The Cooperative Gene?
Posted on Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is a classic in evolutionary biology, but unfortunately one that is often misunderstood – thanks mostly to those whom, as Dawkins puts it, “prefer to read a book by title only, omitting the rather extensive footnote which is the book itself.” The most common misinterpretation of the book is that Dawkins is celebrating selfishness, somehow offering scientific support for the “greed is good” ethos of right-wing Reaganites and Thatcherites of the time. Anyone who actually read the book (and it’s a great read) knows that’s not the case at all: Dawkins argument for a “selfish gene” is actually proposed as a counter-weight to the “paradigm of the selfish organism” and the “selfish species” that dominate much of evolutionary thinking. Genes aren’t consciously selfish like you or I might be selfish, but are metaphorically selfish: we can act towards them as if they were selfish: their only mission in life is to make copies of themselves. Selfish genes, however, can build kind, cooperative, even altruistic organisms – and that’s what most of the book is about actually.
The misinterpretations are all over the place though. For example, I recently watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and in the movie they discuss how Enron CEO Jeff Skillings' favorite book was The Selfish Gene and how Skillings loved the book because he thought it showed how great greed and competition were. Is Dawkins responsible for the misinterpretations of his work, however?
It’s the 30 year anniversary of the book and I just found a talk where Dawkins reflects on the title of the book. He admits that, “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.” He goes on to say:
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 will 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.