Hey all,

As some of you will be aware (from previous questions I have asked) science isn't really my 'thing' but I try my utmost to get my head round it.

Can someone please give me a rundown on what The Selfish Gene (For Dummies) is?

I'll tell you what I think it is and you can tear it to pieces at will

I think it's the driver behind natural selection, it's the gene that performs in the best interests of the continuance of the species.

Does that even make sense?

Have not read The Sefish Gene yet
but natural selection is not as perfect
as you might believe. All it does is ever so
slightly alter the process by which advantage
is passed on through propagation because it is a
rather cumbersome process - Evolution proper occurs
over millions of years and there may be a reason for this

And that reason may be extinction - here let me give you an
example : now suppose that a predator was so successful at evolving
that it could kill prey without any real disadvantage. So therefore over time
that prey would then cease to exist - if that could not then be replaced that predator
would then become extinct too. What Evolution does therefore is to confer equal advantage
to all species so that both survive. So successive generations are genetically modified but only so
slightly significantly so as not to give them an unnecessary advantage against any natural enemies they
may have. I realise this may not actually answer your question Paula but I think that it is relevant none the less

It does make sense, but it is very wrong.

Paula wrote:I think it's the driver behind natural selection, it's the gene that performs in the best interests of the continuance of the species.

The bolded part is the fundamental error. Genes perform in the best interest of themselves. This is the essence of the concept. As far as they 'care' about anything, it is there own survival and reproduction. As it happens, the interest of the continuation and reproduction of the genes' host (me and you for example) and the continuation of the species generally coincide with the gene's own interests.

To paraphrase one of the concepts presented in the book that has stuck with me: We like to think that genes exist as a method for us to copy ourselves into the next generation. The actual truth is that we exist as a method for genes to copy themselves into the next generation. And we wouldn't be around if that method didn't work for them.

We are the vehicles and they are the drivers.

The vehicles may abide by certain rules of the road and extend courtesies that benefit all road users. At the vehicle-to-vehicle level this may be perceived as altruism - giving way to vehicles from the right, not cutting people up etc. - but the force leading this behaviour is the driver's selfish desire to get somewhere as quickly as possible. If abiding by the rules and exchanging courtesies is 'calculated' to help that, then those behaviours will be encouraged. If not they would be cut out by natural selection.

The (controversial at the time, now largely accepted) point that "The Selfish Gene" expressly argues is that natural selection occurs at the level of the gene, not the level of the individual, much less the level of the species. A gene needs to be fit in it's own environment. If, for example, a gene that had a neutral or even negative effect on the individual animal could discover a strategy that allowed it to 'stow-away' into the next generation by (say) attaching itself to other, useful, genes, it has improved it's own fitness but without improving the fitness of the animal.

I am conscious, typing away, that I am probably doing Dawkins a huge disservice with my feeble explanatory attempts. My recommendation to anyone with an interest in the subject is to read the book. It is not overly technical and someone with your clear level of intelligence would take a lot from it.

"The Selfish Gene" is what Richard Dawkins rather regrets calling his famous book (according to the preface to the latest edition), because it implies evolution makes us all selfish, when one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes can, and often do, code for partly altruistic individuals. The clearest example is of parents altruistically looking after their offspring. The offspring have many of the same genes as the parents, so if the parents look after their young instead of only looking after themselves, then more of the parents' genes will survive into the next generation. The genes of selfish parents will tend to die out, because the young of those parents are more likely to die. The genes are being "selfish" in that they code for whatever maximises their representation in later generations, but the behaviour patterns they are coding for are, in the case of those parents, altruistic towards their children.

Evolved altruism coded for by "selfish" genes doesn't only happen with parents and children, it's also seen, for example, in social insects like bees, where the workers don't have any offspring and look after their siblings instead. The "selfish" genes in the bees are coding for entirely altruistic workers as well as for queens and drones which reproduce, because colonies with altruistic workers survived, where bees that did not have colonies did not survive.

