“Richard Dawkins brilliantly made us think in terms of the gene”: re-read The Selfish Gene
In 1976 Richard Dawkins published a book named after an idea he came up with while lecturing on animal behavior for his PhD supervisor. It so happened that the thought of The selfish gene it was an irresistible scientific metaphor, and the book became a world bestseller. It remains one of the most exciting popular books on evolution ever written.
After fifty years The selfish gene feels its age, but the main message remains relevant not only because gene selfishness is a great meme (the term is coined by Dawkins at the end of the book), but because it’s such a powerful way to understand how evolution works: the metaphor makes us think as if genes were acting selfishly. It forces us to think in terms of the gene. In doing so, Dawkins modernized evolutionary biology and also democratized it—making it a people’s business. Now everyone could understand why bats share blood with each other, why orchids mimic bees, and why the common cold virus makes us cough: why living things looked and behaved the way they did.
When Charles Darwin laid out his theory of natural selection, he understood that individuals compete for resources and that they differ in how they survive and how many offspring they add to the next generation. Individual members of a species should behave for their own good, Darwin said, not for the benefit of others, and traits that help individuals do better are passed on. Fine on the surface, but it didn’t always work – for example in insect societies where sterile workers work to help the queen reproduce or even kill themselves to protect their nest. Darwin’s solution was to argue that in social insects such as ants, wasps, and bees, the family is actually the individual, so the sterile workers who apparently help the family were essentially helping themselves. It was a scam, but he was in the right place.
During the mid-20th century, as part of a reworking of evolutionary biology and its connection with genetics that became known as the modern synthesis, a number of biologists mathematically described how evolution works by changes in the frequency of genetic variants. Then two biologists in particular, George Williams and WD Hamilton, showed how understanding adaptations (structures, traits, and behaviors that help organisms survive) as working for a gene could explain apparent altruism. From a gene perspective, it makes sense for a worker ant to forego reproduction and help its mother raise offspring because it helps its own genes into the next generation.
Without knowing about DNA or genes, Darwin guessed what was going on. Dawkins brought mathematics and theory to life beautifully. Out were the Lamarckian “just so” stories of evolution (for example, that elephants got their long trunks by stretching them over generations), and out was the idea that organisms behave for the good of the species; v was a graspable description of biology that was consistent with genetics.
One of the criticisms leveled at Dawkins following the work of Williams and Hamilton is that he merely popularized what others had invented. But The selfish gene she acted as a midwife of academic theory; gave birth to a concept that influenced generations of biologists and, importantly, the public.
Another criticism is that the book’s idea of what a gene is and how DNA works is incorrect or oversimplified. DNA does not work alone; the components of the cell act in symphony to produce the phenotype. The key feature of a gene is not its executive power, but its stability over time, the persistence of its genetic sequence. Dawkins knew this, but chose not to tell the book Immortal gene.
Perhaps the biggest problem people have with the book now is that it popularized genetic animism—the belief that DNA controls the cell and the organism. In Dawkins’ telling, we are “giant mining robots”, survival machines “blindly programmed to protect the selfish molecules known as genes”. At best, this is a literary oversimplification. At worst, it promotes the mistaken view of genetic determinism, the idea that aspects of our behavior are inevitably programmed by our genes. We would see this again in the overreach of the Human Genome Project and the idea that there are genes “for” everything from heart disease to intelligence. That’s not how genes work.
Reading today, I am also struck by how the metaphor of selfishness underscores the role of cooperation and symbiosis in life. Dawkins addresses this in the text, but the force of his metaphor is such that this aspect is inevitably neglected.
These criticisms aside, the way in which Dawkins so brilliantly and suggestively described animal behavior in terms of the gene is why it had such huge influence. People forget that Dawkins was not a geneticist but an ethologist, studying the evolutionary basis of animal behavior. As an undergraduate, I was intrigued and became a behavioral ecologist. And that for me is an exemption from most other things. Therefore, despite its partial obsolescence, the metaphor still works.
Book by Rowan Hooper Uniformity: Symbiosis and the hidden story of life’s greatest collaborationsis released in June.
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