Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don’t misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership.
If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.
During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.
Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than ‘environmental’ ones?
Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Finally, at the end of the chapter, we saw that genes ‘sharing’ a given extended phenotypic trait might come from different species, even different phyla and different kingdoms.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.
One is that phenotypes that extend outside the body do not have to be inanimate artefacts: they can themselves be built of living tissue.
Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.
The other idea is that wherever there are ‘shared’ genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative.
No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that ‘The Selfish Gene’ on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.
But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, lists six fundamental constants, which are believed to hold all around the universe.
That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity.
If the parasite’s means of genetic exit from the host’s body is the same as the host’s, namely the host’s gametes or spores, there will be relatively little conflict between the ‘interests’ of parasite and host genes.
The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.
The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements.
The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.
A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising.