The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [45]
A generation ago, most biologists would have found that paragraph baffling. Genes are not conscious and do not choose to co-operate; they are inanimate molecules switched on or off by chemical messages. What causes them to work in the right order and create a human body is some mysterious biochemical program, not a democratic decision. But in the last few years, the revolution begun by Williams, Hamilton and others has caused more and more biologists to think of genes as analogous to active and cunning individuals. Not that genes are conscious or driven by future goals: no serious biologist believes that. But the extraordinary teleological fact is that evolution works by natural selection and natural selection means the enhanced survival of genes that enhance their own survival. Therefore a gene is by definition the descendant of a gene that was good at getting into future generations. Therefore, a gene that does things that enhance its own survival may be said, teleologically, to be doing them because they enhance its survival. Co-operating to build a body is as effective a survival ‘strategy’ for genes as co-operating to run a town is a successful social strategy for human beings.
But society is not all co-operation. A measure of competitive free enterprise is inevitable. A gigantic experiment called communism in a laboratory called Russia proved that. The simple, beautiful suggestion that society should be organized on the principle ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ proved disastrously unrealistic, because each did not see why he should share the fruits of his labours with a system that gave him no reward for working harder. Enforced co-operation of the communist kind is as vulnerable to the selfish ambitions of the individual as a free-for-all would be. Likewise, if a gene has the effect of enhancing the survival of the body it inhabits but prevents that body breeding, or is itself never transmitted through breeding, then that gene will by definition become extinct and its effect will disappear.
Finding the right balance between co-operation and competition has been the goal and bane of western politics for centuries. Adam Smith recognized that the economic needs of the individual are better met by unleashing the ambitions of all individuals than by planning to meet those needs in advance. But even Adam Smith could not claim that free markets would produce Utopia. Even the most libertarian politician today believes in the need to regulate, oversee and tax the efforts of ambitious individuals so as to ensure that they do not satisfy their ambitions entirely at the expense of others. In the words of Egbert Leigh, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, ‘Human intelligence has yet to design a society where free competition among the members works for the good of the whole.’4 The society of genes faces exactly the same problem. Each gene is descended from a gene that unwittingly jostled to get into the next generation by whatever means was in its power. Co-operation between them is marked, but so is competition. And it is that competition that led to the invention of gender.
As life emerged from the primeval soup several billion years ago, the molecules that caused themselves to be replicated at the expense of others became more numerous. Then some of those molecules discovered the virtues of co-operation and specialization, so they began to assemble in groups called chromosomes to run machines called cells that could replicate these chromosomes efficiently. In just the same way little groups of agriculturalists joined with blacksmiths and carpenters to form co-operative units called villages. The chromosomes then discovered that several kinds