The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

by Richard Dawkins

The purpose of this very simple model was to illustrate the kinds of conditions under which philandering might be favoured by natural selection, and the kinds of conditions under which faithfulness might be favoured. There was no presumption that philandering was more likely in males than faithfulness. Indeed, the particular run of the simulation that I published culminated in a mixed male population in which faithfulness slightly predominated (Dawkins 1976a, p. 165, although see Schuster & Sigmund 1981). There is not just one misunderstanding in Rose’s remarks, but multiple compounded misunderstanding. There is a wanton eagerness to misunderstand. It bears the stamp of snow-covered Russian jackboots, of little black microchips marching to usurp the male role and steal our tractor-drivers’ jobs. It is a manifestation of a powerful myth, in this case the great gene myth. The gene myth is epitomized in Rose’s parenthetic little joke about ladies not blaming their mates for sleeping around. It is the myth of ‘genetic determinism’. Evidently, for Rose, genetic determinism is determinism in the full philosophical sense of irreversible inevitability. He assumes that the existence of a gene ‘for’ X implies that X cannot be escaped. In the words of another critic of ‘genetic