Genes are not things, not ‘batons’ to be handed on in the relay race of life. There is no such thing as Dawkins’s ruthlessly selfish gene, determined to pass on its lineage unscathed, in the process dominating and exploiting that poor, blind robotic vehicle, the organism, to which it belongs. ‘As genomes evolve, new genes are born and older genes may adopt novel functions, fuse, or disappear altogether,’ writes systems biologist Adrian Verster.125 Genes are malleable processes, subservient to the needs of the organism in which they happen for the time being to inhere.
