이기주의와 이타주의 논쟁: 도킨스와 윌슨의 논쟁 - 사이의 관점에서

Abstract

In 2007, Richard Dawkins published a very interesting book, The God Delusion, which has soon attracted much attention from the publics. What impressed them is not only the fact that the worldly famous biologist wrote about religion, but also the fact that he is as a matter of fact suggesting a rational religion as an alternative to faithbased religions. It is not the former but the latter fact that has been paid attention to with much interests and arguments. This article especially focuses on the fact that Dawkins in the book criticizes the theory of group selection in order to attack faith-based religion(s). The correct name he criticized there is the “multilevel selection theory” proposed by E. Sober and D.S. Wilson. The reason why Dawkins argues against the theory of group selection is that it seem to refute his own theory of selfish genes and, more than that, that Sober and Wilson’s theory of multilevel selection allows in evolutionary process the place of religion, against which he argues. As the title of his book, The God Delusion, alluedes to, religion for him seems to be a kind of mental disease to be healed. The point of this article is neither that altruism is the main drive of evolutionary process, denying Dawkins’s point that the main drive is selfishness nor that religion is necessary in that it is inevitably intertwined with the generation of altruistic inner mechanism. What this article wants to suggest is that evolutionary process is driven both by selfishness and by altruism and that this structure of selfishness/altruism is the ramification of the one and the same force of evolutionary motivation. I call this the structure of betweenness.