Selfish Genes, Cartels and the Politics of Gaia

I recently picked up a copy of Margret Atwood’s recently published book Burning Questions which is a collection of essays and occasional pieces written between 2004 and 2022 about the “big questions” facing humanity. The issues she discusses run the whole gamut, from her most recent thoughts on the filming of her book The Handmaid’s Tale, through to gender and feminism and on to climate change, and the writer as a political agent.  I am not going to review this eclectic collection, suffice it to say I found it most engaging, but my intention is to use it as a starting point for this current blog.

The book is divided into various sections, one of which she entitles, Art is Our Nature where she addresses environmental issues, and it contains pieces written in 2022 drawing attention to the fact that Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published over 50 years ago, and another chapter entitled Big Science. These essay titles excited me as they encompass and exploration into the relationship between science, society and the environment. This relationship, I hasten to add, is not always straight forward and will be the focus of this blog. Firstly, it is perhaps not surprising that on examination we find that Atwood’s father was a forest entomologist, and she would spend time with him in the Canadian backwoods of Quebec honing her environmental sensibilities. Therefore, with these women, Atwood is a writer with environmental sensibilities, and secondly, with Carson we have an environmental scientist with literary sensibilities. Interestingly, although Carson’s early studies were in literature, she eventually switched subjects and ended up majoring in zoological science, but her literary bent would continue to cast its shadow and be deployed to great effect in the area of environmental protection and conservation. I see both these women caught between the two cultures of art and natural science.

As an applied biologist studying soil and plant microbiology in the late 1970s, I was well aware of environmental pollution, but also the river in the valley at the end of the road where I grew up, the river Roch, was highly polluted and devoid of any fish (not so today I can happily report). However, the issues surrounded the use of synthetic pesticides, and in particular the connection between DDT and its relationship to the thinning of the eggshells of birds was something as an undergraduate I couldn’t escape. Indeed, three years after I joined Rothamsted Research, as a post-doctoral researcher in 1986 looking for alternatives to synthetic pesticides to control plant-parasitic nematodes, Michael Elliot, a chemist and a senior research fellow at Rothamsted, was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for his contribution to stabilising a class of synthetic chemicals known as the pyrethroids. What he and his team did was extract the natural insecticide pyrethrin, which they extracted from several species of plants related to chrysanthemums but lost its insecticidal properties very rapidly, and stabilise it thereby paving the way for them to be developed for use as commercial insecticides.

Micheal Elliott who stabilised natural pyrethrin from chrysanthemums

Acknowledge: Wikipedia

Since my joining Rothamsted as a research scientist nearly 40 years have elapsed, and, as I stated above, the river Roch now supports a fish population which I personally witnessed a few years ago on a trip to my hometown Rochdale where I saw people catching fish from the river. The river flows through the centre of Rochdale and it was all covered over in the early twentieth century to mitigate the fact that it was basically an open sewer full of the pollution which was the biproduct of the developing industrial town. Rochdale is a town nestling in a cleft in the Pennines Northeast of Manchester, which is recognized for being very wet. But it is getting wetter.  Indeed, on Boxing Day 2015 the whole centre of the newly uncovered river Roch flooded an event that had not occurred in living memory.  The previously covered river had been opened up and the centre of the town re-designed because it was felt that the increase in rainfall was likely to cause a blockage and the river to flood. Climate change was regarded by most to be the cause.

Rochdale is a product of the Industrial Revolution and surely the product of progress, but today I am wondering for how much longer! In 1979, the year I graduated and the year I started working as an agricultural scientist in Africa, Margret Thatcher became Prime Minister and by the late 1980’s she had become a keen spokesperson advocating green issues. She was one of the first political leaders to draw international attention to climate change, but that was not what many remember her for, she was also a strong advocate for business and the free market and seemed to have had no remorse for the coal mining communities she ravaged even though many environmentalists would have at that time supported an energy policy that moved away from fossil fuels.

There is an apocryphal story that Margret Thatcher got her catchphrase, “There’s no such thing as society” from a dinner she attended at Magdalen College at Oxford at which it is alleged she had a discussion with Richard Dawkins who was also attending. I have no idea when this exchange took place but Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene was written during the 1970’s apparently during the period of the three-day week and also the time of the publication of Edward Wilson’s book Sociobiology (Dawkins’ book came out the following year). Interestingly, 1976 was the year Milton Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics and therefore the discussion, if it took place, must have been sometime between the mid to late-1970s and the publication of an interview she gave to Woman’s Own in 1987, a couple of years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This naturally begs the question as to whether sociological and political thinking was affecting biological thinking or vice versa. And, indeed, this would not be the first occasion where a biologist would have priority and affected other academic disciplines. Our discussion is somewhat reminiscent of the influences Charles Darwin had on Karl Marx and where he politely declined Marx’s invitation to have Das Capital dedicated to him.

Charles Darwin (left) Karl Marx (right)

The time from Friedman getting his Nobel Prize, 1976, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989, was a period where the responsibility of business was, according to Friedman, to increase profits for the shareholders and abdication responsibility to society at large. This was the view Thatcher followed with gusto and had led to her catchphrase picked up by Woman’s Own. Meanwhile, in 1985 in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had taken over the leadership of the Communist Party with the intention of increasing government openness and to economically reform the country as the centralised planning system was failing miserably. From a Western perspective, where there was no such thing as society, capitalism had won over communism, and this increased the resolve of the US and UK governments to deregulate; clearly the Soviet Union’s centrally planned system had broken, or at least this is what Ronald Regan and Margret Thatcher would have you believe. But was this really the result of a conversation at dinner between Margret Thatcher and the biologist Richard Dawkins?

