By Aadya Nageswaran
Source of information: The Selfish Gene (By Richard Dawkins)
In a crux, genes are selfish. If you have read the book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins, then I need not say more. Genes are the basis for natural selection. Look at it logically; every human body is different, and all humans die at some point or the other. On what basis could selection take place at the individual level? When we talk of the genome, however, there is a whole new story to be told.
Your entire family has genes similar to yours, and any outsider too might have specific genes that are similar to yours. Not to mention, chimpanzees share about 98% of their genes with us. It is, therefore, at the genetic level that selection takes place. The more successful gene survives, leaving the weaker ones to die. That is what the common phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’ truly means.
Now, there is an entire theory based around the assumption that genes are selfish, or that whatever the survival machines do are in the interest of the genes. Genes will program their survival machines such that not only do they survive, but they also produce enough young ones for the copies of the genes they carry to be spread through the gene pool. (As an analogy, the gene is to the animal the way the man who coded the computer is to the computer. The animal gets the code; and then it lives by applying these basic rules.)
There is a very interesting case that I would like to illustrate when it comes to this theory. It is known as kin altruism. Specifically, I would like to talk about how the parent is altruistic towards its young. (Humans differ from other animals in the sense that they have developed consciousness, which makes them freer as compared to all the other animals that are slaves to their genes.)
The relatedness of a mother to her child is ½, or I should say that she shares half her genes with her child. (Half of her genes over and above the baseline number, since we must remember that we each share a considerable amount of genes with others.) Hence, she cares for her child half as much as she cares for herself. In looking after her child, she is ensuring that her genes are passed on. It might seem like a crude way of looking at something we prefer to call love, but there it is.
There are a lot of factors that play a role in deciding how much a mother cares for each of her children. She will probably spend more energy on getting food for the younger one, since the older one is more equipped to hunt for itself. On the other hand, if her children are faced with a life or death situation where she can only save one child, she will choose the older one. This is because, she has already spent more time and energy on nurturing and caring for the older one. By saving the younger one, she is not doing her genes any favour. Because by doing so, she has wasted all the time she spent on the older one by saving the younger one on whom she had spent comparatively less energy.
It might seem disturbing when you read about something this devoid of emotion, but meaningless altruism serves no purpose in evolution.
It might seem impossible for you to process that there is so much going on behind every decision an animal takes. Everything, after all, happens in a split second. In reality, as you might have already guessed, the animal doesn’t think at all. In fact, it simply does. They don’t sit around calculating relatedness, or weighing every decision. They don’t have that sort of conscious forethought.
Everything just happens; that’s instinct. We, as observers, can only build up crazy theories for their every action. The same way we have laws of motion and inertia, it’s not like we consciously think about these laws every time we do something. Only in retrospect do these theories make sense. We aren’t consciously applying them in real life. It’s the same for animals.
Are genes cool or what?
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