The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [16]
None the less, Weismann’s followers, and especially Sir Ronald Fisher and Hermann Müller, could escape the teleology trap by arguing that evolution, if not preordained, was at least essential. Asexual species were at a disadvantage and would fail in competition with sexual species. By incorporating the concept of the gene into Weismann’s argument, Fisher’s book in 19308 and Muller’s in 19329 laid out a seemingly watertight argument for the advantages of sex, and Müller even went so far as to declare the problem emphatically solved by the new science of genetics. Sexual species shared their newly invented genes among all individuals, asexual ones did not. So sexual species were like groups of inventors pooling their resources. If one man invented a steam engine and another a railway, then the two could come together. Asexual ones behaved like groups of jealous inventors who never shared their knowledge, so that steam locomotives were used on roads and horses dragged carts along railways.
In 1965, James Crow and Motoo Kimura modernized the Fisher–Müller logic by demonstrating with mathematical models how rare mutations could come together in sexual species but not in asexual ones. The sexual species does not have to wait for two rare events in the same individual but can combine them from different individuals. This, they said, would grant the sexual species an advantage over the asexual ones, so long as there were at least one thousand individuals in the sexual ones. All was hunky dory. Sex was explained, as an aid to evolution, and modern mathematics was adding new precision. The case could be considered closed.10
Mankind’s Greatest Rival is Mankind
So it might have remained had not a Scottish biologist named V. C. Wynne-Edwards published a voluminous and influential book a few years before, in 1962. Wynne-Edwards did biology an enormous service for he exposed a gigantic fallacy that had systematically infected the very heart of evolutionary theory since Darwin’s day. He exposed the fallacy not to demolish it but because he believed it to be true and important. But in so doing he made it explicit for the first time.11
The fallacy persists in the way many laymen speak of evolution. We talk blithely among ourselves about evolution being a question of the ‘survival of the species’. We imply that it is species that compete with each other, that Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’ is between dinosaurs and mammals, or between rabbits and foxes, or between men and Neanderthals. We borrow the imagery of nation states and football teams: Germany against France, the home team against its rivals.
Charles Darwin, too, slipped occasionally into this way of thinking. The very subtitle of The Origin of Species refers to the ‘preservation of favoured races’.12 But his main focus was on the individual, not the species. Every creature differs from every other; some survive or thrive more readily than others and leave more young behind; if those changes are heritable, gradual change is inevitable. Darwin’s ideas were later fused with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who had proved that heritable features came in discrete packages that became known as genes, to form a body of theory that was able to explain how new mutations in genes could spread through a whole species.
But there lay buried beneath this theory an unexamined dichotomy. When the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species, or with members of other species?
A gazelle on the African savannah is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying