Why are genes selfish?
Richard Dawkins wrote a very popular book called the Selfish Gene that explained, for a popular audience, many of the exciting new theories and discoveries being made in evolutionary biology in the 1960s and 70s. The metaphor Dawkins chose, the selfish gene, was an extremely powerful metaphor, so powerful that it has often overshadowed the science itself! The controversies that swirl around EP are often tightly bound up with Dawkins metaphor. If our genes are selfish, are we all, deep down, unalterably selfish ourselves? Why did Dawkins chose this metaphor, what does it really mean, and what are its implications for EP and human nature? Simplifying greatly for the sake of the argument, there is a molecule, called a nucleotide, that comes in four different types, A, C, G, & T. Large numbers of these nucleotides can be linked together in a linear strand to make a much bigger molecule called DNA. Schematically, DNA looks like this: ACGTGCCTetc. Human DNA consists of about 3 billion nucleo
