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The Selfish Gene, 40th Anniversary Edition
Richard DawkinsScientists, unlike politicians, can take pleasure in being wrong. A politician
who changes his mind is accused of ‘flip-flopping’. Tony Blair boasted that
he had ‘not got a reverse gear’. Scientists on the whole prefer to see their
ideas vindicated, but an occasional reversal gains respect, especially when
graciously acknowledged. I have never heard of a scientist being maligned
as a flip-flopper.
In some ways I would quite like to find ways to recant the central
message of The Selfish Gene. So many exciting things are fast happening in
the world of genomics, it would seem almost inevitable—even tantalizing
—that a book with the word ‘gene’ in the title would, forty years on, need
drastic revision if not outright discarding. This might indeed be so, were it
not that ‘gene’ in this book is used in a special sense, tailored to evolution
rather than embryology. My definition is that of George C. Williams, one of
the acknowledged heroes of the book, now lost to us along with John
Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton: ‘A gene is defined as any portion of
chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to
serve as a unit of natural selection.’ I pushed it to a somewhat facetious
conclusion: ‘To be strict, this book should be called … The slightly selfish
big bit of chromosome and the even more selfish little bit of chromosome.’ As
opposed to the embryologist’s concern with how genes affect phenotypes,
we have here the neo-Darwinist’s concern with changes in frequencies of
entities in populations. Those entities are genes in the Williams sense
(Williams later called that sense the ‘codex’). Genes can be counted and
their frequency is the measure of their success. One of the central messages
of this book is that the individual organism doesn’t have this property. An
organism has a frequency of one, and therefore cannot ‘serve as a unit of
natural selection’. Not in the same sense of replicator anyway. If the
organism is a unit of natural selection,
…
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