Such observations could well have implications for the origin of life. 1 Can DNA do that on its own? After a fashion, yes: very short strands of both single- and double-stranded DNA can produce copies when treated to a cycle of changing conditions. Julius Rebek and coworkers demonstrated one of the first: a synthetic molecule that could act as the template for its own replication. It is not clear that a gene can be considered, from a chemical point of view, a replicator. I will go out on a limb and say that I don’t believe anyone has ever observed a gene, as a discrete and autonomous unit, make an exact copy of itself, whether or not it is in a pool of such copies. Genes, but no other units in life’s hierarchy, make exact copies of themselves in a pool of such copies.’ Groups, meanwhile, do not make exact copies of themselves. Wilson ignores, argues Dawkins, that the gene ‘is on its own as a “replicator”, with its own unique status as a unit of Darwinian selection. This challenges Dawkins’ gene-centred view. Wilson for the latter’s advocacy of group selection: the idea that natural selection works at the level of groups of organisms (and presumably at other levels in the biological hierarchy from gene to ecosystem).

Perhaps Dawkins’ most trenchant statement to that effect was in an attack on Harvard biologist E. But the fundamental premise on which it is built – DNA as replicator – seemed always to be sound. ‘We are,’ he famously said, ‘all survival machines for the same kind of replicator – molecules called DNA.’ Battles have been fought over whether this is a good use of metaphor (and as with the ‘selfish gene’ itself, metaphor was all it was ever meant to be). The 'replicator' (DNA) is not independent of the 'vehicle', the organism itself, so that The Selfish Gene can no longer be regarded as a valid scientific hypothesis.Ĭentral Dogma One-way Causation Self-replication Selfish Gene Weismann Barrier.Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The selfish gene, which topped a poll last year for the most inspiring science books of all time, has set the agenda for how we think about genes and DNA. All three of these assumptions have now been shown to be incorrect. The idea rests on three assumptions: the isolation of the genome from any influences by the soma and its development in interaction with the environment (the Weis - mann Barrier), one-way causation from DNA to proteins (The Central Dogma), and the autoreplication of DNA (Schrödinger's aperiodic crystal). It presents a severely narrowed down version of Huxley's synthesis, which developed in the 1960s following the formulation of the Cen tral Dogma of molecular biology by Francis Crick.

The idea of The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, grew out of the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology formulated by Julian Huxley in 1942, and more specifically from George Williams' Adaptation and Natu - ral Selection in 1966.

The selfish gene author