If your evolution education stopped in high school, you should pick up this book. If it stopped in university, you should pick up this book. Past that… well I just assume you aren’t reading this blog, so if you are reading this, then you should read The Selfish Gene.

If for some reason you want to keep reading this instead of the book yet, here are some of my favorite bits from the book.

Replicators are the fundamental unit of life

When looking around at the natural world, we have a tendency to look at human-sized things as the fundamental unit of life. The whole idea of biology has to do with these “organisms”.

But evolution really just cares about replicators, things that can make more copies of themselves. At that scale, organisms are really just the latest innovation in a long chain of things which create themselves. Like the title implies, we should be looking at genes as the most basic unit.¹

When you really think about it, nothing makes sense except in this light. If individuals were the most basic thing that evolved, then the idea of altruism could never exist. Why would you ever sacrifice yourself unless the thing that matters in terms of replicating is the genes inside of you rather than “you” as a concept. Since there’s a 50% chance your siblings carry the same genes as you, it always makes sense in the long-run to sacrifice yourself for 3 of them.

Humans as wet vehicles

I really like the analogy of genes as the programmers and humans as a chess engine. In a chess game, the programmers don’t play the game, they rely on the engine they created ahead of time. While genes might be the ultimate driver of life, they’re slow. They can’t react to dangers on the same timescale which is what we’re for. Not only are we the vehicles to propagate them, but we are also the faster response systems to changes in the environment.

Free will?

Is it possible that genes have pushed humans to more and more free will? Is it possible that the end game of evolution is the evolution of more free will? In the beginning, genes exerted a lot of control on what the final behavior of the creature was like, but they’ve ceded more and more control over to the higher organism.

From an evolutionary perspective, genes only care about making more copies of themselves. If it makes more sense to cede control over to brains and humans, then that’s what they’ll do. Of course humans still very controlled by our genes, but we’re starting to decouple from them. Having genetic defects might not be a thing in the future, and what happens when we truly master genetic engineering? Did they predict that? I bet not.

Just what are individuals?

How can you tell where the beginning of an individual starts and ends? Is an ant-colony a “super-organism” or are the ants the unit we should care about? Are humans even individuals?

For this last one, my gut reaction is of course a human is an individual. If you define an organism as some set of processes that can’t replicate without the cooperation of others in some set space, then humans would meet that criteria. Except, like every other purely sexual organism², we need other humans in order to replicate. Does that mean that there’s currently half of the “Ivy-??” super-organism-thing that I currently haven’t found? (As you can tell, I’m an extremely romantic person.)

Actually, evolution only cares about memes

The definition of evolution is descent with modification. Given this most basic definition, you can see evolution everywhere. Dawkins coined the idea of memes, or ideas that are passed through culture and modified by human minds. While genes are powerful, they’re slow. While they’ve invented ways to try and speed up how fast they can change an organism through things like Hox genes, it’s not even fair to compare the mutation rate of a genome with that of our ideas.

While genes operate in As and Ts, memes operate through higher level language. What makes mems so powerful is that the thing spreading them is human minds imbued with creativity. While you might surprised at how far a lot of time and random mutations can take you, human minds can take you so much further so much faster.

As someone who has studied Artificial Life and Computational Evolution (a.k.a how do we do all this cool nature stuff in computers), I think there’s a lesson to be learned here. Maybe rather than sticking to genes and chromosomes as the basis of individuals, we have to be thinking about the best possible replicator we can find. Could we supercharge our digital evolution through better crossover and mutation operators that operate on language? Some people have started doing research on this exact topic, but I feel that there’s a lot more to be gleaned here.

Ummm

I couldn’t fit this in anywhere logically, but you should look up the Bruce Effect. No more spoilers on that.