The snag about evolved altruism is that it only evolves between related individuals, which makes human cooperation unusual, because humans cooperate with, and are often altruistic towards, unrelated individuals. However, most of our altruism is directed towards close kin, and the rest is almost certainly because of the huge advantages of cooperating with other people even when they are not related (for example, racism is highly disruptive in large mixed-race societies, so it's worth discouraging), but there are still fierce arguments going on about how exactly human cooperation and altruism evolved.

A selfish gene is a specific way to view evolution from the viewpoint of the propagation of gene-copies. Genes mutate all the time when they copy themselves, and those genes that happen to mutate in such a way that they have a higher likelyhood of making it into the next generation are the genes that come to dominate the population(there are more of them). So from a certain perspective, the genes can be said to be "selfish", because all that matters is their own propagation into coming generation, and everything else that happens around them is simply parts of the strategy the genes employ to this end. From this viewpoint, your genome in it's entirety could be said to be the unit of selection, a selfish one, and your entire body with it's organ and your brain etc. etc. are simply something around themselves, which the genes have constructed in order to ensure their contined survival and propagation into coming generations.
So even a single cell, like a bacteria, has a genome enveloped inside it. This genome is the selfish unit of selection, the thing that is passed on to coming generations through copying, and everything else is simply a sort of "vehicle" that the selfish genes construct.

In any case, you should read the book. It's easly accessible and doesn't require any science background at all.

The key to this is not equating the selfish gene with a selfish organism.

The 'selfish' aspect means the gene will do whatever it takes to survive, be nasty, be nice, be considerate, be helpful it doesn't matter. If it is a useful trait the gene may do it.

The Extended Phenotype was the sequels and is even more interesting in that the genes in question may exist in another organism.

John

Instead of thinking of the organisms we know and love, think of them instead as vehicles for genes - bodies are what genes make in an ever escalating competition to reproduce themselves.

zoon wrote:"The Selfish Gene" is what Richard Dawkins rather regrets calling his famous book (according to the preface to the latest edition), because it implies evolution makes us all selfish, when one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes can, and often do, code for partly altruistic individuals.

If I recall, he doesn't regret calling it that, he lambasts people for just looking at the title and not reading the book before making that erroneous criticism.

In other words -

"A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."

John

I'm loving these responses, thanks all. It's funny but the more I know about this kind of thing the scarier I find it in a way. I'm not sure that makes any sense, I certainly never looked at our existence with any kind of woo attached at all but when it's broken down to gene level like this I'm finding it a little unnerving. I can compare it to watching Carl Sagan clips about how we are all made of star stuff, just puts you in your place

I feel like I need to read the book though. Will it really not be too sciency for me?

Not at all, go for it.

Whenever I buy books like this I know I am going to read them time and time again for the rest of my life. You will always pick up bits you missed the first time round.

John

z8000783 wrote:Not at all, go for it.

Whenever I buy books like this I know I am going to read them time and time again for the rest of my life. You will always pick up bits you missed the first time round.

John

I really need to read The God Delusion again for that reason, I think I struggled with a bit of the biology stuff. I've learned a lot from coming here too so maybe that would make a difference.

Don't worry about TGD, you get enough of that stuff here, get The Selfish Gene.

John

Paula wrote:I feel like I need to read the book though. Will it really not be too sciency for me?

Not at all. There's a reason Dawkins had a reputation as an excellent educator and science populariser way before he landed his current ubiquitous title of "the atheist Richard Dawkins".

I know what you mean about these concepts being scary. It's probably not surprising when they ask us to question our very understanding of what it means to be us. I found The Selfish Gene to be particularly 'unnerving' in that respect - perhaps because it seems closer to home, less abstract, than cosmological history - but in a good way, if that makes any sense.

Spearthrower wrote:

zoon wrote:"The Selfish Gene" is what Richard Dawkins rather regrets calling his famous book (according to the preface to the latest edition), because it implies evolution makes us all selfish, when one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes can, and often do, code for partly altruistic individuals.

If I recall, he doesn't regret calling it that, he lambasts people for just looking at the title and not reading the book before making that erroneous criticism.

