“… a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.”

— Richard Dawkins, book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

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Richard Dawkins322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

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“What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

“Genes do indeed behave as if they have selfish goals, not consciously, but retrospectively: genes that behave in this way thrive and genes that don’t don’t.”

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“I would hope it is a when, as opposed to an if. How about Gene Simmons?”

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“The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene’s eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years”

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Part of the answer to the question "Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?"
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“Jacob and Monod found that in bacteria, genes are switched on and off by other genes. This led them to distinguish between effector genes and regulatory genes. Effector genes encode effector proteins… which mediate specific cellular functions. Regulatory genes encode proteins called regulatory proteins, which switch the effector genes on or off.”

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“For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.”

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