The Selfish Gene

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

Just as whole boats win or lose races, it is indeed individuals who live or die, and the immediate manifestation of natural selection is nearly always at the individual level.

According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.

Most genes exert their influence during foetal life, others during childhood, other during young adulthood, others in middle age, and yet others in old age. (Reflect that a caterpillar and the butterfly it turns into have exactly the same set of genes.)

The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.

But how can a single gene determine all the multifarious aspects of mimicry-colour, shape, spot pattern, rhythm of flight? The answer is that one gene in the sense of a cistron probably cannot. But by the unconscious and automatic 'editing' achieved by inversions and other accidental rearrangements of genetic material, a large cluster of formerly separate genes has come together in a tight linkage group on a chromosome. The whole cluster behaves like a single gene-indeed, by our definition it now is a single gene-and it has an 'allele' which is really another cluster. One cluster contains the cistrons concerned with mimicking species A; the other those concerned with mimicking species B. Each cluster is so rarely split up by crossing-over that an intermediate butterfly is never seen in nature, but they do very occasionally turn up if large numbers of butterflies are bred in the laboratory.

Then natural selection may tend to favour the new 'genetic unit' so formed, and it will spread through the future population. It is possible that gene complexes have, over the years, been extensively rearranged or 'edited' in this kind of way.