The Extended Phenotype

Title: The Extended Phenotype
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press 1989 (First published 1982)
ISBN: 0-19-286088-7
Pages: 264
 

Any work from Dawkins exudes promises of a minimum guarantee. Besides, Dawkins had earlier appealed that “it doesn’t matter if you never read anything else of mine, please at least read this”. That’s why I took this book for reading from the library, being thoroughly familiar with the mercurial style of Dawkins as reviewed elsewhere in this blog. His writings on evolution bear the markings of authority and wit. The recent title, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ is simply superb and can be regarded as the greatest weapon in Science’s arsenal on its ever raging fight against creationism and intelligent design.

However, this one was a huge disappointment. Dawkins had declared early in that he had biologists in mind as the target audience. True to his word, all the arguments goes above the lay reader. As I have no background to biology, save what you acquire before you leave high school, this book was utterly boring and a pain to read. It was only because of Dawkins’ exhortation to at least read this work and my desire to write a review which prompted me to complete the reading of this book. Believe me, it was not at all enjoyable and I didn’t understand even the main ideas. The author has meant this book to be a research paper somewhat and the references to other papers in the field don’t lend much reading value to the work. It was a torture to go through the pages. Even tough biological ideas are treated like they don’t need any explanation. I came across the term ‘haplodiploid’ without any reference to its meaning and only after a painstaking search through the glossary, could place it properly.

Dawkins’ ideas differ from the traditional Darwinian school in that he considers the gene as the basic unit of replication and natural selection is attributed to act upon this material. Phenotype means the manifested attributes of an organism, the joint products of its genes and their environment. A gene may be said to have phenotypic expression in, say, eye colour. In this book, the concept of phenotype is extended to include functionally important consequences of gene differences, outside the bodies in which the genes sit. Animals are expected to behave as if maximizing the survival chances of all the genes inside them. This is amended by Dawkins to a new central theorem of the extended phenotype: an animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing the behaviour.

The book is useless for the general reader and not at all recommended. How it will look like to a biologist, I am not able to tell.

Rating: 1 Star