The Unit Definition

The final chapter of The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, gives us new insight into what he targeted his book to do and the definition of the life units he uses to expose his thinking. As Dawkins talks about the relationship between parasitical individuals with their hosts he states that “a parasite whose genes aspire to the same destiny as the genes of its host shares all the interests of its host and will eventually cease to act parasitically” (245). It basically shows how the future, the immortality of a parasite, will make the dependant individual share and use his energy to fulfill the reproduction and living requirements of the other until they become an individual. This reminded me of the beginning of Michael Jackson’s, This Is It, where the artists that were casting to be part of Michael Jackson’s last performances in London expressed their idolizing feelings towards him. The obligation to make everything come out perfectly for Michael Jackson seemed to be one of the huge themes in the movie, a similar trait to the parasitical creatures Dawkins describes.

A concept that I found extremely interesting in this chapter was the idea of bottlenecked individuals which started and ended (when reproducing) in a single celled survival machine. Dawkins mentions that “vehicles that evolved a bottlenecked life prospered, and became more discrete and vehicle-like” (265). The species which were able to become bottlenecked individuals, those which reproduce by single cell identical duplication, work in an efficient unit-like fashion. This helps mutations to work their way through generations and maintain that unit idea in the living creature. The individual’s existence (what maintains genes from going back to the primeval soup environment) is the dependence of replicated cells to their cousin cells.

Defining key terms for this book, limiting his words for the reader to fully appreciate his descriptions, seem to play a vital role in Dawkins’ writing. One of the important concepts to understand is the unit he uses for life and evolution. In this concluding chapter, Dawkins explains how the community and individual reproduction are too general to observe the specifics in phonotypical traits and how the ultimate concept to understand life’s units is the replicators. As his description of the “immortal coils” ends, he states that “the only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator” (266). This statement doesn’t need any more explanation or supporting from Dawkins’ side, it has become obvious through the examples he exposed in his writing that we are truly empty membranes without these magical, but indeed selfish individuals.