Dawkins 1982

Richard DAWKINS

The extended phenotype — (OUP, 1982)

p. 264. The replicators that exist tend to be the ones that are good at manipulating the world to their own advantage. In doing this they exploit the opportunities offered by their environments, and an important aspect of the environment of a replicator is other replicators and their phenotypic manifestations. Those replicators are successful whose beneficial phenotypic effects are conditional upon the presence of other replicators which happen to be common. These other replicators are also successful, otherwise they would not be common. The world therefore tends to become populated by mutually compatible sets of successful replicators, replicators that get on well together. In principle this applies to replicators in different gene pools, different species, classes, phyla and kingdoms. But a relationship of specially intimate mutual compatibility has grown up between subsets of replicators that share cell nuclei and, where the existence of sexual reproduction makes the expression meaningful, share gene-pools.

            The cell nucleus as a population of uneasily cohabiting replicators is a remarkable phenomenon in itself. Just as remarkable, and quite distinct, is the phenomenon of multicellular cloning, the phenomenon of the multicellular organism. Replicators whise effects interact with those of other replicators to produce multicellular organisms achieve for themselves vehicles with complex organs and behaviour patterns. Complex organs and behaviour patterns are favoured in arms race. The evolution of complex organs and behaviour patterns is possible because the organism is an entity with a recurrent life cycle, each cycle beginning with a single cell. The fact that each cycle restarts in every generation from a single cell permits mutations to achieve radical evolutionary by going ‘back to the drawing board’ of embryological engineering. It also, by concentrating the efforts of all cells in the organism on the welfare of a narrow, shared germ-line, partly removes the ‘temptation’ for outlaws to work for their own private good at the expense of the other replicators with a stake in the same germ-line. The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded LOCAL CONCENTRATION, a shared knot of replicator power.