The Selfish Allele

[JimC]

"Richard Dawkins should have named his seminal book "The Selfish Allele". Discuss..."

[Clinton Huxley]

The Bitchy and Self-Centred Chromosome.

[JimC]

The Bitchy and Self-Centred Chromosome.

Yes, but it gets chopped up all the time, so it cannot be the object of natural selection...

The "gene" is merely shorthand for a messy combination of either locus or function. Every gene is in fact a category name, containing a potential population of alternative forms, the alleles, whose unrelenting but utterly unconscious competition for relative abundance in the gene pool (broadly considered) is, at heart, the essence of Richard's message...

(mind you, he had to use the term gene, since allele is unknown to the majority of a scientifically illiterate population...)

[Clinton Huxley]

I know all that!

The ME! ME! ME! Gene.

[Trinity]

The selfish meme gene

[PsychoSerenity]

The Bitchy and Self-Centred Chromosome.

Yes, but it gets chopped up all the time, so it cannot be the object of natural selection...

The "gene" is merely shorthand for a messy combination of either locus or function. Every gene is in fact a category name, containing a potential population of alternative forms, the alleles, whose unrelenting but utterly unconscious competition for relative abundance in the gene pool (broadly considered) is, at heart, the essence of Richard's message...

(mind you, he had to use the term gene, since allele is unknown to the majority of a scientifically illiterate population...)

The question is, would that title have put off more people from reading it than the number that have just read and misconstrued the title as it is?

[FBM]

The Libertarian Gene, maybe?

[Clinton Huxley]

The Libertarian Gene, maybe?

The Sethish Gene.....

[Tero]

If you get the selfish gene, do you need to wear designer jeans?

[mistermack]

Noooooooooooo,

the selfish gene is the right title. Nobody would have bought the book, if it was called the selfish allele.
It would have gone extinct.

[FBM]

The Libertarian Gene, maybe?

The Sethish Gene.....

[Mysturji]

The Bitchy and Self-Centred Chromosome.

Yes, but it gets chopped up all the time, so it cannot be the object of natural selection...

The "gene" is merely shorthand for a messy combination of either locus or function. Every gene is in fact a category name, containing a potential population of alternative forms, the alleles, whose unrelenting but utterly unconscious competition for relative abundance in the gene pool (broadly considered) is, at heart, the essence of Richard's message...

(mind you, he had to use the term gene, since allele is unknown to the majority of a scientifically illiterate population...)

Yeah. And anyway, didn't she sing that James Bond theme song?