Selfish to the core - Part 3

Many believe that the living world would have originated as a chaotic society of tiny molecules constituting what is referred to as the primeval soup. Among these molecules arose a particularly formidable character called the replicator (which we have referred to earlier) whose uniqueness lay in the fact that it could make copies of itself and spread through the primeval soup. The DNA of today, in character, is an example of a replicator that survived over the ages and functioned as the basis for the synthesis of higher organisms. There would have been many replicator molecules that would have fought each other over dominion of the natural world over the ages because common and limited resources for survival necessitated competition. Some replicators would have come together and recognised prudence in complicity against others in the soup thus forming even bigger replicator molecules. Indeed, the DNA that we find today in living organisms may be very much unlike these original replicators that existed and propagated in the primeval soup, but the principle on which it functions and propagates has not changed. As Dawkins puts it succinctly, the three characteristics that a replicator must possess if it has to survive in the natural world are longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. Is there a basic motive (purely functional in nature and nothing to do with consciousness, as defined in Part 1) at a more fundamental level of which the three aforementioned properties of a replicator are direct consequences? The DNA of any living organism in the world is a map of its psychobiological characteristics. Living beings have evolved over ages up the ladders of natural selection- able bodied organisms of today from the chaotic molecules of the primeval soup through extremely elaborate evolutionary processes over many millions of years - and it is known that it is the replicator (or simply put, the DNA) indeed that holds the masterplan over generations. Thus, can we identify a suitable 'motive' for these replicators that will unveil the process of evolution through the eyes of natural selection?

In this confessedly small exposition (though I realise now that it is far from that), I suddenly find myself juggling at a single place with a number of concepts that were developed over three elaborate chapters in "The Selfish Gene". But I have, to the best of my abilities, tried to maintain a logical chronology of thought in the way I that I received these ideas albeit putting them through a lot of condensation. Coming back to where we were, I had mentioned in my last post that a DNA was divided into sections called the chromosomes which in turn were further divided into genes. Thus, any modern replicator is nothing but a conglomeration of genes. A more enterprising and indeed interesting way to look at it is that it were these unitary genes that were the original replicators in the primeval soup. The properties of longevity, fecundity and high copying-fidelity that were mentioned earlier are indeed the properties that genes would desire if they were to pass the test of survival in nature. A gene, if it has to survive in the gene pool, has to ensure that its copies spread faster than any of its rival genes competing for the same resources. Complicity with other genes may be a really smart option and we shall come to this when we discuss 'survival machines' in the next paragraphs. Fundamentally though, the natural propensity of a gene must be to act for its own interests. Even complicity with other genes, that may seem altruistic at the surface are really acts of forwarding self-interest, if investigated more closely. This is, simply put, the principle of gene selfishness or the 'gene centric view of evolution' or 'gene selection'. The fundamental 'motive' that we were talking about in the last paragraph is indeed selfishness in the sense that a gene must try and propagate its kind in the gene pool at all costs. Let me repeat once again that this selfishness is not a conscious motive and that the reader should not make a conclusion that genes are ruthlessly malevolent entities. Nor is this statemet a harbinger for my crescendo statement where I would issue a coup de grace on humankind as being selfish thanks to the selfish genes that inhabit them. No , I am neither a devil's chaplain nor (or even worse) an evangelist in disguise.

The terms selfishness and altruism that appear here are purely technical definitions- biological motives independent of consciousness and very similar to computer algorithms at the very basic level of the constitution of the living. Selfishness of a gene encompasses all those actions that enable it to spread its copies in the gene pool, even if this required it to inhibit the spread of other genes especially its rivals that are called alleles. Pure Altruism on the other hand refers to acts that demand the gene to facilitate the spread of copies of other genes (rivals or not) at the cost of inhibiting its own spread. There have been instances (the example of Jonathon Livingston Seagull in Part 1), where acts of seeming altruism by an organism on the surface is really selfishness at the core- gene selfishness. The basic statement of the theory of 'gene selection' is that at the fundamental level, genes are basically selfish and this selfish nature empowers them to serve as units of natural selection in all living beings along the evolutionary chain. Can we support this hypothesis with observable evidence from the natural world - observations that cannot be explained under the tenets of 'group selection' or 'individual selection' theories of evolution?( to be continued and concluded)