Perhaps we will never know, but the zeitgeist of the time would suggest that such a conversation could quite plausibly have been a subject of discussion over a dinner table at an Oxford College. Remember, in 1983 Thatcher had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was not without controversy, but let’s fast forward to 2006 and the publication of the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene in which Dawkins writes an introduction to the new edition. In his new introduction he does indeed mention Margret Thatcher, who had by then been labelled The Iron Lady for her uncompromising approach to political leadership, and her abdication of society was regarded by many, including me, as the promotion of selfish individualism at the expense of society.  Where was all this going to lead? Therefore, as an exercise it might be instructive to have a look at what Dawkins says about the word “selfish”, as used in the book’s title:

The level at which natural selection operates has long been a source of disputation among biologists and I clearly remember of small group of us at Rothamsted driving to Oxford in 1988 to attend an open discussion held in the Sheldonian Theatre between Richard Dawkins, the Oxford don, and Stephan Jay Gould, the Harvard based palaeontologist and essayist, entitled, “A Darwinian Dialogue”. I cannot remember the details of their arguments, but although they argued back and forth about the nature of evolution, its mechanisms, and the level at which natural selection operates, there was a consilience between their views that could only be interpreted to substantiate Darwin’s overarching theory of evolution. Basically, by the end of all their arguments in which neither party pulled their punches, they metaphorically kissed and made up.

Now, Mrs. Thatcher’s statement about there being no such thing as society I regard as hopelessly flawed, and I think the zoologist Richard Alexander gets to the point in his book Darwinism and Human Affairs when he says:

…selection has not operated so as to promote directly either the long-term survival of individuals or the well-being and survival of populations or species at the expense of individuals. When such effects occur – whether as a result of social interactions or for other reasons – they are either the incidental consequences of the evolutionary process or they arise out of such consequences.

Now forgetting the level of genes for the moment, I’ll return to those, what Alexander is saying is that the level at which selection operated, i.e. the individual, the population, the species, are real and they arise out of the evolutionary process but he goes on to say that, “Genes are not yet part of the everyday consciousness …of even the most thoughtful and best educated people of the world.” Indeed, it’s Dawkins’ intention to remedy this situation, but it is clear that his book is a polemic and has had a polarising effect between on the one hand, the rugged self-centred individualists, and on the other, the conformity of socially minded collectivists. There is therefore a tension here between the social and the solitary aspects of the human condition. Each one of us is a social solitary, but can this tension also be applied to genes?

Reading Dawkin’s introduction to his thirtieth-anniversary edition he claims as indisputable that there are two levels of selection: the gene as one unit of selection as a replicator, and the organism as the other unit of selection as the vehicle. Neither he declares, should be denied, and goes on to say that a good alternative to his title The Selfish Gene is The Cooperative Gene as a key theme in his book is that it “argues for a form of cooperation among self-interested genes,” i.e. in his words, “from genes that cooperate in self-interested cartels.” Now the use of the word cartel is interesting because a cartel is an association of businesses with the strict aim of maintaining prices at an elevated level and thereby restricting competition. Now are we not here caught in a paradox where Dawkins wants to have his cake and eat it! Is not the subtitle to Darwin’s book The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and is not the word struggle another word for competition? Clearly these arguments are nuanced and indeed Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene along with Wilson’s Sociobiology got tarred with the brush of biological determinism and Margaret Thatcher, presumably unaware of the scientific debate that ensued following the publication of these books, politicised the science in her declaration that society did not exist. Indeed, within the community of biologists to this day there is a great deal of discussion regarding the level at which selection operates.

At the risk of being controversial and starting with Dawkins’ selfish gene we can create a hierarchy of vehicles (Dawkins’ term) from a single cell prokaryote to multicellular prokaryotes, from multicellular prokaryotes to eukaryotes, single celled eukaryotes to multicellular eukaryotes to multicellular organisms and up through the whole tree of evolutionary life on earth.  Now throughout this whole evolutionary sequence of vehicles from the microbes that existed in the primordial soup, some 4 billion years ago to ourselves, genes are continually being turned on and turned off and this regulation is fundamentally key. Now it’s a little surprising that a small individual adult nematode (the lab worm C. elegans)worm has about 1000 cells and about 20 thousand genes, while an individual adult person has over 25 trillion cells but still only just over 20 thousand genes. It is the regulation of those genes that distinguishes us from the nematode.

James Lovelock who with William Golding developed The Gaia Hypothesis

Acknowledgment: Wikipedia

Returning to Margret Atwood’s Burning Questions, in a delightful little book entitled The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes, another Oxford don, Denis Noble and former Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, takes a systems-level view of life in which a musical score represents the genotype, and where the different parts of the playing orchestra can be compared to the organs and systems of the harmonious functioning phenotype that the audience hears. Every living person is full of regulatory feedback loops and homeostatic mechanisms, and it was suggested in the seventies, by the chemist the late James Lovelock, that the whole earth is a self-regulating organism, and together with the novelist William Golding, they named it The Gaia Hypothesis. This was and still is a controversial issue and raises many questions about reductive deterministic views of the universe versus holistic indeterministic approaches which underlie the heart of Margret Atwood’s Burning Questions regarding our environment. But sticking for the moment to Denis Noble’s approach and applying the musical metaphor back to physiology, it seems that the earth is running a temperature, and we need some planetary physicians.