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The Selfish Gene turns 30

Saturday 22 April  2006 

Summary

Richard Dawkins spoke at an event at the London School of Economics held to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of his book, The Selfish Gene.

Program Transcript

Robyn Williams: Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene is now 30, so the London School of Economics, the LSE, has decided to celebrate. We’ll have their list of scientific superstars next week, but here’s the man himself, the man who wrote The Selfish Gene, on what it meant and what we might make of it 30 years on.

Richard Dawkins: I’m sometimes asked if there’s any unifying philosophy in all my activities. I suppose I’m a lover of explanation. I love to reduce complex mysteries by means of simple explanation, and I suppose that makes me a reductionist, but the word means so many different things, and is to some people a dirty word. It’s one thing to reduce, in the sense of trying to find simple explanations for complex phenomena, and in that sense I’m proud to be a reductionist. But if it’s taken to mean reducing in the sense of demeaning or underestimating the beauty, the complexity of that which we’re trying to explain, then I would not own up to it. I want to do full justice to the complexity of that which we’re trying to explain, while all the time seeking the simplest possible explanation for it. So in that sense I am a reductionist; I’m a materialist. As to whether I’m a determinist, I’ll let you know when I’ve decided.

Although I’m very interested in the way life is, I’m also fascinated by the question; are there aspects of life that just had to be so? For example, it’s a matter of fact that the genetics that we know is digital, both at the Mendelian level of the independent assortment of genes in pedigrees, and also at the Watson and Crick level of the digital information within each gene. That’s a fact. But is the digitalness of genetics just a fact, or is it something that had to be so, for life to work at all? And my suspicion is that genetics did indeed have to be digital, in order at least for evolution by natural selection to work, and I further suspect that evolution by natural selection is also a necessary condition for all of life, wherever life may be found anywhere in the universe. This is my Universal Darwinism claim.

Now, if you take your science as narrowly evidential, you’ll say something like, ‘Since you’ve never seen life on another planet, how can you possibly say anything about the way life might be universally?’ On the face of it that sounds like a reasonable complaint, but on the other hand there surely must be some things that theory tells us must be so, and it can’t be right to rule out of bounds everything that we can’t see with our own eyes. This, by the way, is the inspiration for choosing the Desmond Morris painting The Expectant Valley, which was on the original hardback edition of The Selfish Gene and has been revived in the 30th anniversary retro edition.

So what are the general principles of life, wherever life might be found? I just want to suggest some candidates, as a sort of stimulus to get other people thinking of others. First, Darwinism itself. I've mentioned that. I think it’s universal. Can’t prove it, but I think it is. Second, digital genetics, with very low mutation rate. Does it have to be DNA? Presumably not. Does it have to be a polynucleotide? Possibly not. Does it have to have a triplet code? Almost certainly not. Does it have to be one-dimensional? The DNA code is a one-dimensional string of digits. Or could it be two-dimensional? Could it be a two-dimensional array? I suspect that it probably could. Could it be three-dimensional? Almost certainly not, because a three-dimensional code is very hard to read out of. But there does have to be something three-dimensional, and in our form of life it’s provided by proteins. Proteins are the three-dimensional executives which are specified by the one-dimensional genetic code and which in their turn specify the whole of embryology and hence the rest of life.

Sexual recombination. In our form of life this could be said to be a prerequisite for the existence of what we call species, not in the boring taxonomist’s sense, but in the sense of an entity which has a gene pool in which information is passed on. Multicellularity. Life as we know it on this planet is either small or is built up from large numbers of small units, which we call cells. Is this something that had to be so? Or could one imagine a life form which was large, and yet not cellular? But every time I meet a biochemist, the first question I always ask them is; would you please devise for me an alternative biochemistry? And see how different it is possible to be and still, at least in theory, work.

Next question might be, does the information have to be molecular at all? Memes. This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as a kind of…almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes. What if they were computer viruses? They hadn’t been invented when I wrote The Selfish Gene so I went straight for memes, units of cultural inheritance.

