The Selfish Gene

 

Road to Self-Awareness 

I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene about two decades ago.

Fiction was my staple reading then. I had come to acknowledge vagaries of fate – unfathomable misery of many and unbridled joys of some, through fiction. - John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Samuel Butler’s The Way Of All Flesh, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Sharat Chandra Chatterjee’s Shrikant, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, were some of the literary masterpieces that chronicled life in face of a whimsical fate.  

But acceptance of chance in human condition gave birth to many queries. It appeared that being human was not just possessing an upright posture, a reasoning mind, ability of language, culture, and social behaviour. These made us all similar. What made us different? Why everyone behaves in a unique fashion? Why are we here? Our existence must justify our fickle fates.

Seeds of doubts had been sown but answers were not in sight.

Then I chanced upon Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Book had been published around that time. It blew my brains. Book was on history of science: chemistry, astronomy, quantum mechanics, and evolution. I had not imagined that science could be written in such an easy and accessible prose. A new universe gaped at me. I roamed it dazed, breathless with excitement and discovered anew the depth of my ignorance. Bibliography of the book added a new stream to my reading, that of popular science. Over the next few years, I read countless in this genre.

As I read these books, I formulated a native, perhaps naïve, understanding of universe. Universe comprises inert, implying lifeless, and living matter. Knowledge of the origin of these, would reveal if there was any meaning behind existence.

I first began with astronomy that explains the formation of universe. On origin of life, I believed I knew much, medicine being my profession. I learned, my beliefs and knowledge, were miles off the mark.

Bill Bryson introduced me to the biologist Richard Dawkins. His ideas were ecstatically shocking to my ignorant mind. I first read his book, The Selfish Gene. Over next few years I read all. And many more by other biologists. I was pulled into Evolution line, hook, and sinker. I had my answer on life, as much as extant rational thought had been able to tease out.   

Preceding words appear to paint an ardent, planned, and meticulous pursuit. I read these books, as and when I could lay my hands on each. There was none to guide me, the book in my hands being the only guru, and world wide web, an eternal reference pool that informed me about the books, resources to procure them, and also assisted in their purchase.

Today, as i write about this phase of my readerly life, decades removed from the events, a pattern seems to emerge. But it was neither contemplated nor existed as it was unfolding.

…

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines iconic as ‘being a famous person or thing that people admire and see as a symbol of a particular idea, way of life, etc.’

Selfish Gene is an iconic book in the history of science writing. The lucid, plain, and simple prose is not what makes the book unique; it is the idea the book expounds that is iconic. It changed the way one looks at genes. It upended the prevalent concept of gene. Genes do not serve bodies, bodies serve genes. Samuel Butler, it would seem now, was articulating a profound scientific truth when he said, 'A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg’. The book offered a Genecentric view of life.

Book was published in 1976. In preface to the 30th edition that I read, Dawkins, looking back on the criticism the book received, wrote that most criticism was regarding the title. Many learned critics who ‘prefer to read the book by title only’ found it abominable that Dawkins characterised genes as selfish. Some readers were horrified by the suggestion that the biological processes that made us were selfish. They saw in it a ‘nihilistic pessimism’. Some said Dawkins’ book had robbed their life of its meaning.

Dawkins thought this was due to emphasis on the Selfish word in the title and not on Gene. Although, Gene was his objective. In the book he presents a ‘Gene-eyed view of Darwinism’. Genes, like every other attribute in us, govern our behaviour too. But it is preposterous to suggest that a scientist who avers that genes make some people aggressively ambitious is calling them aggressive genes. Anthropomorphic personification is a much-used tool in science to write about innate objects in universe. It allows scientist to explain her theory in simple, concise words that are easily understood by readers.

Even if a behaviour that is coded by genes makes the individual selfish, it is not a moral judgement. ‘We should not derive our morals from Darwinism,’ Dawkins repeatedly emphasises in the book. Values can be adduced from the action of someone with agency, who can exercise choice to decide her course of action. Earthquakes, avalanches, storms, animals, that cause enormous destruction of life are not called immoral. Our brains have evolved capability to rebel against our selfish genes. Every time someone uses a contraceptive they are rebelling against the dictate of their genes.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, an Evolutionary Biologist, wrote in 1973, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution’. Darwinism, that is evolution of species by natural selection, is an incontrovertible fact in science today. Natural selection works by selecting traits that favour the entity being selected. Behaviour is also a product of evolution. Hence, it is imperative that behaviour of all animals is selfish. But an apparently selfish behaviour need not be premeditated.

