The point of my life is not to make babies.

I feel I have to throw that out there, because a lot of the rhetoric of evolutionary biology nowadays centers around Richard Dawkins’ famous interpretation of evolution, selfish-gene theory. With selfish-gene theory, individual genes, as manifested in an organisms’ phenotype (physical characteristics apparent when genes interact with the environment), are the driving force of evolution.

This has come under scrutiny recently. Niles Eldridge, who wrote the book Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene, is outspoken against Dawkins and his conceptualization of evolution, harshly condemning the notion that life is all about reproduction. In this text, Eldredge sees reproduction and economics, i.e., everything we do when we are not reproducing, as equally, intricately connected. He advocates natural selection, where organisms do not live solely to reproduce-though if they are good at eking out an economic life, they might.

The difference between Dawkins and Eldridge is a divergence of perception, not data. Eldridge is looking at the moment-to-moment existence of organisms, picking out patterns through evolutionary history but resisting the assumption that those patterns are indicative of a driver. Dawkins, or at least his language, seems to be looking forward, which is dangerous because it assumes a certain teleology when natural selection is, famously, “blind.”

I am much more willing to agree with Eldredge, who sees genes as being record-holders of natural selection as it affects populations over a period of time rather than active players. Genes are not moving evolution forward, but keeping track of genetically shifting lineages.

This shift away from a gene-centered ideology is significant not only in its interpretation of what “moves” evolution, but also in its implications for our understanding of sex and reproduction. If Dawkins makes replication out to be the key factor of existence (all genes want to replicate; this drives everything), then when humans, who notoriously assign value and meaning to what should be unbiased natural phenomena, look at this theory, all emphasis gets placed on what an organism does at this one instance in its lifespan. Reproduction is construed to be the culmination and validation of an organism’s life.

Does reproduction point to, or is it the product of, an economic life? The manifestation in nature is the same no matter which way you look at it. The manifestation in our culture is profoundly different.

At a cultural level, most science holds the biases of all who contribute. As we see with the dichotomy between Dawkins and Eldredge, even when looking at the same set of data, two uniquely human concepts can be derived.

I am not a scientist, and the scientific implications for choosing a side are not obvious to me; however, I do see sweeping cultural consequences for doing so. If we stick with Dawkins’ interpretation of evolution, we are bound to conceptualize the reproductive aspects of our lives as carrying a disproportionate amount of weight. Under Dawkins, what happens to an organism everyday, its patterns of sleeping and eating, all these things that make up its life, are ignored, overlooked in a brute concentration on only the way it reproduces itself. Dawkins’ interpretation begs the question: what for? Why reproduce in the first place, if economic life is so unimportant?

Eldredge holds that we reproduce to continue living, but we do not necessarily reproduce to live. Reproduction is only so more life can continue, so these basic economic processes can persist, so generations of meerkats can continue to do whatever meerkats do, so I can continue to make French-onion soup on the weekends, so bees can continue to bee.

For me, that’s the point: not the replication of myself, not baby-making. In zooming down to my little human pod and looking out at all of existence, by living subjectively within the evolutionary pattern I am a part of, I see my economic life as being incredibly important, and my reproductive life, if I choose to have one, as merely an aspect. If my life has to be for something, why not just be for living?

Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.