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A review by athousandgreatbooks
The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins
5.0
Natural selection is the differential survival of the fittest. But fittest what? Fittest individuals, races, species, what? Turns out, it’s the Gene.
In the beginning were the replicators, the fundamental unit of life that made copies of its self, spawning into existence by chance. Through mutation, different varieties of replicators came to be. The successful ones had one or more of the three properties – high longevity, fecundity, and/or copying-fidelity. The unsuccessful ones, by definition, ceased to be.
Slowly, the replicators found more and more sophisticated ways of being that allowed them to replicate successfully, thereby increasing their population in the pool. Many replicators banded together for mutual benefit and became predominant in the backdrop of all other replicators. Soon their banding became formalized and led to the creation of many-celled bodies, vehicles for their propagation.
Note that it is not that individuals have genetic material to make copies of themselves, but rather the genes that create vehicles for protection until they can be passed on to another body, ad infinitum. In other words, vehicles don’t replicate themselves; they work to propagate their replicators. This is the gene-view of evolution that Dawkins espouses, the Immortal Gene.
Genes cooperate with other genes in the gene-pool only to maximize their own chances of survival. All apparent altruism is a front for the selfish gene, and careful analysis through Game Theory highlights what the Evolutionary Stable Strategies of survival and propagation could be, and have been.
Everything from parental love to fratricide at birth (case in point, British Swallows), to symbiotic and parasitic relationships – all are sophisticated (though unconscious) techniques built into the vehicle by the genes to propagate themselves into the next generation.
It does take a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up, and remind ourselves that the replicators came first, in importance as well as in history.
The one bit that wasn’t quite convincing was the idea of the Meme as a completely new form of replicators. Somehow, it seemed to me a rehashing of the idea of the Archetype. But that is by the way.
In the beginning were the replicators, the fundamental unit of life that made copies of its self, spawning into existence by chance. Through mutation, different varieties of replicators came to be. The successful ones had one or more of the three properties – high longevity, fecundity, and/or copying-fidelity. The unsuccessful ones, by definition, ceased to be.
Slowly, the replicators found more and more sophisticated ways of being that allowed them to replicate successfully, thereby increasing their population in the pool. Many replicators banded together for mutual benefit and became predominant in the backdrop of all other replicators. Soon their banding became formalized and led to the creation of many-celled bodies, vehicles for their propagation.
Note that it is not that individuals have genetic material to make copies of themselves, but rather the genes that create vehicles for protection until they can be passed on to another body, ad infinitum. In other words, vehicles don’t replicate themselves; they work to propagate their replicators. This is the gene-view of evolution that Dawkins espouses, the Immortal Gene.
Genes cooperate with other genes in the gene-pool only to maximize their own chances of survival. All apparent altruism is a front for the selfish gene, and careful analysis through Game Theory highlights what the Evolutionary Stable Strategies of survival and propagation could be, and have been.
Everything from parental love to fratricide at birth (case in point, British Swallows), to symbiotic and parasitic relationships – all are sophisticated (though unconscious) techniques built into the vehicle by the genes to propagate themselves into the next generation.
It does take a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up, and remind ourselves that the replicators came first, in importance as well as in history.
The one bit that wasn’t quite convincing was the idea of the Meme as a completely new form of replicators. Somehow, it seemed to me a rehashing of the idea of the Archetype. But that is by the way.