The slelfless gene? Has the selfish gene gone away?
In a recent article " It's time to get skeptical about the ""Selfish Gene"". " Richard Dawkins book was taken to challenge, but not as much as many would think. The discovery in recent years that evolution can be driven by environmental factors has changed some thinking but not all. There are many dynamics on how genes work, and as much as we think we have figured out, we are still figuring out so many more. Environment does play an important role in evolution. In certain environments genes which function for specific traits work well, or work enough to pass on, so here a selfish gene is fine. But in another environment, it doesn't work at all, so no matter how selfish that gene is, he is likely to be the one passed over, and possibly silenced or even bred out of the population. What people fail to understand is that there is not 1 selfish gene, but 10 books worth of selfish genes. When a gene is expressed and amped up, it is usually in a phy