According to one expert in evolution and development, Professor Georgy Koentges of Warwick University, the central problem is the impossibility of defining "fitness", whether in organisms, organs, cells, genes or even gene regulatory DNA regions. As a result, he sees both Dawkins and Wilson as "straw men" in this debate.
"Dawkins has a lot of unnecessary rhetoric in his review," he said this weekend. "He is usually on the spot, but it has to be said that some of his arguments are based on older models of calculating fitness. The difficulty is in assigning what Darwin called 'fitness' to a particular genetic feature. They are trying to set basic fitness conditions which they believe work over very long periods of time."
This is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a good or bad gene. It doesn't work that simply. Genes are used and re-used in different contexts, each of which might have a different overall fitness value for a given organism or a group."
In later life Darwin said he wished he had called his theory natural preservation, rather than selection, but even the preservation of certain genes down the ages is no proof that they are good.
"To use a simple human example, someone with the perfect set of genes for walking with two legs might die early because they jump off a cliff," said Koentges.
"Equally, there are many things that survive in biology for no beneficial reason, like male nipples. They are 'bystanders' of other important processes. They result from underlying genetic processes that in the opposite sex are absolutely essential for our survival as mammals."
Like other scientists commenting on this "tit-for-tat" dispute between Wilson and Dawkins, Koentges also detects the old struggle between those who focus purely on the gene and those who see it as "an anthropological insult to our own feeling of self-belief".
"The field has moved on, and so should we all," says Koentges.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors
