The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition (Oxford Landmark Science) Richard Dawkins ¶

[WIP] [[Blueprint]]

Notes ¶

Why are people ¶

• we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes
• universal love and species welfare that simply do not make evolutionary sense
• altruism = increase another entity's welfare at the expense of its own
• group selection: a group whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group may less likely to go extinct than an individualist group <- theory the author does not believe in because an exploiting weak link in the group he will survive better.
• question of which altruism is to be expected according to the theory of evolution
• key idea: the fundamental unit of selection and of self-interest, is at the scale of the gene, unit of heredity

The replicators ¶

• replicator = particular molecule formed by accident that was capable of making copies of itself. It's a mould or template. Imagine it as a large molecule consisting of a complex chain of various sorts of building block molecules. The small building blocks were abundantly available in the soup surrounding the replicator. Now suppose that each building block has an affinity for its own kind. Then whenever a building block from out in the soup lands up next to a part of the replicator for which it has an affinity, it will tend to stick there. The building blocks that attach themselves in this way will automatically be arranged in a sequence that mimics that of the replicator itself.
• These replicators mutate and diverge in the primeval soup, forming varieties of a common ancestor
• immergence of competition: scarcity of resources <- building blocks
• the replicators that survived were the ones who built survival machines for them to live in

• They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Immortal Coils ¶

• genes are somewhat responsible for their own development in the future -> their survival depends on the efficiency of the bodies in which they live
• recessive / dominant gene
• gene pool = genes in the general population
• meiosis -> chromosomes of mother and father merge to form one individual
• this process is in a way a crossing over, between the genetic heritage of father and mother into the child

• A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection. In the words of the previous chapter, a gene is a replicator with high copying-fidelity. Copying-fidelity is another way of saying longevity-in-the-form-of-copies and I shall abbreviate this simply to longevity.

• the shorter a genetic unit is, the less likely it is to be split during a crossing over so it is likely to live longer.
• creation of genetic units is a product of this crossing over

• As the cistrons leave one body and enter the next, as they board sperm or egg for the journey into the next generation, they are likely to find that the little vessel contains their close neighbours of the previous voyage, old shipmates with whom they sailed on the long odyssey from the bodies of distan

• individuals are fleeting but genes have a certain immortality
• genes have an effect on the embryonic development of their survival machines and thus can propagate its survival by making it more likely to live / reproduce
• any gene that behaves in such a way to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of rival genes, is by definition selfish
• gene needs to have characteristics that are not objectively good but suit the environment and the gene pool

Gene Machine ¶

• genes don't directly control behaviour but control our protein synthesis, which is slow
• genes have to instruct their survival machines with general rules and behaviours, not specifics

• They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

• brains and consciousness are a way for us to surpass our genetic instincts and instructions: we are in charge of our day to day actions and can predict the future and act accordingly.
• there is communication between different survival machines that affect genetic survival (parasite, prey, symbiosis)

Aggression: Stability and the selfish machine ¶

• there is no use in always trying to kill rivals. In the large tapestry of animal interaction, removing one rival does not necessarily do good.
• instead, there should be a calculated, albeit unconscious cost-benefit calculator of whether or not instigating a conflict is worthwhile.
• An ESS - Evolutionarily Stable Strategy is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
• These have to be stable not because it might be good for the individuals practising it but that it is immune to inner treachery, where animals attempt different strategies to exploit the current one.
• genes are selected not as good in isolation but good at working with or against the other genes of the gene pool. A gene has to be complementary with other genes with whom it interacts.

Genesmanship ¶

• key point; genes might be able to assist replicas of itself that are in other bodies.
• ^ close kin and relatives have a higher than average chance of sharing kin

• For convenience we use an index of relatedness, which expresses the chance of a gene being shared between two relatives. The relatedness between two brothers is 1/2, since half the genes possessed by one brother will be found in the other. This is an average figure: by the luck of the meiotic draw, it is possible for particular pairs of brothers to share more or fewer genes than this.

• idea of the existence of genes for kin-altruism: the net gain of saving a brother or a cousin can be calculated and weighed in decisions made by survival machines.

• To extend the actuarial analogy, individuals can be thought of as life-insurance underwriters. An individual can be expected to invest or risk a certain proportion of his own assets in the life of another individual. He takes into account his relatedness to the other individual, and also whether the individual is a ‘good risk’ in terms of his life expectancy compared with the insurer’s own. Strictly we should say ‘reproduction expectancy’ rather than ‘life expectancy’,

• sometimes animals can be tricked into thinking someone is their relative so that they expend resources helping them.
• these decisions of helping or not will also be slightly weighted towards not because of this type of deception

Family Planning ¶

• distinction between child-bearing and child-caring is important
• territoriality is a widespread phenomenon
• Winning a territory is like getting a ticket to breed (resources, space, etc...)
• naturalists can establish dominance hierarchies - social ordering where everybody knows their place
• animals can practise birth control to maximise the number of their children that survive: having too many might lead to some dying, too little means low genetic spread.
• ^ optimization of birth rates

Battle of the Generations ¶

• Parental investment (P.I.) is defined as ‘any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring

