Richard Dawkins on expanding our concept of the individual
“To return to the analogy of the Necker Cube, the mental flip that I want to encourage can be characterized as follows. We look at life and begin by seeing a collection of interacting individual organisms. We know that they contain smaller units, and we know that they are, in turn, parts of larger composite units, but we fix our gaze on the whole organisms. Then suddenly the image flips. The individual bodies are still there; they have not moved, but they seem to have gone transparent. We see through them to the replicating fragments of DNA within, and we see the wider world as an arena in which these genetic fragments play out their tournaments of manipulative skill. Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication. It happens that they have ‘chosen’ to do so largely by moulding matter into large multicellular chunks which we call organisms, but this might not have been so. Fundamentally, what is going on is that replicating molecules ensure their survival by means of phenotypic effects on the world. It is only incidentally true that those phenotypic effects happen to be packaged up into units called individual organisms.
We do not at present appreciate the organism for the remarkable phenomenon that it is. We are accustomed to asking, of any widespread biological phenomenon, ‘What is its survival value?’ But we do not say, ‘What is the survival value of packaging life up into discrete units called organisms?’ We accept it as a given feature of the way life is. As I have already noted, the organism becomes the automatic subject of our questions about the survival value of other things: ‘In what way does this behaviour pattern benefit the individual doing it? In what way does this morphological structure benefit the individual it is attached to?’
It has become a kind of ‘central theorem’ of modern ethology that organisms are expected to behave in such a way as to benefit their own inclusive fitness, rather than to benefit anyone, or anything, else. We do not ask in what way the behaviour of the left hind leg benefits the left hind leg. Nor, nowadays, do most of us ask how the behaviour of a group of organisms, or the structure of an ecosystem, benefits that group or ecosystem. We treat groups and ecosystems as collections of warring, or uneasily cohabiting, organisms; and we treat legs, kidneys, and cells as cooperating components of a single organism. I am not necessarily objecting to this focus of attention on individual organisms, merely calling attention to it as something that we take for granted. Perhaps we should stop taking it for granted and start wondering about the individual organism, as something that needs explaining in its own right, just as we found sexual reproduction to be something that needs explaining in its own right.”
