The Selfish Gene, Part 1

I just finished reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's a good read. I'll split this topic into two posts: One on desire and the truth of evolutionary theory, and the other on progress in evolution This is the first of those.

Here is Dawkins talking about organisms without consciousness:
"The 'purpose machine', the machine or thing that behaves as if it had a conscious purpose, is equipped with some kind of measuring device which measures the discrepancy between the current state of things, and the 'desired' state. It is built in such a way that the larger this discrepancy is, the harder the machine works. In this way the machine will automatically tend to reduce the discrepancy [...] it may come to actually rest if the 'desired' state is reached." (p50)

It's striking how close this is to standard "direction-of-fit" views of desire: To desire is to see a gap between the world and one's mental state, and to try and reduce that gap by bringing the world into line with the mental state.

Yet Dawkins is explicitly talking about non-conscious "pursuit" of goals. I've been meaning to write for a while on why you might think that "motivating reasons" are not really reasons at all. That argument needs its own post, but the Dawkins quote illustrates it well. If non-conscious behaviour already looks like this, then what is the extra thing that distinguishes the supposedly more purposive motivating reasons from non-conscious "pursuit" of a "goal"?

"Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable" (p12, his emphasis)

Another striking passage. If the more fundamental law is survival of the stable, then this should explain the existence of all life with more accuracy than evolutionary theory (in particular, it should better explain conflicts between life and "dead" matter). So why haven't we rejected evolutionary theory in favour of this more general view?