• parents decide how they invest their resources and attention to their children
• it is possible that male fertility tails off gradually whereas so sudden for females because old man can easily father children without needing parental investment, because as long as he has children with young women, an old man gains more from investing in children than grand-children. Females might need more effort to grow / bear a child and it would be better for them to invest in grand-children.
• it can be genetically selfish to want your mother to invest in siblings because they share your genes.
• genes will exploit the powers at their disposition: different behavioural policies as a child and adult
• cynical: animal children can manipulate their parents to invest more into them as a survival policy (like a cat purring for attention)
• this is an unconscious process in our genes

Battle of the Sexes ¶

• possible view of sexual partnership as mutual distrust and exploitation
• sex cells of males are small, female are large
• isogamy - individuals are not distinguishable into two sexe
• male sperm cells are tiny so they can beget many children quickly. Impossible for females because their large sex cell nourishes the new infant.
• this means females will have to invest more into a child because they have already wasted a large egg on them. <- genetic female exploitation

• Bruce effect: male mice secrete a chemical which when smelt by a pregnant female can cause her to abort. She only aborts if the smell is different from that of her former mate this limits population and opens female mice to new advances by the mouse

• females can resist this by "playing hard to get" - this forces the male to commit and thus have a larger stake in his offspring's survival and would remove the benefit of deserting
• other strategy: he-man strategy: females resign on getting any help from their male partners after birth, and just look to find the best male genes for their offspring.
• thus showing true genetic power in a man is a way for him to validate his genetic luck and attract a female partner
• paradoxical sex features: huge antlers are attractive to females because they act as handicaps: this shows that despite their deficit they have survived and have good genetic ability.
• different breeding systems can be understood as a conflicting interest between male and female where both sex wants to maximize their total reproduction output.
• males tend to be more promiscuous because breeding more is advantageous for them because they don't need to invest much in each child.

You Scratch My Back, I'll ride on yours ¶

• by definition: if animals live in groups, their genes must get more benefit than they put in
• altruism can actually be genetically selfish: for example if there's danger and a bird flies to a tree, it's in his interest to cry out so other birds join him and he's part of a crowd.
• symbyosis = relationship of mutual benefit -> ESS of mutual cooperation
• idea: our genes are all symbiotic units that form our body -> we are colonies of symbiotic genes
• cheating is a way to defeat the equilibrium of cooperation, and the evolution of cunning and intelligence makes us much better at it

Memes ¶

• cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission and although conservative, it can give rise to a certain form of evolution.
• it evolves much faster than genes, and is common to more species than just man (ex: birds learning new songs)
• language, technology, etc... are all examples of these <- progressive and cultural change
• idea of expanding Darwinism beyond the gene to the domain of the idea
• theory of a fundamental law: all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities
• a new kind of replicator: human culture
• meme = new replicator that conveys the idea of cultural transmission, unit of imitation (ex: tunes, ideas, catch-phrases)
• memes propagate by leaping from brain to brain via a process which can be called imitation
• as with genes, fecundity is more important than longevity

• the computers in which memes live are human brains.

• idea of the collaboration of memes that assist each other like for example the combination of music / art / architecture in a church
• idea of persistence: when we die we leave two things behind us: genes and memes. We act as gene machines but that aspect will be forgotten in three generations but our contributions to culture live on.
• discourse on selfishness: the idea of the selfish gene does not reflect the selfishness of man in general. We can use our brains to have consciousness and be altruistic, and there's also the idea that man has the foresight and predictive powers to realise that acting selfish in the immediate might not even be the best outcome for him.

Nice guys finish first ¶

-- elaborate discourse on game theory / prisoner's dilemma but too difficult to condense into notes, check it out if you're curious

The long reach of the gene ¶

• phenotype: bodily manifestation of a gene, effect of gene on the body.
• concept that a phenotypic effect can go beyond to all the effects on the world and not just its succession of bodies
• the gene's phenotype are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation
• for example, an animal might pick a certain material (stone) for their habitat, and then a "gene" would decide the hardness of the stones they pick, their resilience etc. In that sense we can thus mention the idea of a "gene" for stone hardness / size / etc... In this case stone hardness is an extended phenotypic effect of the caddis' genes.

• it's as if the genes reached outside their own body and manipulated the world outside.

• similarly, our genes and composants collaborate and influence each other for our benefit not because they belong to us but because they share a same outlet to replication, our sperm or egg.
• asymmetry of cost of failure - if the gene for a failure at something determines the life or death of an individual that gene will be doomed, however, the gene for the other individual in that interaction might not be deadly if this individual fails and is exploited, in which case their "cost" of failure is much lower and they can be exploited while still passing on the gene. (cuckoo tricking other species bird parents' into taking care of him example).
• why do genes and individual units combine to form survival machines (or "vehicules")?
• process of an organism
  • the way DNA and genetic transmission works means that there's a period of "going back to the drawing board" with the creation of a new individual during which mutation can happen. single-celled bottleneck
  • period of child development during a life-cycle
  • cells build up and cooperate with each other because meiosis is fair and they will be equally passed on -> cellular uniformity
  • key idea that the success of the organism affects the success of its individual components in a way, so they are motivated to collaborate'
• important to remember that the replicators come first, in a bio perspective

Epilogue ¶

• hamilton's rule