He does both:

Richard Dawkins (introduction to 30th anniversary edition of the Selfish Gene) wrote:
Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975, ....Tom Machsler....liked the book but not the title....I now think Maschler may have been right. Many critics....prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for "The Tale of Benjamin Bunny" or "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", but I can readily see that "The Selfish Gene" on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. ....

The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize "selfish" and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is "gene" and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, "selfish". Altruism might well be favoured at other levels. Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might expect individual organisms to behave altruistically "for the good of the species". They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation, or restrain their hunting behaviour to conserve the species' future stocks of prey. It was such widely disseminated misunderstandings of Darwinism that originally provoked me to write the book.

Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically "for the good of the genes", for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes.

Paula wrote:

z8000783 wrote:Not at all, go for it.

Whenever I buy books like this I know I am going to read them time and time again for the rest of my life. You will always pick up bits you missed the first time round.

John

I really need to read The God Delusion again for that reason, I think I struggled with a bit of the biology stuff. I've learned a lot from coming here too so maybe that would make a difference.

To be honest, if TGD was a bit technical on the Biology front, then I think that parts of The Selfish Gene might be a bit of a struggle the first time through, but you can always ask questions here - well worth reading! It was required reading on an undergraduate course, but like John said, I have gone back and read it many, many times since.

zoon wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

zoon wrote:"The Selfish Gene" is what Richard Dawkins rather regrets calling his famous book (according to the preface to the latest edition), because it implies evolution makes us all selfish, when one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes can, and often do, code for partly altruistic individuals.

If I recall, he doesn't regret calling it that, he lambasts people for just looking at the title and not reading the book before making that erroneous criticism.

He does both:

Richard Dawkins (introduction to 30th anniversary edition of the Selfish Gene) wrote:
Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975, ....Tom Machsler....liked the book but not the title....I now think Maschler may have been right. Many critics....prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for "The Tale of Benjamin Bunny" or "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", but I can readily see that "The Selfish Gene" on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. ....

The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize "selfish" and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is "gene" and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, "selfish". Altruism might well be favoured at other levels. Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might expect individual organisms to behave altruistically "for the good of the species". They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation, or restrain their hunting behaviour to conserve the species' future stocks of prey. It was such widely disseminated misunderstandings of Darwinism that originally provoked me to write the book.

Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically "for the good of the genes", for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes.

Aha thanks! That'll be why: I have a copy from 20 years ago! I've seen him mention this in other articles/books, but never seen him suggest that he now doesn't like the title.

Precambrian Rabbi wrote:

Paula wrote:I feel like I need to read the book though. Will it really not be too sciency for me?

Not at all. There's a reason Dawkins had a reputation as an excellent educator and science populariser way before he landed his current ubiquitous title of "the atheist Richard Dawkins".

I know what you mean about these concepts being scary. It's probably not surprising when they ask us to question our very understanding of what it means to be us. I found The Selfish Gene to be particularly 'unnerving' in that respect - perhaps because it seems closer to home, less abstract, than cosmological history - but in a good way, if that makes any sense.

I'm glad it's not just me

z8000783 wrote:Don't worry about TGD, you get enough of that stuff here, get The Selfish Gene.

John

Ok, it'll be my next download on the Kindle. Thanks everyone.

I'm going to give my genes names, clever little buggers

Spearthrower wrote:

Paula wrote:

z8000783 wrote:Not at all, go for it.

Whenever I buy books like this I know I am going to read them time and time again for the rest of my life. You will always pick up bits you missed the first time round.

John

I really need to read The God Delusion again for that reason, I think I struggled with a bit of the biology stuff. I've learned a lot from coming here too so maybe that would make a difference.

To be honest, if TGD was a bit technical on the Biology front, then I think that parts of The Selfish Gene might be a bit of a struggle the first time through, but you can always ask questions here - well worth reading! It was required reading on an undergraduate course, but like John said, I have gone back and read it many, many times since.

You know, I think what I do is blank out a wee bit, it get's a bit technical and I switch off. I really just need to stop being a lazy bitch and keep at it. Thing is I really want to understand it all, the way it's been put here is just fascinating.

You know me, I'll ask.