Selfish gene theory

This is a restatement of Richard Dawkins selfish gene theory. Most biologists do not see the concept as a radical idea but as a helpful way of viewing natural selection. Of course our bodies are more than gene machines, as Dawkins is the first to admit but many harsh facts of life, such as illness, ageing and death, can best be understood rationally in these terms. 

Selfish gene theory predicts that males (producers of less costly gametes) can afford to mate with any female (producers of more costly gametes) who might bear them some offspring (S, Chapter 3). If the cost of copulation is low, a few cross-species "mistakes" may be of little consequence to a male capable of many matings over a lifetime. 

You may be familiar with Richard Dawkins s books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, and may perhaps have learned most of what you know about evolution, particularly the evolution of behavior, from these excellent sources. His second book. The Extended Phenotype, is less well known, and that is a pity, because in many ways it is his finest achievement. Nonetheless, even the most lucid books contain some obscure passages, and you could weU have been puzzled by a couple of pages of The Extended Phenotype that deal will the theory of modifier genes, which R. A. Fisher proposed in 1930 to explain why the phenotypes of some genes are dominant whereas others are recessive, phenotype being a technical term for the specific set of observable characteristics that indicate the presence of a particular variant of a gene. 

---