“Selfish” v. “Innocent” genes

When Richard Dawkins titled his seminal book “The Selfish Gene” he knew he was getting into trouble. But he could not have known that he was getting the gene also into trouble! From being selfish in the 1970s, the gene has become “innocent” in 2011 – in It’s your environment, stupid! (The Hindu Open Page, July 17, 2011), Professor B. M. Hegde says, “The poor gene is innocent.”

That is perhaps the most harmless statement in the whole article. No one denies Lamarck was a distinguished biologist. It is simply that he got things wrong. A few decades later Darwin got closer to the truer mechanism of evolution. The classic Lamarckian argument was the giraffe stretched its neck to feed on the fruits perched high and got its neck lengthened and its progenies inherited that characteristic. The Darwinian mechanism goes like this: in a population of giraffes, a few had longer necks, mere variation in a characteristic, and had better chance of feeding themselves. Hence, these survived better, and reproduced more. True, Darwin too was in the dark about the details of how things worked. But he got it right in the main. This does not sit well with Professor Hedge.

“Survival of the fittest” was NOT Darwin’s phrase; it was his Bulldogs’ – Thomas Henry Huxley. The “struggle” and “violence” Darwin talks about must be taken within the context of how organisms survive and they should not be infused with our current interpretations. This was the fault of the Social Darwinists and I thought we had left that school far behind. But, no, says Prof. Hedge.

In a sense Dawkins was, in his book, working against Spencer’s interpretation of Darwin. He saw selfishness not in the organism, say the giraffe, but in the coming together of thousands of genes, in each of them, that made up the giraffe. Just the fact that the mechanism Darwin (“Evolution through natural selection”) had postulated may have gaps does not make Lamarckian mechanism of the environment reaching into the genes is correct. This argument unfortunately parallels the Intelligent Designer (ID) hypothesis, in more ways than one, I might add.

No proof of an Intelligent Designer existing (in any sense) is ever offered. It is merely asserted that the concept of Intelligent Designer is sufficient to disprove the idea espoused simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin. Likewise, it is Prof. Hegde’s claim epigenetics is the putative mechanism that belies Darwin. Not even a semblance of a link between epigenetics and the giraffe growing taller is offered. Epigenetics merely points to the possibility of a process beyond random genetic mutation. It means nothing like, “our life experiences control our biology and not vice versa.” The idea has not even questioned, much less dethroned Darwinian understanding. But this is not what people will take home from articles that putatively enthrone Lamarck while offering no evidence except scattering some supposedly super-technical words like “iatrogenic’, “metagenome”, which, in my understanding is an unnecessarily complex way of saying “the set of all genomes that make up all human beings”. In short, the human gene pool; so simple isn’t it?

While it is undeniably true that sensation-seeking media have mutated scientist’s findings beyond recognition, good science writers like Matt Ridley take pains to drill into the readers that when they designate a gene as a cause of a disease they merely mean that with that gene (or a particular variation of it) the probability of an organism getting that disease is higher. No definitiveness anywhere. Unfortunately even this message, delivered in simple language, is too high brow for the science illiterate. The fact that even these have become inscrutable to the population is a measure of this all pervasive science illiteracy and it definitely does not show the scientists up as arrogant. No scientist worth his salt has ever claimed, as Prof. Hegde implies: science is the gospel truth for all times. Prof. Feynman has repeatedly said that science is always provisional.

Genes do play a vital role in the survival of an organism. One precise manifestation is this – Huntington chorea and a minimum of 36 repetitions of “CAG” on Chromosome 4 (4p16.3). If that is not a vital role, what is?

When a sentence like “Each cell in our body … is a complete organism and is capable of doing almost all the functions of a man…” or, “[a]t the cellular level, every human (animal) cell is an ‘independent’ person with feelings and capacity…” gets even an implied imprimatur of a paper like The Hindu all right thinking people must take the responsibility to extirpate these myths from the societal firmament.

A gene is selfish in the sense Dawkins wrote; but it is not “innocent” in any sense - epigenetics or not, genes do control who we are.

Raghuram Ekambaram