• DOI:10.1017/S0031819100050580
• Corpus ID: 170552110

In Defence of Selfish Genes

@article{Dawkins1981InDO,
  title={In Defence of Selfish Genes},
  author={Richard Dawkins},
  journal={Philosophy},
  year={1981},
  volume={56},
  pages={556-573}
}

• R. Dawkins
• Published 1 October 1981
• Physics
• Philosophy

and genetically quite impossible situation' (p. 440), and as a 'grossly simplified and distorted scheme' (p. 444). But of course it is abstract, simplified and distorted. This is what models are, and that is what gives them their usefulness. It is the very property which made my model useful to Mackie and which stimulated his useful contribution. Models do not aspire to mimic reality faithfully. If they did, they would not be models, they would be reality. In physics, for instance, it is sometimes convenient to imagine a body-it may even be described as a traintravelling at nearly the speed of light past an observer, who sees the passengers hideously foreshortened. Only a pedant would point out that trains can't go that fast, and that in any case the observer wouldn't have time to see the passengers. If a philosopher made such an objection against the writings of a particular physicist, we could justly conclude that he or she did not understand the first thing about physics, since all physicists make use of such simplified models. Yet this is almost exactly the nature of Midgley's objection to my 'grudger/sucker/cheat' model. If she had objected that it was a bad model I would have listened sympathetically, but that is not what she did. She appears not to have understood that it was a model at all. In the present state of evolutionary biology, the preferred models embody various kinds of deliberate simplification, and one of the most fashionable of these deliberate simplifications is the 'one gene one strategy' model that worries Midgley so much. I am only one of many biologists for whom it is a convenient weapon in our theoretical armoury. Others who frequently wield it include J. Maynard Smith and E. 0. Wilson, to name two biologists whom Midgley singles out for special praise in her article. It is ironic that she should compare my 'gene-selection' treatment of the paradox of sex, to its disadvantage, with a passage from John Maynard Smith's rightly praised The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge University Press, I978). Like nearly all Maynard Smith's works, this book abounds in simplified models of exactly the kind Midgley castigates. If she had read beyond the Preface to page II13, Midgley would have found Maynard