The Unselfish Gene

For the last 30 years we have been treated to Richard Dawkins "Selfish Gene" as a semi-scientific adjunct to neo liberal thinking and economic. Nature red in tooth and claw dressed up in 20th century language, the theory appeared to provide scientific backing to the "no society" view of human evolution and social development. Each individual owed it to his or her genes to act as selfishly as possible.

New Scientist says here that the limitiations of this theory have been breached - whereas individual creatures act most successfully on selfish gene principles, it may not work like that for species.

Quote :

Evolutionary success is all about looking out for number one - or so most biologists would tell you. The genes that do the best job of passing themselves along to the next generation, whether by brute selfishness or canny cooperation, are the ones that flourish - a view most memorably championed by Richard Dawkins more than 30 years ago in his bestselling book The Selfish Gene.

This relentless focus on the gene may not tell the whole story, however. A small but growing coterie of evolutionary biologists argue that it leaves us blind to crucial evolutionary processes at higher scales - among groups, species and even whole ecosystem. If they are right, the popular view of evolution and the biological world needs a radical shake-up.

Almost everyone agrees that the gene's-eye view works perfectly well most of the time. "It's dominated the field, and dominated for a long time," says Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Indeed, many biologists think the selfish-gene concept can explain all the intricacies thrown up by evolution, and not just the obviously selfish ones.

Helping relatives
For example, the gene or genes that make worker ants devote themselves to helping their queen reproduce rather than reproducing themselves might appear altruistic but really these genes are promoting their own survival: helping a close relative is another way of passing on one's own genes. As this example shows, "selfish genes" do not always favour self-centred, uncooperative behaviour, a common misreading of Dawkins's position.

However, the consensus is that evolution never favours what might be called "selfless" genes - that is, adaptations that benefit a group of organisms or the species as a whole. An example would be a gene that restricts how many offspring a predator has, to avoid wiping out its prey. Such a gene should always lose out to selfish genes that maximise reproduction, the thinking goes, even if reproducing without restraint threatens the survival of the whole species.

Increasingly, though, this consensus is being challenged, and on several fronts. The least controversial of these is the notion that entire species themselves can have traits that, over geological time, make them more likely than others to escape extinction and branch off new daughter species. This can lead to evolutionary change that could not be predicted from individual adaptations alone.

Species selection
For example, David Jablonski of the University of Chicago has shown that, over millions of years, marine snails with small ranges have been more likely to go extinct than more widespread ones. "Even small perturbations can take out a highly localised species, whereas a more widespread species will live to fight another day," says Jablonski. As a result, the geographic range of species in a lineage tends to increase over time, Jablonski has found - though this trend is muddied by periodic mass extinctions, which wipe out widespread species as well as those that occupy a more specialist niche.

This so-called "species selection" may help explain other puzzling observations. For example, larger individuals often outcompete smaller ones, so selection at the level of individuals would suggest that the average body size of mammals ought to increase over millions of years - yet in many groups it doesn't. A larger-bodied species, however, has a larger requirement for food and space, and so might run a greater risk of extinction. In this case species selection may oppose individual selection and so help keep body size constant, says Jablonski.

Even Dawkins agrees there is something to the idea of species selection. "What it takes to survive as an individual is different than what it takes to survive as a species," he says. Selection at the species level does not drive the evolution of new traits but it does help determine how such adaptations fare in the broad sweep of evolution, in changing environments over vast stretches of time. "Species selection may not build horns, but it can determine how many species have horns or how long horns persist," says Jablonski.

Quote :

What it takes to survive as an individual is different to what it takes to survive as a species
Just how important is species selection, though? "How frequent is it, and how often does it operate counter to individual selection? We don't have a good sense of that yet, because so few people are testing at multiple levels," says Jablonski.

Whole article here:
LINK

cactus flower wrote:

For the last 30 years we have been treated to Richard Dawkins "Selfish Gene" as a semi-scientific adjunct to neo liberal thinking and economic. Nature red in tooth and claw dressed up in 20th century language, the theory appeared to provide scientific backing to the "no society" view of human evolution and social development. Each individual owed it to his or her genes to act as selfishly as possible.

Nobody who has actually read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" could possibly think this reflects Dawkins' own position. He can't help it if a bunch of neocon nutters employ his biological theory to society in general, no more than Heisenberg could be blamed if Noel Dempsey tried to use the Uncertainty Principle to explain why the trains never ran on time while he was the relevant Minister.

Dawkins explicitly states in the book that humans having acquired sentience and transcended the naked genetic imperatives can and do thwart those urges to behave selflessly to build stable social structures.

coc wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

For the last 30 years we have been treated to Richard Dawkins "Selfish Gene" as a semi-scientific adjunct to neo liberal thinking and economic. Nature red in tooth and claw dressed up in 20th century language, the theory appeared to provide scientific backing to the "no society" view of human evolution and social development. Each individual owed it to his or her genes to act as selfishly as possible.

Nobody who has actually read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" could possibly think this reflects Dawkins' own position. He can't help it if a bunch of neocon nutters employ his biological theory to society in general, no more than Heisenberg could be blamed if Noel Dempsey tried to use the Uncertainty Principle to explain why the trains never ran on time while he was the relevant Minister.

Dawkins explicitly states in the book that humans having acquired sentience and transcended the naked genetic imperatives can and do thwart those urges to behave selflessly to build stable social structures.

I wouldn't argue with that, and his theories were vulgarised by others for political purposes. The point of the New Scientist articles is that the "naked genetic imperatives" include group and species imperatives, and not just those of the individual gene. Do you have any thoughts on that?