They will promote their own propagation in the short term even if they compromise the creatures that

They will promote their own propagation in the short term even if they compromise the creatures that contain them in the longer term They are not simply selfish They are completely solipsist: blind, deaf and unaware. The idea that genes pursue their own agenda offers us a chance to look at the currents that lie beneath our actions and ostensible motives, but Jones doesn’t do justice to these modern insights. He deals competently with ideas relating to “genes for aggression” or “genes for intelligence”, but those notions are already somewhat passe We have moved on. Of particular importance is the work of Bill Hamilton, now a professor at Oxford, who has pointed out, however odd it may seem, that irredeemably “selfish” genes may succeed by promoting behaviour which is “altruistic”. In the interests of brevity, we can talk of genes “for” altruism; all populations of animals possess them. A gene for altruism is any gene that codes for any particular character – not necessarily a behavioural feature, although behaviour is most obviously implicated – that is costly to the individual who owns that gene, but is beneficial to the creatures around it. Examples abound: such genes are at work in any field of rabbits, flashing their white tails as they run from danger to warn their fellows, even though it would be far safer simply to sneak away and leave them to it.Such behaviour is genetically endowed.

Natural selection has favoured the solipsist genes that bring it about. How? Because the other animals that are being warned are likely to be related to the one that blows the whistle, and are therefore likely to contain copies of the same altruistic gene that prompted the apparently selfless behaviour. The point is not that the whistleblower calculates the odds that others contain the same gene as itself. The point is that if an altruistic gene arises in a population then, by promoting altruistic behaviour, that gene will propagate its own spread, because it will promote the survival of others that contain copies of itself.

In short, selfishness and altruism are not antithetical: the altruism is an expression of the selfishness. The inevitability of altruism in what in essence is a ruthless world is one of the many notions of science that can be difficult to grasp precisely because it is so simple. But its ramifications are huge.For example, Hamilton himself has suggested that – biologically speaking – parental care is merely a special case of more general “altruism”: parents favour their own children just because those children have the greatest chance of containing (altruistic) genes like their own. Extrapolations of such themes predict that females have a different “agenda” from males, and hence pursue different strategies: females furthering their own genes by ensuring survival of the relatively few children that they are able to produce, and males doing most to propagate themselves by increasing the number of offspring. The point is not to declare that what is “natural” is thereby “right”: “is” is not “ought”, as David Hume pointed out in the 18th century. Immanuel Kant made the point more strongly: that what is natural would obviously come easily and what comes easily cannot be said to be “good” at all.