638 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
gene remains powerful, largely for reasons of general preference in our culture,
rather than for any observed power or intrinsic biological status possessed by
evolutionary individuals of this lowest level. When an incoherent argument
remains intriguing, and supporters cannot bear the wrench of total abandonment, a
favored theory must be festooned with compromises and "howevers," or so
changed in form that only lip service remains to cover a truly altered substance.
Often, given human tendencies to paint a bright face on adversity, gene
selectionists have made their necessary retreats, but presented them as refinements
or elaborations of the original theory. In this closing section, I shall show that the
two most prominent "revisions" of gene selectionism—Dawkins's extended
phenotype (1982) and Williams's codical selection (1992)—represent defeats
rather than improvements as advertised.
DAWKINS ON THE "EXTENDED PHENOTYPE." I always admired the
chutzpah of Senator Aikens' brilliant solution to the morass of our involvement in
the Vietnamese War. At the height of our reverses and misfortunes, he advised that
we should simply declare victory and get out. Richard Dawkins got in with his
1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He declared victory with The Extended Phenotype in
1982 —although he had really, at least with respect to the needs and logic of his
original argument, gotten out.
With admirable clarity, and no ambivalence, Dawkins proclaimed the doctrine
of exclusive gene selectionism in 1976: "I must argue for my belief that the best
way to look at evolution is in terms of selection occurring at the lowest level of all
... I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest,
is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the
unit of heredity (1976, p. 12). So selection occurs at only one lowest level—the
gene, labelled as 'the fundamental unit of selection.' Nothing more inclusive, not
even an organism, can be called a unit of selection."
Dawkins presented his later work, The Extended Phenotype, as an extension
and elaboration of gene selectionism: "This book," he wrote, "is in some ways the
sequel to my previous book, The Selfish Gene" (1982, p. v). Dawkins had admitted,
in 1976, that genes work through phenotypes of the "lumbering robots"
(organisms) serving as their passive homes. But if genes are nature's real actors,
and phenotypes only their means of expression, then why limit phenotypes to
bodies? Any consequence of a gene should be equally capable of carrying the
gene's interest in a process of selection. Dawkins admitted of course that most
aspects of this extended phenotype— the footprint of a shorebird in the sand, for
example—will be too ephemeral, or too by the by, to be effective in the gene's
interest. But other parts of the extended phenotype (with the beaver's dam as
Dawkins's favorite example) do contribute to the success of beaver genes, and
should be included within "the extended phenotype" that the gene—the ultimate
and only unit of selection (at least in 1976)—can manipulate in its full range of
machinations for replicative success.
Dawkins (1982, pp. iv-vii) therefore insisted that the viewpoint of The