A World in Common discussion on ‘The Gene’s Eye View of Evolution’, contributed by TB, 10 February 2008.

Most biologists and geneticists today have come down on the side of a gene’s eye view of evolution, as opposed to the discredited group view, and perhaps less so the individual view. There are, of course, detractors from the ideas expressed among others, by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, but this is what always happen when new ideas are presented in science. A strong “rearguard action” is always fought, until the new way of looking at things has had time to gather overwhelming evidence in its favour. It has to be this way, for science to have any credibility.

For example, see this write-up in TimesOnLine for an interesting critique of Dawkins’s ideas, where the writer says: ‘Although there have been squabbles about whether the gene or the carrier of the gene (the individual) is the object “selected”, most evolutionists have come down on the side of the gene.’

Thirty years of The Selfish Gene:

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2225739,00.html

There seems to be a lot of resistance among people in general to the acceptance of the gene’s eye view – the author of the following book is intimating that we are biased in favour of “the individual”. I haven’t got the book yet, but it looks very interesting, also because a deals with the fascinating topic of genomic imprinting.

The unpopularity of a gene’s eye view:

http://www.annalsonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/907/1/212

I am a layperson interested in genetics, and contrary to what the contributor in this link, AB, advises us to do, namely to sit around “waiting for” some evidence against Dawkins’s gene’s eye view to come to light – in AB’s opinion presumably the “correct socialist” view to take – I have taken the trouble to read, not only The Selfish Gene itself, but a few fairly recent publications in the area of genetics and evolution. What I have found is an acceptance and a vindication of Dawkins’ opinions – not wholesale and without criticism – but of the book’s basic tenets.

I would like to quote a few below.

Robin Dunbar (British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist), in The Trouble with Science p.141:

(Talking about metaphors used in scientific language)… Similarly the term ‘selfish’ in Dawkins’s concept selfish gene is not meant to be taken literally. Quite obviously genes cannot behave selfishly because selfishness is a moral property an it is likely that only humans can possess it. Dawkins is as well aware of this as anybody else. His point is a analogical one: genes behave (in the mathematician’s sense, of course) as if they were selfish, as if they only looked after their own interests. In fact, of course, they do nothing at all: they are simply inert bits of DNA whose only functional capacity is to produce copies of themselves. But the process of Darwinian natural selection act on genes in such a way that the effectiveness with which they are able to replicate themselves in the next generation looks like active choice. Dawkins is simply pointing out that when we ask about the evolution of behaviour (or anything else), we have to adopt a gene’s eye view. His point is a purely cautionary one, a reminder that in evolutionary studies the accounting has to be done in terms of the number of copies of a given gene that appear in the next generation.

Joseph Ledoux (neural scientist), in The Emotional Brain, p 137:

There is no denying that genes make each one of us different from one another and explain at least part of the variability in the way different people act in dangerous and other situations. But we have to be very careful in interpreting differences in behaviour between different people. As Richard Dawkins puts it: ‘If I am homozygous for a gene G, nothing save mutation can prevent my passing G on to all my children. So much is inexorable. But whether or not I, or my children, show the phenotypic effect normally associated with possession of G may depend very much on how we are brought up, what diet or education we experience, and what other genes we happen to possess.

 

The bottom line is that our genes give us the raw materials out of which to build our emotions. They specify the kind of nervous system we will have, the kinds of mental processes in which it can engage and the kinds of bodily functions it can control. But the exact way we act, think, and feel in a particular situation is determined by many other factors and is not predestined in our genes. Some, if not many, emotions do have a biological basis, but social, which is to say cognitive, factors are also crucially important. Nature and nurture are partners in our emotional life. The trick is to figure out what their unique contributions are.

And, for good measure, a sociologist…

Christopher Badcock (Reader in Sociology at the LSE), in Evolutionary Psychology, An Introduction, p.84:

Taking such a ‘gene’s eye’ view of things may seem strange, but there are good reasons for arguing that it is a more realistic and objective way of looking at things than is our conventional, and rather self-centred, attitude to ourselves. We have already seen that our genes do not exist to reproduce us so much as we exist to reproduce them, and if on occasions this means making sacrifices – perhaps even the ultimate one – then, from the individual gene’s point of view, that is how it must be. Natural selection ultimately selects, not for human improvement, health, comfort, a balance of nature, advances of complexity, or whatever, but for one thing and one thing only: the reproductive success of genes for which organisms are nothing more than their biodegradable packaging. Only this view of things can make sense of suicidal altruism from the point of view of natural selection.

and a science journalist, who is also chairman of the International Centre for Life, Newcastle.

Matt Ridley, in Genome, pp.127-8:

For instance, given a choice between a safe, comfortable and long life for the individual or a risky, tiring and dangerous attempt to breed, virtually all animals (and indeed plants) choose the latter. They choose to shorten their odds of death in order to have offspring. Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body’s survival is secondary to the goal of getting another generation started. If genes are ‘selfish replicators’ and bodies are their disposable ‘vehicles’ (in Richard Dawkins’s controversial terminology), then it should not be much of a surprise to find that genomes, like bodies, are habitats replete with their own version of ecological competition and co-operation. Truly, in the 1970s for the first time, evolution became genetic.

Dawkins himself has been at pains to dispel the myth that he is a ‘genetic determinist’. It quickly becomes evident that he is not – for anyone bothering to read his controversial book properly. In the endnotes to his 1989 editions, he states plainly: “I am not advocating a morality based on evolution” and “In fact genes ‘determine’ behaviour only in a statistical sense.”

So for anyone interested in these issues, don’t sit around waiting for the great and the good to form your opinions for you – seek out the material and make up your own mind.

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