Final Selfish Gene Blog Entry

The Selfish Gene

P. 250-266

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...... I didn't understand what "built in unfairness" or "asymmetry in the cost of living." Just as well, why does Dawkins dedicate so much of this chapter on the significance of parasitic coexistence?

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Bottlenecking the life cycle: Restarting the building of a body each time. In other words, each time a new person is born the drawing board of humanity is reset.

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....In my opinion the "bottleneck life cycle" can be both, good and bad. For example, by starting over the genes have a chance to perfect previous models and make the body more efficient and effective in its functions. However, if by some chance they make a terrible mistake, this could lead to the self destruction of the body they formed; the probability of these same genes being passed on is considerably lower as the body could die before it has reached the reproductive state of its life. Therefore, the "bottleneck life cycle" is somewhat flaw proof, and it allows more perfection than mistakes. This theory, or system allows genes to perfect themselves as they pass on from one generation to the next, rooting out flaws very early on.

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Excerpt from RICHARD DAWKINS'S EVOLUTION By: By Ian Parker: (http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Media/dawkny.shtml)

......Like so much of Dawkins's enterprise, the inspiration for "The Selfish Gene" was rebuttal: the book was designed to vanish an infuriatingly widespread popular misconception about evolution. The misconception was that Darwinian selection worked at the level of the group or the species, that it had something to do with the balance of nature. How else could one understand, for example, the evolution of apparent "altruism" in animal behavior? How could self-sacrifice, or niceness, ever have been favored by natural selection? There were answers to these questions, and they had been recently developed, in particular, by the evolutionary biologists W. D. Hamilton, now at Oxford, and George Williams, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. But their answers were muted. Dawkins has written, "For me, their insight had a visionary quality. But I found their expressions of it too laconic, not full-throated enough. I was convinced that an amplified and developed version could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain."

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......Essentially, their insight was that altruism in nature was a trick of the light. Once one understands that evolution works at the level of the gene--a process of gene survival, taking place (as Dawkins developed it) in bodies that the gene occupies and then discards--the problem of altruism begins to disappear. Evolution favors strategies that cause as many of an animal's genes as possible to survive--strategies that may not immediately appear to be evolutionarily sound. In the idea's simplest form, if an animal puts its life at risk for its offspring, it is preserving a creature - gene "vehicle," in Dawkins's language--half of whose genes are its own. This is a sensible, selfish strategy, despite the possible inconvenience of death. No one is being nice.

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.......Starting from this point, "The Selfish Gene" took its reader into more complex areas of animal behavior, where more persuasion was needed--more mathematics, sometimes, and more daring logical journeys. Dawkins assumed no prior knowledge of the subject in his reader, yet was true to his science. He made occasional ventures into ambitious prose (genes "swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots"), but mostly relied on sustained clarity, the taming of large numbers, and the judicious use of metaphor. The result was exhilarating. Upon the book's publication, the Times called it "the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius." Douglas Adams, a friend of Dawkins's and the author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," found the experience of reading it "one of those absolutely shocking moments of revelation when you understand that the world is fundamentally different from what you thought it was." He adds, "I'm hesitating to use the word, but it's almost like a religious experience."

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.......The last thing that would have crossed my mind was to think that this book was a rebuttal to the usual misconceptions of evolution. I guess that thinking about that way makes sense; however, it's not the first thing that comes to mind. I actually thought this book was a tool for Dawkins to show and teach any average joe about the intricacies behind the whole process of evolution. (Funny to say average joe, though, it's not one of the easiest books I've ever read.) For someone interested in the field of science or sociology or evolution this is probably a very interesting book, but, personally, for me it wasn't. It was a bore having to go through all the technical terms a million times until I kind of understood what was going on. It was very tedious reading that required 200% of my attention in order to understand a very disproportional amount of what was actually being said.