Why it's time to lay the Selfish Gene to rest

See Dawkin's response at http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/12/6/...

The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether – it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely untrue.

The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith.

Jerry Coyne's response to this took up two posts on his website:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/david-dob...

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/david-dob...

On his part, Dawkins has commented that his famous book could have had the title The Cooperative Gene chosen for it by the publisher without any change of text in the book itself.

The Selfish Gene is one of those books that has an uncanny ability to provoke truly awful criticism, both from people who should know better and people who quite evidently never will. To be fair to him, David Dobbs is merely in the former category.

Genes, gene expression, immune system learning, changes in symbiotic baterial flora, memory in neurons, culture. All of those are systems work towards survival and are always/sometimes/possibly passed down to offspring with mixing and random noise to help their surival. Inheritance of genes expression is interesting but does not negate importance of genes no more that inheriting bacterial flora from mother (or a surgeon doing c-section) does that. Genes are uniquely important because they are the base system.

The explanation of "genetic assimilation" seems bogus to me. The expression-based trait doesn't need the gene change to propogate. The genetic change doesn't need to wait for the expression-based trait to appear. Why are we looking at them as being part of the same process, instead of coincidentally parallel ones?

How many of these controllable genes do we humans have? How can I turn some on and off to see what will happen?

tl;dr “I haven't yet read _The Extended Phenotype_”.