Home > Work > The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene QUOTES

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene QUOTES

1 " There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

2 " Nevertheless, they are obviously functional units of great importance, and it is now necessary to establish exactly what their role is. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

3 " Selection favours those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes, which in turn succeed in the presence of them. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

4 " Returning, for clarification, to DNA as our archetypal replicator, its consequences on the world are of two important types. Firstly, it makes copies of itself, making use of the cellular apparatus of replicases, etc. Secondly, it has effects on the outside world, which influence the chances of its copies’ surviving. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

5 " But there is nothing magic about Darwinian fitness in the genetic sense. There is no law giving it priority as the fundamental quantity that is maximized. Fitness is just a way of talking about the survival of replicators, in this case genetic replicators. If another kind of entity arises, which answers to the definition of an active germ-line replicator, variants of the new replicator that work for their own survival will tend to become more numerous. To be consistent, we could invent a new kind of ‘individual fitness’, which measured the success of an individual in propagating his memes. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

6 " Whatever the claims of memes to be regarded as replicators in the same sense as genes, the first part of this chapter established that individual organisms are not replicators. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

7 " If the organism is not a replicator, what is it? The answer is that it is a communal vehicle for replicators. A vehicle is an entity in which replicators (genes and memes) travel about, an entity whose attributes are affected by the replicators inside it, an entity which may be seen as a compound tool of replicator propagation. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

8 " Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

9 " The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " Evolution is the external and visible manifestation of the differential survival of alternative replicators (Dawkins 1978a). Genes are replicators; organisms and groups of organisms are best not regarded as replicators; they are vehicles in which replicators travel about. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

18 " Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

19 " The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicle. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

20 " The controversy about gene selection versus individual (or group) selection is a controversy about whether, when we talk about a unit of selection, we ought to mean a vehicle at all, or a replicator. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene