

Why it's time to lay the Selfish Gene to rest - anigbrowl
http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/

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zt
See Dawkin's response at
[http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/...](http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/adversarial-
journalism-and-the-selfish-gene)

 _The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the
important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the
same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed
grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the
butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different
ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses
but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether
– it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but
there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and
in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other
books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the
thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely
untrue._

 _The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying
particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a
sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene
were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural
selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the
environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny
minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its
genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a
queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental
triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of
another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional
strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith._

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tokenadult
Jerry Coyne's response to this took up two posts on his website:

[http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/david-
dob...](http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/david-dobbs-mucks-
up-evolution-part-i/)

[http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/david-
dob...](http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/david-dobbs-mucks-
up-evoution-part-ii/)

On his part, Dawkins has commented that his famous book could have had the
title _The Cooperative Gene_ chosen for it by the publisher without any change
of text in the book itself.

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rjknight
The Selfish Gene is one of those books that has an uncanny ability to provoke
truly awful criticism, both from people who should know better and people who
quite evidently never will. To be fair to him, David Dobbs is merely in the
former category.

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scotty79
Genes, gene expression, immune system learning, changes in symbiotic baterial
flora, memory in neurons, culture. All of those are systems work towards
survival and are always/sometimes/possibly passed down to offspring with
mixing and random noise to help their surival. Inheritance of genes expression
is interesting but does not negate importance of genes no more that inheriting
bacterial flora from mother (or a surgeon doing c-section) does that. Genes
are uniquely important because they are the base system.

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andrewflnr
The explanation of "genetic assimilation" seems bogus to me. The expression-
based trait doesn't need the gene change to propogate. The genetic change
doesn't need to wait for the expression-based trait to appear. Why are we
looking at them as being part of the same process, instead of coincidentally
parallel ones?

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winfred
How many of these controllable genes do we humans have? How can I turn some on
and off to see what will happen?

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obelos
tl;dr “I haven't yet read _The Extended Phenotype_”.

