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New discovery proves 'selfish gene' exists

Sun, 06/22/2008 - 16:56 — NLN

A new discovery by a scientist from The University of Western Ontario provides conclusive evidence which supports decades-old evolutionary doctrines long accepted as fact.

Since renowned British biologist Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion") introduced the concept of the 'selfish gene' in 1976, scientists the world over have hailed the theory as a natural extension to the work of Charles Darwin.

In studying genomes, the word 'selfish' does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation. Ironically, this 'selfish' tendency can appear anything but selfish when the gene does move ahead for selfless and even self-sacrificing reasons.

For instance, in the honey bee colony, a complex social breeding system described as a 'super-organism,' the female worker bees are sterile. The adult queen bee, selected and developed by the worker bees, is left to mate with the male drones.

Because the 'selfish' gene controlling worker sterility has never been isolated by scientists, the understanding of how reproductive altruism can evolve has been entirely theoretical -- until now.

Working with Peter Oxley of the University of Sydney in Australia, Western biology professor Graham Thompson has, for the first time-ever, isolated a region on the honey bee genome that houses this 'selfish' gene in female workers bees.

This means that the 'selfish' gene does exist, not just in theory but in reality. "We don't know exactly which gene it is, but we're getting close."

"This basically provides a validation for a huge body of socio-biology," says Thompson, who adds the completion of Honey Bee Genome Project in 2006 was crucial to this discovery.

University of Western Ontario


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Comments

Mon, 06/23/2008 - 04:13 — photojack

This "selfish gene" only applies in this limited scenario.

I still support Stephen Jay Gould's evolutionary thinking that goes against the Dawkins concept of the broad majority of genes being "selfish". It is interesting that I had used examples of altruism in animal behavior as counter to the selfish gene concept. Now they are calling bee worker sterility "reproductive altruism"!? Gould's concept still holds in mammals and other higher animals.

Darwin was a keen observer and theorist and his theory is PROVEN beyond a shadow of a doubt. The only reason it is still called a theory is because it can't be proven in the same way a mathematical theorem can. That is a problem with semantics, NOT the science!

Tue, 06/24/2008 - 18:21 — Illusio

I think you may have misunderstood "The selfish gene"

"It is interesting that I had used examples of altruism in animal behavior as counter to the selfish gene concept."

If you did this, you didn't understand the concept of the selfish gene. Which is odd, as your second paragraph indicates you do. Selfishness is simply that property of evolution which causes genes to reproduce more at the expense of its alleles and is pretty much a mathematical inevitability in an evolutionary system. It is a theory because that's what we call currently accepted knowledge in the natural sciences.

Using the behaviour of bodies or organisms to provide counterexamples of such selfishness is simply an irrelevant approach. Bee worker sterility and other examples were dealt with by Dawkins himself in 'the selfish gene' and they are perfectly explained by their relatedness to the queen. They simply benefit their own genes as much by making sure she reproduces as if they did it themselves. The genes that built their bodies are certainly not sacrificing anything. They can't, because if they did, they would go extinct, outcompeted by invading reproduction strategies.

It helps to think of it in this way. There is only one way such sterility can have evolved in the first place. Non-sterile workers who started exhibiting queen-helping behaviour resulted in more copies of their genes being passed on - through the queen, not through their own reproduction. As they didn't reproduce, the genes related to reproduction became irrelevant and were allowed to mutate into non-functionality - with zero downside to themselves.

Genes are selfish, but bodies may or may not be. In the long term only genes that succeed in reproducing themselves, by cooperating with genes at other loci and outcompeting rival alleles can survive.

It doesn't matter if they sometimes do it through indirect methods, such as sterile worker bodies.

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