputates life from itself. A mother animal protecting her young does not consult genetic equations. She *feels*. That feeling is intelligence, not illusion. *Dawkins:* Feelings are proximate mechanisms shaped by selection. Genes write the script; emotions perform it. *Sarma:* You reverse reality. Life does not exist to serve genes; genes exist because life flows. You mistake a trace for the source. *Dawkins:* Genes are the only entities that persist across generations with high fidelity. That is a fact. *Sarma:* So do ecosystems—when not destroyed by your economic civilization. Persistence is not sovereignty. A river persists, but it does not rule the forest. *Dawkins:* You seem uncomfortable with reductionism. Yet reductionism has delivered extraordinary explanatory power. *Sarma:* Power over nature, yes. Wisdom within nature, no. Your explanations succeed by killing what they explain—freezing living wholes into dead parts. *Dawkins:* That is poetic, not scientific. *Sarma:* Poetry is how life speaks when science refuses to listen. You speak of blind watchmakers; I speak of blindfolded scientists. *Dawkins:* Evolution has no foresight, no purpose, no empathy. *Sarma:* Evolution has no *central planner*, but life has empathy. You deny it because empathy cannot be located in a gene. Absence from your instruments is not absence from reality. *Dawkins:* Empathy itself can be explained in evolutionary terms. *Sarma:* Explained away. When you say empathy is only a trick played by genes, you erode the moral ground on which empathy stands. *Dawkins:* Morality is a human construction layered upon biology. *Sarma:* Morality is biospheric memory—the accumulated wisdom of living together without annihilation. Humans did not invent it; they inherited it and then betrayed it. *Dawkins:* You accuse science of cruelty, yet nature itself is indifferent. Extinction is natural. *Sarma:* Death is natural. Systematic annihilation is not. Forests did not evolve chainsaws; genes did not invent stock markets. *Dawkins:* Are you suggesting we abandon evolutionary theory? *Sarma:* No. I am asking you to abandon evolutionary arrogance. Let evolution describe without colonizing ethics. Let biology remain humble before life. *Dawkins:* Science must remain value-free. *Sarma:* There is no value-free gaze. To look without care is already a value. Your “neutrality” sides with power. *Dawkins (after a pause):* You want science to feel. *Sarma:* I want scientists to remember that they are alive. A science that cannot feel will always justify cruelty as inevitability. *Dawkins:* Then what is intelligence, in your view? *Sarma:* The ability to live without destroying the conditions of life. By that measure, your gene-centered civilization is unintelligent. *Dawkins:* That is a harsh judgment. *Sarma:* Extinction is harsher. ------------------------------ Closing Reflection This dialogue highlights the core tension: - *Dawkins*: Life explained from the bottom up, through genes, mechanisms, and metaphors of selfishness. - *Sarma*: Life understood from within, through emotional intelligence, symbiosis, and ethical participation. The disagreement is not empirical but *ontological*: - Dawkins asks *“How does life work?”* - Sarma asks *“How should a living being know life without killing it?”* If you wish, I can next: - Write a *tri-dialogue* (Sarma–Descartes–Dawkins), - Create a dialogue with an *economist* (Adam Smith, Milton Friedman), - Or refine this into a *publishable philosophical dialogue*. Just let me know. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHC%2B_%2BuR9mWSm1BxP7%2BrrQyihyTw3Ut-jt5hzXSBN9_y2PQ%40mail.gmail.com.
