The Extended Phenotype Quotes

“Putting these three things together we arrive at our own ‘central theorem’ of the extended phenotype: An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“An organism is the physical unit associated with one single life cycle. Replicators that gang up in multicellular organisms achieve a regularly recycling life history, and complex adaptations to aid their preservation, as they progress through evolutionary time.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Genes affect proteins, and proteins affect X which affects Y which affects Z which . . . affects the phenotypic character of interest.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The genes in one organism’s cells, then, can have extended phenotypic influence on the living body of another organism; in this case a parasite’s genes find phenotypic expression in the behaviour of its host.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Of course genes are not directly visible to selection. Obviously they are selected by virtue of their phenotypic effects, and certainly they can only be said to have phenotypic effects in concert with hundreds of other genes. But it is the thesis of this book that we should not be trapped into assuming that those phenotypic effects are best regarded as being neatly wrapped up in discrete bodies (or other discrete vehicles). The doctrine of the extended phenotype is that the phenotypic effect of a gene (genetic replicator) is best seen as an effect upon the world at large, and only incidentally upon the individual organism—or any other vehicle—in which it happens to sit.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“A replicator may be said to ‘benefit’ from anything that increases the number of its descendant (‘germ-line’) copies.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“My thesis has been that the slight further conceptual step outside the immediate body is a comparatively minor one. Nevertheless it is an unfamiliar one, and I tried to develop the idea in stages, working through inanimate artefacts to internal parasites controlling their hosts’ behaviour. From internal parasites we moved via cuckoos to action at a distance. In theory, genetic action at a distance could include almost all interactions between individuals of the same or different species. The living world can be seen as a network of interlocking fields of replicator power.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“What does complementariness mean for genes? Two genes may be said to be complementary if the survival of each, relative to its alleles, is enhanced when the other is abundant in the population.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The genotype may be a ‘physiological team’, but we do not have to believe that that team was necessarily selected as a harmonious unit in comparison with less harmonious rival units. Rather, each gene was selected because it prospered in its environment, and its environment necessarily included the other genes which were simultaneously prospering in the gene-pool. Genes with complementary ‘skills’ prosper in each others’ presence.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“An extended phenotypic character is the product of the interaction of many genes whose influence impinges from both inside and outside the organism. The interaction is not necessarily harmonious—but then nor are gene interactions within bodies necessarily harmonious,”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Just as every gene is the centre of a radiating field of influence on the world, so every phenotypic character is the centre of converging influences from many genes, both within and outside the body of the individual organism.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“These phenotypic consequences are conventionally thought of as being restricted to a small field around the replicator itself, its boundaries being defined by the body wall of the individual organism in whose cells the replicator sits. But the nature of the causal influence of gene on phenotype is such that it makes no sense to think of the field of influence as being limited in this arbitrary way, any more than it makes sense to think of it as limited to intracellular biochemistry. We must think of each replicator as the centre of a field of influence on the world at large.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Most of the replicators in the world have won their place in it by defeating all available alternative alleles. The weapons with which they won, and the weapons with which their rivals lost, are their respective phenotypic consequences”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene ‘for’ a behaviour pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, ‘for’ a behaviour pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“It will be remembered that the ‘central theorem’ of the selfish organism claims that an animal’s behaviour tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes ‘for’ that behaviour pattern maximizing their survival.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“It seems to follow from the thesis of this book that there is no important distinction between our ‘own’ genes and parasitic or symbiotic insertion sequences. Whether they conflict or cooperate will depend not on their historical origins but on the circumstances from which they stand to gain now.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“If the parasite’s means of genetic exit from the host’s body is the same as the host’s, namely the host’s gametes or spores, there will be relatively little conflict between the ‘interests’ of parasite and host genes.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“the behaviour of an individual may not always be interpretable as designed to maximize its own genetic welfare: it may be maximizing somebody else’s genetic welfare, in this case that of a parasite inside it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“the conclusion I wish to draw is not really disputable. If host behaviour or physiology is a parasite adaptation, there must be (have been) parasite genes ‘for’ modifying the host, and the host modifications are therefore part of the phenotypic expression of those parasite genes. The extended phenotype reaches out of the body in whose cells the genes lie, reaches out to the living tissues of other organisms.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The other idea is that wherever there are ‘shared’ genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“One is that phenotypes that extend outside the body do not have to be inanimate artefacts: they can themselves be built of living tissue.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“Finally, at the end of the chapter, we saw that genes ‘sharing’ a given extended phenotypic trait might come from different species, even different phyla and different kingdoms.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“The gene’s extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene