{"id":814761,"date":"2026-10-26T21:04:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T21:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/814761\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T21:04:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T21:04:12","slug":"the-selfish-gene-50-years-on-its-time-for-an-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/814761\/","title":{"rendered":"The Selfish Gene, 50 years on \u2014 it\u2019s time for an update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I first read The Selfish Gene<\/a> in the 1980s, as a graduate student in neurobiology and animal behaviour. I admired the clarity with which biologist Richard Dawkins distilled mid-twentieth-century work in evolutionary biology.<\/p>\n

The idea at the core of the book, published in 1976, was thrillingly simple: that a living organism is just a gene\u2019s way of making more organisms that can carry the gene down the generations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dawkins\u2019s paradox: dissecting the body\u2019s battle to keep selfish genes in check<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Back then, The Selfish Gene seemed pretty harmless. Dawkins\u2019s ideas tracked with mainstream sociobiology. It was a popular book that covered exactly the sort of ideas that my lecturers were already teaching.<\/p>\n

Re-reading it now, with decades of scholarship in the history of biology under my belt, it seems less benign. The determinism baked into the \u201cgene\u2019s-eye view\u201d in the book troubles me, as does the passivity of the organism in Dawkins\u2019s telling \u2014 a \u201cvehicle\u201d, a mere \u201creplicator\u201d. The implication: that traits such as aggression are hard-wired<\/a> into people. Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, new tools, fresh models and scholars in many disciplines have begun to embrace the complex reality of biology. Readers in search of an understanding of life on Earth today would do better to reach for books that take a broader view.<\/p>\n

Gene-centric views<\/p>\n

The Selfish Gene was the apotheosis of the \u2018modern evolutionary synthesis\u2019. That theory uses mathematics to quantify species evolution at the population level, through changes in the frequency of different versions of genes, known as alleles, across time and space.<\/p>\n

Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that the gene\u2019s-eye view was \u201cimplicit\u201d in the 1930s writings of modern-synthesis pioneer (and eugenicist) Ronald Fisher and his contemporaries, but was made \u201cexplicit\u201d by evolutionary biologists George Williams and William Hamilton, in the 1960s. \u201cFor me,\u201d he wrote, \u201ctheir insight had a visionary quality. But I found their expressions of it too laconic, not full-throated enough.\u201d The Selfish Gene, then, takes the ideas to their extreme.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Richard Dawkins book of the dead is haunted by ghosts of past works<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The modern synthesis blends two branches of evolutionary biology and genetics: neo-Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. Neo-Darwinian evolution was established in the 1890s by biologist August Weismann<\/a> in his book Die Keimplasma (The Germ Plasm). The book builds off On the Origin of Species, in which Charles Darwin outlines a central tenet \u2014 organisms evolve over many generations through an internal process called natural selection. This is the Darwinism of the first edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Yet over five successive editions, published between then and 1872, Darwin had given increasing credence to the \u2018effects of use and disuse\u2019 \u2014 the idea, associated with naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that characteristics acquired during an organism\u2019s lifetime can be inherited. Darwin wrote, for example, about blind cave fish (Astyanax mexicanus). Their ancestors had eyes when they first nosed into a lightless cave. But after going unused for generations, the eyes degenerated, and the change gradually became heritable.<\/p>\n

Darwin saw no reason that his theories couldn\u2019t accommodate such phenomena. He didn\u2019t speculate on mechanisms. Today, an evolutionary biologist might argue that any animal that put less energy than its neighbours into making a complex but useless structure, such as an unused eye, would have surplus energy to devote to, say, bigger gonads or defending its territory, and thus would gain a survival advantage. To Weismann, however, incorporating use and disuse into Darwinism was a dangerous move towards teleology, and risked ceding biological change to bishops and mystics. He proposed that only the germ plasm (the material carried in sperm and egg cells) was passed from parents to offspring. Nothing outside could affect what was transmitted.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Trays containing the entire human genome, split into more than 20,000 fragments of DNA.Credit: James King-Holmes\/SPL<\/p>\n

The second field that makes up the modern synthesis, Mendelian genetics, was invented not by Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth-century monk after whom the field is named, but by naturalist William Bateson, in his strange and brilliant 1902 book, Mendel\u2019s Principles of Heredity: A Defence. Mendel ran experiments crossing peas, and in 1866 published a paper describing rules that governed how traits were passed down \u2014 how many offspring of a green and yellow pea cross would be green and how many yellow, for instance. We now know that only some traits, controlled by single genes, follow the simplistic patterns he observed.<\/p>\n

The conservative Mendel claimed only to have found a law \u201cvalid for Pisum\u201d (the pea genus); Bateson claimed that all heredity followed Mendel\u2019s laws. Bateson\u2019s book was \u2018a defence\u2019 against the theories of his rival and erstwhile best friend, Walter Weldon, who argued that such neat, simple laws do not describe how nature works. Weldon pointed out that traits such as height vary continuously, in a bell-shaped, normal distribution. He argued that such traits result from many factors, both hereditary and environmental.<\/p>\n

In the end, as historian Gregory Radick has argued<\/a>, Mendelism became the universally accepted form of heredity more for practical reasons than because it captured an essential truth. It\u2019s easy to teach and methodologically simple.<\/p>\n

The new biology<\/p>\n

Both components of the modern synthesis focus on the gene as the sole determinant of heredity. Both halves reached essentially universal acceptance well before Dawkins came along \u2014 the spit and swagger of the field\u2019s proponents keeping challenges and alternatives at bay.<\/p>\n

To a historian, this universal acceptance sounds close to ideology. Fortunately, since The Selfish Gene was published, scientists\u2019 understanding of the basic mechanisms that drive evolution has changed drastically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I first read The Selfish Gene in the 1980s, as a graduate student in neurobiology and animal behaviour.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4390,59,916,1293,4230,4231,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-evolution","tag-gb","tag-genetics","tag-history","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}