SOME things should not be mentioned in polite society, even among evolutionary biologists, who admittedly have bizarre ideas about what constitutes "polite". For example, it is close to blasphemy to speculate about the level at which natural selection acts, or about the unit of heredity. For it is written "the fundamental unit of selection ... is the gene, the unit of heredity" (The Selfish Gene).
The "selfish gene" metaphor created by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book has so dominated that discussion about other levels of selection or forms of inheritance has hardly been taken seriously. Yet in a packed room at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts recently, professors did just that - albeit without Dawkins. Their message: too much emphasis has been put on the gene-centred approach, there is more to evolution than orthodox genetics.
Eva Jablonka, the principal speaker and an evolutionary biologist at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, believes ...
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