In the act of copulation, female mantis, a large insect, often eats the head of its male partner. This obtains her a good meal. Males often offer themselves for this cannibalisation. Their genes will proliferate in the progeny. Though female’s actions are selfish, one would hesitate in labelling female mantis a selfish insect.

Altruism, a behaviour that increases the welfare of another entity, at a cost to self, occupies most of the book. Many ground-nesting birds exhibit a behaviour known as ‘distraction display’. When a predator is sighted approaching a nest, the parent bird, limps away from the nest, holding out one wing as though it were broken. Predator sensing an easy prey follows it. A good distance away from the nest, the bird takes flight. There is a risk to the parent bird in this. But even if it falls prey, its genes in nestlings get a chance at survival. This is gene-altruism. Benefit of this behaviour will accrue to the altruistic gene encoding for such behaviour.

Natural selection must act on the immutable, indivisible, and fundamental unit of life. Only then it can preserve small gains achieved by selecting randomly occurring but, beneficial variations in the genetic pool of a species. This process repeated over eons gives rise to a staggering variety and complexity of life on earth, as is evident today. A tribe, a clan, a group of animals is too large a unit. It is not stable over eternities that are needed for new species to form. Nor is an individual. With each sexual reproduction, the genome of the progeny is never a true copy on any parent. Every individual is unique. The genome of an individual is neither immutable, nor stable for an enormously slow process of natural selection.

Dawkins, building up on research of previous biologists, postulated in the book that this unit, the target of natural selection is a Gene. Genes are the immutable, almost immortal entities that live for thousands of years. Immortal in genes is not the physical entity represented by the double-helical DNA. It is the information that the coil encodes. This information is copied, faithfully, from one generation to another, and then to another, and another. This process has gone on relentlessly for almost 4.5 billion years, since the formation of first replicating entity on primordial earth. And has given rise to millions of life forms beginning from perhaps a strand of Messenger RNA. There is a sublime beauty in this thought. Darwin, in a rare show of mellifluous prose, wrote in the final paragraph of The Origin Of Species:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Genes cannot survive on their own. They need other genes that can breathe, look for food and extract nutrients from it, throw out the resultant waste, detect danger in the environment and avoid it, find suitable mates to help in reproduction, and also genes to manufacture mind in a large bipedal ape that can navigate the world inhabited by similar scheming minds. Genes build a body – body is the phenotypic expression of the genes in the genome of the body – for their survival. Bodies are thus, survival machines, built by genes, for their propagation. Survival of a gene in the pool is linked to the survival of other genes in the same body. Cooperation with other genes is imperative for the survival of each. Hence, the need for gene-altruism.

Richard Dawkins is an ethologist, biologists who study behaviour of non-human animals. Much of the book is on evolutionary basis of behaviour. Dawkins explains how behaviour developed in animals. He writes on different aspects of behaviour; romantic love, infidelity, sexual jealousy, aggression, cooperation, pecking-order in groups, parental care, parental investment, parental manipulation, parent-offspring rivalry, and sibling rivalry.

I had read biology in school; at 40, I discovered I had not learnt it yet.

 

When I look back over the time, I first read the book, it feels, that my unploughed, ignorant, but irreverent mind provided the right soil for the seeds of rational knowledge. I read the book in a state of impassioned excitement. It opened access for many books on the subject and I devoured them greedily.

I learnt evolution, and its pivotal role in answering the existential questions: What is being human? Why we are the way we are? Is there a meaning in our existence? More importantly, I learnt about the morally indifferent, rational way of gaining knowledge about universe that is science. Search for truth is removed from morality. Science is not ‘im’  but ‘a’ moral.

Only someone who has not read the book can berate it on its moral values – I realised this after I had read the book. In one of his later books, Unweaving The Rainbow, Dawkins made an eloquent appeal against this tendency:

‘Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? … Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings … I am almost driven to despair of which I am wrongly suspected.’

In The Selfish Gene I discovered reasons to be sanguine about life, to accept ourselves as we are, and rejoice in the feast of living, where we are a chance guest, making only an ephemeral appearance.