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The strategic gene

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Abstract

Gene-selectionists define fundamental terms in non-standard ways. Genes are determinants of difference. Phenotypes are defined as a gene’s effects relative to some alternative whereas the environment is defined as all parts of the world that are shared by the alternatives being compared. Environments choose among phenotypes and thereby choose among genes. By this process, successful gene sequences become stores of information about what works in the environment. The strategic gene is defined as a set of gene tokens that combines ‘actor’ tokens responsible for an effect with ‘recipient’ tokens whose replication is thereby enhanced. This set of tokens can extend across the boundaries of individual organisms, or other levels of selection, as these are traditionally defined.

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Notes

  1. A gene’s effects are often measured relative to the average for all alternatives (alleles) in the population. Fisher (1941) defined the average effect as the partial regression of the phenotypic measure on the presence or absence of the gene.

  2. A function is synonymous with a selectional property of a gene (Shea 2007, p. 320) or the property for which there is selection (Sober 1984, pp. 99–100). In Sober’s example of small green balls passing through a sieve, there was selection for the property of smallness and selection of objects that were small and green. He did not state whether there was selection of the property of greenness. I consider there to be selection for and of functions of a favored gene but simply selection of side-effects.

  3. Many significant things do not have precise boundaries. No line on the ground demarcates where the Rocky Mountains begin (nor is there any way to count the number of peaks in Colorado without making pragmatic, somewhat arbitrary, choices about what counts as a peak). One could, if one chose, think of North America as comprised of smaller and larger chunks of landscape material without naming any topographical features with fuzzy boundaries. Locations and areas could be identified by latitude and longitude, but this would be cumbersome. Natural selection is pragmatic rather than principled (whatever ‘works’ works) and my own approach to evolutionary theory is similarly pragmatic.

  4. Dichotomous branching is a property of the semi-conservative replication of DNA but is not a necessary feature of the genealogies of genes. Rabies virus has a single-stranded RNA genome. This strand is transcribed to produce the complementary single-stranded antigenome that serves as a template to transcribe multiple copies of the parent genome (Wunner 2007).

  5. A strategic gene could also consist of tokens (actors) that reduced the replication of tokens of the same type (recipients), but in this case the strategy is inept and the gene would be eliminated by natural selection.

  6. Isadore Nabi (pers. comm.) offers the rejoinder “If we could explain how each organism has evolved its particular form, by the selection of differences, then we would have explained, per stirpes, why it has its particular state. But the reverse is not true. A sufficient explanation of how an organism develops may tell us nothing about why it has its particular form.”

  7. Fisher (1958, p. 39), a statistician par excellence, compared his fundamental theorem of natural selection to the second law of thermodynamics. Dynamics exhibits ‘time-reversal invariance’ whereas thermodynamics is not time-reversible. Processes of mutation, drift and recombination are time-reversible at the micro-level of the individual gene token but increase entropy at the population level. Fisher believed that natural selection was associated with a unidirectional arrow of time that tended to increase order. Okasha (2008, p. 346) rejects the existence of such an arrow because increase in ‘adaptation’ is countered by deterioration in the environment.

  8. Here I employ a loose definition of replication and heritability as recurrence of form, including the ‘simple replicators’, ‘limited hereditary replicators’, and ‘unlimited hereditary replicators’ of Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995, pp. 41–42).

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Acknowledgments

Daniel Dennett, Steve Frank, Andy Gardner, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Kim Sterelny and the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things discussion group made helpful comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    David Haig

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Haig, D. The strategic gene. Biol Philos 27, 461–479 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9315-5

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