A comment on selfish genes: DIE! (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 10, 2015, 14:47 (3605 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Saturday, January 10, 2015, 14:54

Another very discerning comment on why the 'selfish gene' is a poor metaphor and limits thought:-"It's a gorgeous story. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits, it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple. It has inspired countless biologists and geneticists to plumb the gene's wonders and do brilliant work. Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and many others, the selfish-gene story is so focused on the gene's singular role in natural selection that in an age when it's ever more clear that evolution works in ways far more clever and complex than we realise, the selfish-gene model increasingly impoverishes both scientific and popular views of genetics and evolution. As both conceptual framework and metaphor, the selfish-gene has helped us see the gene as it revealed itself over the 20th century. But as a new age and new tools reveal a more complicated genome, the selfish-gene is blinding us."-"If you're West-Eberhard or of like mind, what are you to replace it with? The slave-ish gene? Not likely to leap from brain to brain. The co-operative gene? Dawkins himself considered this but rejected it and I agree that it lacks sufficient bling. And as West-Eberhard notes, any phrase with ‘gene' in it still encourages a focus on single genes. And ‘evolution is not about single genes,' she says. ‘It's about genes working together.'
 
"Perhaps better then to speak not of genes but the genome — all your genes together. And not the genome as a unitary actor, but the genome in conversation with itself, with other genomes, and with the outside environment. If grasshoppers becoming locusts, sweet bees becoming killers, and genetic assimilation are to be believed it's those conversations that define the organism and drive the evolution of new traits and species. It's not a selfish gene or a solitary genome. It's a social genome."-http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/-Also review my entry on Thursday, January 08, 2015, 00:32 re' selfish genomes