What a long strange trip

it's been for Robert Trivers, who during the early 1970s was one of the most brilliant evolutionary theorists ever. Now, I'm happy to see he's back with a magisterial tome Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements, co-written with Austin Burt. "Selfish genetic elements" are bits of DN that don't raise the Darwinian fitness of the organism as a whole, just of their own kind, often at the expense of the overall creature.

As a crude analogy for what Trivers and Burt are describing, think of the Enron Corporation. Traditional economic theory, which bears many resemblances to traditional evolutionary theory, would conceive of Enron as a single entity that competes against other firms for the good of its shareholders. Unfortunately, old fashioned economics did not prove an adequate guide to Enron's behavior because the firm was infested with "selfish managerial elements," executives who were looting the firm for their own selfish benefit.

Just as firms have evolved various carrots to to align individual managers' self-interests with the interests of the stockholders ( such as stock options) and sticks to prevent embezzlement (such as audits), organisms evolve responses to selfish genetic elements.

Of course, developing a better understanding of Enron-like situations does not "refute" economics, just adds to its sophistication. Similarly, Trivers and Burt are adding to the explanatory power of Darwinism.

One quibble. I realize that this horse long ago left the barn, but Richard Dawkins' term "selfish gene" has caused a lot of misunderstanding among the public over the years. A better term might be "dynastic gene."

Thus, my Enron analogy can be misleading because what the "selfish genetic elements" are doing is not making themselves rich, per se, but contriving for copies of themselves to proliferate. The closest business analogy instead might be a firm damaged by nepotism, such as Wang Computer in the 1980s, where managers appoints their relatives to important positions at the expense of the company as a whole.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer