The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

As far as a gene is concerned, its alleles are its deadly rivals, but other genes are just a part of its environment, comparable to temperature, food, predators, or companions.

And if sexual, as opposed to non-sexual, reproduction benefits a gene for sexual reproduction, that is a sufficient explanation for the existence of sexual reproduction. Whether or not it benefits all the rest of an individual’s genes is comparatively irrelevant.

It seems that some people, educationally over-endowed with the tools of philosophy, cannot resist poking in their scholarly apparatus where it isn’t helpful.

I am reminded of P. B. Medawar’s remark about the attractions of ‘philosophy-fiction’ to ‘a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought’

As so often, fallacies arise when we forget the essential gradualism of evolution, the fact that adaptive evolution proceeds by small, step-by-step alterations of pre-existing structures or behaviour.