Species as Individuals in the Hierarchical Theory of Selection 639
Extended Phenotype evolved gradually and progressively from The Selfish Gene.
"The present book," he tells us, "goes further," presumably in the same direction:
This belief—that if adaptations are to be treated as "for the good of"
something, that something is the gene—was the fundamental assumption of
my previous book. The present book goes further. To dramatize it a bit, it
attempts to free the selfish gene from the individual organism, which has
been its conceptional prison. The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools
by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may
"extend" far outside the body in which the gene sits, even reaching deep
into the nervous system of other organisms. Since it is not a factual position
I am advocating, but a way of seeing facts, I wanted to warn the reader not
to expect "evidence" in the normal sense of the word.So genes have become even more fundamental, and bodies even more
inconsequential: "Fundamentally, what it going on is that replicating molecules
ensure their survival by means of phenotypic effects on the world. It is only
incidentally true that these phenotypic effects happen to be packaged up into units
called individual organisms" (Dawkins, 1982, pp. 4-5). *
But now the argument begins to unravel. Just when the gene seems poised to
swallow the organism entirely as just one incidental aspect of the gene's
armamentarium (the fully extended phenotype), Dawkins turns around, and tells us
that we may treat organisms as focal entitites after all, and describe evolution from
the organism's point of view just as well: "I am not saying that the selfish organism
view is necessarily wrong, but my argument, in its strong form, is that it is looking
at the matter the wrong way up ... I am pretty confident that to look at life in terms
of genetic replicators preserving themselves by means of their extended
phenotypes is at least as satisfactory as to look at it in terms of selfish organisms
maximizing their inclusive fitness" (1982, pp. 6-7).
Shall we then favor the gene or the organism? Dawkins claims to prefer genes
and to find greater insight in this formulation. But he allows that you or I might
prefer organisms—and it really doesn't matter. In a telling analogy, Dawkins
compares genes and organism to the two possible versions (different
*But it is not "only incidentally true" that genes generally come packaged into
organisms on our planet—and that, in full extension, organic matter coagulates into
evolutionary individuals at several levels of an inclusive hierarchy: genes, cell lineages,
organisms, demes, species, and clades. This process of coagulation has occurred for
active and interesting structural reasons only dimly understood (Buss, 1987). But how
could we regard this most fundamental feature of the organic world, constituting the basis
of evolutionary causality in units of selection, as "only incidentally true"? This structure
may well be contingently true—in the sense that we can imagine an alternative world
composed only of naked genes—but our planet's biological reality surely cannot be
designated as incidental in the usual sense of unimportant or not fundamental. Indeed, the
origin of such hierarchical structure may not even be contingently true, but broadly
predictable (see Kauffman, 1993; Maynard Smith and Szathmary, 1995).