The Information - James Gleick [144]
Genes, not organisms, are the true units of natural selection. They began as “replicators”—molecules formed accidentally in the primordial soup, with the unusual property of making copies of themselves.
They are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. 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.♦
This was guaranteed to raise the hackles of organisms who thought of themselves as more than robots. “English biologist Richard Dawkins has recently raised my hackles,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould in 1977, “with his claim that genes themselves are units of selection, and individuals merely their temporary receptacles.”♦ Gould had plenty of company. Speaking for many molecular biologists, Gunther Stent dismissed Dawkins as “a thirty-six-year-old student of animal behavior” and filed him under “the old prescientific tradition of animism, under which natural objects are endowed with souls.”♦
Yet Dawkins’s book was brilliant and transformative. It established a new, multilayered understanding of the gene. At first, the idea of the selfish gene seemed like a trick of perspective, or a joke. Samuel Butler had said a century earlier—and did not claim to be the first—that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. Butler was quite serious, in his way:
Every creature must be allowed to “run” its own development in its own way; the egg’s way may seem a very roundabout manner of doing things; but it is its way, and it is one of which man, upon the whole, has no great reason to complain. Why the fowl should be considered more alive than the egg, and why it should be said that the hen lays the egg, and not that the egg lays the hen, these are questions which lie beyond the power of philosophic explanation, but are perhaps most answerable by considering the conceit of man, and his habit, persisted in during many ages, of ignoring all that does not remind him of himself.♦
He added, “But, perhaps, after all, the real reason is, that the egg does not cackle when it has laid the hen.” Some time later, Butler’s template, X is just a Y’s way of making another Y, began reappearing in many forms. “A scholar,” said Daniel Dennett in 1995, “is just a library’s way of making another library.”♦ Dennett, too, was not entirely joking.
It was prescient of Butler in 1878 to mock a man-centered view of life, but he had read Darwin and could see that all creation had not been designed in behalf of Homo sapiens. “Anthropocentrism is a disabling vice of the intellect,”♦ Edward O. Wilson said a century later, but Dawkins was purveying an even more radical shift of perspective. He was not just nudging aside the human (and the hen) but the organism, in all its multifarious glory. How could biology not be the study of organisms? If anything, he understated