An Ecology of Replicators
An Ecology of Replicators
An Ecology of Replicators
RICHARD DAWKINS
Daniel Dennett went only a little too far when he wrote, at the beginning
of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995): “Let me lay my cards on the table. If I
were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d
give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.”
He wasn’t talking about evolution itself, which was not Darwin’s idea,
but natural selection, which pretty much was. Today, notwithstanding
local school boards in various backwoods and boondocks of the United
States, no educated person doubts the truth of evolution. Nor do they
doubt the force of natural selection. Natural selection is not the only driver
and guide of evolution. At least at the molecular level, random drift is also
important (Kimura 1983) but selection is the only force capable of produc-
ing adaptation. When it comes to accounting for the stunning illusion of
design in nature, there is no alternative to natural selection. The one idea
that might, for a moment, have seemed to be a conceivable alternative,
Lamarckism, is not, as has sometimes been suggested, a good alternative
theory which just had the misfortune to be false. It isn’t even a good
alternative theory. The Lamarckian theory is not a big enough theory to
account for adaptation. It couldn’t work, even on some hypothetical
planet where acquired characteristics were inherited (Dawkins 1982a).
If a biologist denies the importance of natural selection in evolution, it
is pretty safe to assume not that he has some alternative theory but that he
simply underrates adaptation as a dominant property of life that needs
explaining (Mayr 1983). Probably he has never set foot in a tropical rain
forest, or set flipper over a coral reef, or set eyes on a David Attenborough
film.
Nowadays, questions about adaptation are high in the consciousness
of field biologists. It has not always been so. My old maestro Niko Tinber-
gen (1963) wrote of an experience when he was a young man: “I still
remember how perplexed I was upon being told off firmly by one of my
zoology professors when I brought up the question of survival value after
he had asked ‘Has anyone an idea why so many birds flock more densely
when they are attacked by a bird of prey?’”
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford OXI 3 PW, UK.
[email protected]
But the most important elements in the environment of a gene are the
other genes. This ‘ecology of genes’, in which each is separately selected
for its ability to flourish in the presence of the others in the sexually
recombining gene pool, is what creates the illusion of ‘unity of the geno-
type’. It is emphatically not right to say that because the genome is unified
in its embryological role, it is therefore also unified in its evolutionary role.
Mayr was right about embryology. Williams was right about evolution.
There is no disagreement.
DEDICATION
Dedicated, with the very deepest respect, to Professor Ernst Mayr FRS, Hon.
D. Sc (Oxford) on the occasion of his hundredth birthday.
52 / LUDUS VITALUS / vol. XII / num. 21 / 2004
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