Jolene Brown
Prof. V. Keyser
Philosophy 38
17 July 2009
Selfishness or Cooperation:
Properties of Units of Natural Selection in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
In the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins there is a case built for the importance of the genetic unit as the sole operator of natural selection. He claims that a unit of natural selection has three properties, and that the largest unit that exhibits all three of those properties is the definitive unit of natural selection. However, he does not account for all the things that would be required of a unit of natural selection, and his argument itself is based on a large assumption that one must accept before his argument can be seen as a good explanation for the gene being the unit of natural selection. In this way, his argument can be considered weakened since it is missing at least one fundamental element that would assist in natural selection, and that the argument that he makes cannot work without that fundamental assumption.
Dawkins argument consists of three premises and a conclusion which he draws from those premises. His first premise is that the properties of a unit of natural selection can be identified as longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity. He identifies these properties because, he claims, they support the stability of the unit:
Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. (Dawkins 12)
With this first premise Dawkins is identifying those things he feels contribute to the stability of those units of natural selection, and in turn, to the stability of the organisms. With this argument the emphasis is placed on the stability of the organism—the “survival machine”—that houses, protects and assists in the recreation of the natural selection unit.
There is, however, an assumption made in this first premise not addressed by Dawkins in his argument: that these properties (longevity, fecundity, copying fidelity) can be measured in such a way to determine whether or not they are quantitatively significant. For example, it may be argued that science cannot empirically study, or quantitatively measure the longevity of a single gene within a gene pool, or for that matter, measure the longevity of several hundred genes in order to create a wide enough sample to claim that genes that stay in the gene pool longer have more influence on natural selection than others. “It is [the gene’s] potential immorality that makes a gene a good candidate as the basic unit of natural selection” (36) and no amount of science can accurately measure or account for an “immortal” longevity: the longevity factor is rendered unfalsifiable with that assumption of quantification in place. The longevity property may be an important property to a unit of natural selection, but the inclusion of this property undermines the argument itself by making it impossible to be measured by any form of accurate science.
The second premise is that natural selection operates on the largest single entity that embodies these three properties. The importance of the largest entity, in contrast to the smallest, is that natural selection chooses traits that are deemed better for “stability” or survival. Natural selection cannot select a directly from the gene pool because the genes are so small and so ineffectual in the environment that instead natural selection looks at the effects of the gene on the machine that it builds. “If selection tried to choose DNA molecules directly it would hardly find any criterion by which to do so…The important differences between genes emerge only their effects” (235). Based on this argument, it seems likely that natural selection would need to have, at the very minimum, a unit that would have enough effect on the survival machine to allow selection in the first place. The property of longevity also rules out most other organisms beyond the gene, since the gene does last longer than all the organisms that it is a part of. It would seem this premise is a solid second premise in the argument. The third premise is the claim that it is the gene, and no other organism or entity that embodies all of these properties and is the largest one that can be acted on by natural selection. This claim, too, is a fairly straight forward claim, and does not seem to have any underlying assumptions, much like the second premise. Based on these three premises, the conclusion drawn is that the gene is the largest unit on which natural selection is acting, and that the phenotype of the genes are what is being selected for by natural selection.
The problem one is left with after analysis of Dawkins’ argument is not any invalidity of his argument, despite the assumption one must allow in the first premise. The problem lies in that there seems to be one major trait of the natural selection unit that he either did not take into account, or that he discounted altogether as a factor: cooperation. Cooperation, in this sense, does not refer only to the behavioral adaption of two entities working together (altruistically or not), but instead physical cooperation between two of the units to devise more and more extravagant and complicated survival machines.
…evolution is constructive because of cooperation…Cooperation allows specialization and thereby promotes biological diversity. […] Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world. (Nowak 1563)
Cooperation as a behavior begins at the physical level, similar to the selfishness that Dawkins argues for throughout his book. However, cooperation, it can be argued, is fundamental to the successful reproduction of genetic information. Without the fundamental cooperation between to replicators in the original “replicator soup” there would not be the “survival machines” to house the selfish units of natural selection. Though the genes may still be selfish, the individual unit does not have enough power on its own to become and maintain itself as a unit of natural selection: the Dawkins quote on page 235 (stated above) is clear in this claim. This property of cooperation can then be posited as another, if not the underlying, property that allows natural selection to operate in the first place. Through the combination of genes to form their survival machines, they not only allow natural selection to operate on their effects, but they also are able to reproduce themselves with other genes to form new and elaborate survival machines.
Dawkins may be right in that the largest single unit of natural selection is the gene. The evidence he presents in this way is fairly convincing, and other scientists tend to agree. What is up for debate is the idea that the genes are intrinsically selfish. Without other genes, the genes themselves cannot operate effectively as a unit of natural selection or as effective reproducers of their own genetic material for longevity because “…individual genes cannot be considered as replicators because they do not behave as separate units during reproduction” (Lloyd, Sect. 2.2). The genes may have started out as a form of replicator but natural selection immediately began favoring those replicators that could cooperate with other replicators to form large, more complex and protective survival machines. This leap from the selfish replicator to the cooperative gene seems to be one that Dawkins is either unwilling to make or has decided not to make because it would undermine some of his other ideas. Whatever his reason, it is important to realize that without cooperation, the at least one of the properties that he posits as important to the individual unit of natural selection, fecundity, does not operate without the important quality of the unit to cooperate effectively with other units.
Works Cited
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lloyd, Elisabeth. "Units and Levels of Selection." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
Nowak, Martin A., et al. “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” Science magazine. Vol. 314 (December 2006). Pages 1560-1563. URL = http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5805/1560.
No comments:
Post a Comment