I want to say a little bit, which I actually also said in the new preface to the 30th anniversary edition, the title The Selfish Gene; I don’t think it’s a great title. I’m quite pleased with some of my other titles, but I don’t think this is one of my best. It can and has given rise to misunderstanding. The best way to explain it is by correctly locating the emphasis. If you emphasize ‘selfish’ then you will think the book is about selfishness, which it isn’t, it’s mostly about altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is ‘gene’ and that’s not because I ever thought that genes are deterministically important in the sense that is politically objectionable to some people; it’s because of a debate within Darwinism. The central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected, the kind of thing which becomes more or less numerous in the gene pool. That unit will become, more or less by definition, selfish, in this sense. Altruism would then be favoured at other levels. So if natural selection chooses between species, then we could write a book called The Selfish Species, and we would then expect individual organisms to behave for the good of the species. That isn’t the way it is; it is in fact the selfish gene, which means that we expect and see individual organisms behaving for the good of the selfish gene, which may mean altruistic behavior at the level of the individual organism. And that’s quite largely what the book is about.

I can see how the title The Selfish Gene could be misunderstood, especially by those philosophers who prefer to read a book by title only, omitting the rather extensive footnote which is the book itself. Alternative titles could well have been The Immortal Gene, The Altruistic Vehicle, or indeed The Cooperative Gene. The book could equally well have been called The Cooperative Gene, and it would scarcely have needed to be changed at all.

One of the main points in the book is that genes in a sense do cooperate; not that groups of genes prosper at the expense of rival groups, but rather each gene is seen as pursuing its own self-interested agenda against the background of the other genes in the gene pool, the set of candidates for sexual shuffling within a species. Those other genes should be thought of as part of the climate, part of the context, part of the environmental background against which genes are selected, rather like the weather. Natural selection under those conditions will see to it that gangs of mutually compatible genes arise, each one selected for its capacity to cooperate with the others that it is likely to meet in bodies, which means the other genes of the gene pool of the species, that’s in the case of a sexual species. Given that natural selection for selfish genes in that sense tends to favor cooperation, we then have to admit that there are some genes that do no such thing, and work against the interests of the rest of the genome, the true selfish DNA. And there’s a bit of a terminological problem that arises here. Selfish DNA is DNA which works at the expense of the rest of the genome. Selfish genes in my sense also include genes which actually cooperate when they build bodies, because a body is a cooperative enterprise of many genes. So they are still selfish genes in my original sense. So some people have resorted to the use of the phrase ‘ultra selfish genes’ or ‘outlaw genes’ to distinguish those.

A new book has appeared, very recently, called Genes in Conflict, which is the last word in this subject. Bob Trivers is one of the four intellectual heroes of the book, the others mentioned being Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and George Williams. There are of course many others, because I really need to stress that my book is more a summary of ideas of others, and I’d be quite embarrassed if it were thought that I were claiming them for myself. The neo-Darwinian synthesis of Fisher, Haldane and Wright already foreshadowed the idea of the selfish gene very explicitly.

One of the oddest reactions to The Selfish Gene has been the desire expressed by more than one person to un-read it. Here’s the verdict of a reader in Australia, for example:

‘Fascinating, but at times I wish I could unread it. On one level, I can share in the sense of wonder Dawkins so evidently sees in the workings-out of such complex processes, but at the same time I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered for more than a decade. Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper, trying to believe, but not quite being able to, I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quite a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.’

I previously, in another book, Unweaving the Rainbow, described similar reactions. There was a man in New Zealand who said he couldn’t sleep for three nights after reading it, and a teacher in Canada wrote to say that a pupil of his had come to him in tears, because reading The Selfish Gene had convinced her that life was futile and not worth living. He drew her attention to the analogy of when Lenin was placed in a sealed train, in case the bacillus of Leninism should leak out when he was transported back to Russia, and he advised this young woman to show the book to none of her friends.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. That’s the first thing to say. But the second thing to say is almost as important, which is that there really never was any reason for these despairing reactions at all. It is a complete misunderstanding of what science can tell us about ourselves if we conclude from it that we are somehow diminished by it, by the truth. Our life is what we make of it, no new facts about our nature can change that. And another way of putting it is, in the concluding words of the original first edition of The Selfish Gene:

‘We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on Earth can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’

Thank you very much.

Guests on this program:

Richard Dawkins
Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science
Oxford University
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/index.shtml

Publications:

The Selfish Gene
30th Anniversary edition

Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Third Edition
Published: 16 March 2006
ISBN-10: 0-19-929115-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-929115-1

Further information:

Darwin@LSE
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/darwin/

Presenter: Robyn Williams
Producer: Polly Rickard and David Fisher

 

 


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