Creation Moment 12/18/2013 - "Selfish Gene" of Dawkins under attack

Richard Dawkins theory of the"selfish gene" under attack by fellow evolutionists

Basically, what the below article is saying is that newer discoveries in DNA are confirming that genetic variation exists (how we get different shapes, sizes & colors of each kind), [micro-evolution], which if you think about it---is making it harder & harder to really defend evolution, [macro-evolution].

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Psalm 139:14

"Die, selfish gene, die

For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us?

 

The grasshopper, he noted, sports long legs and wings, walks low and slow, and dines discreetly in solitude. The locust scurries hurriedly and hoggishly on short, crooked legs and joins hungrily with others to form swarms that darken the sky and descend to chew the farmer’s fields bare.
Related, yes, just as grasshoppers and crickets are. But even someone as insect-ignorant as I could see that the hopper and the locust were radically different animals — different species, doubtless, possibly different genera. So I was quite amazed when Rogers told us that grasshopper and locust are in fact the same species, even the same animal, and that, as Jekyll is Hyde, one can morph into the other at alarmingly short notice.

But every locust was, and technically still is, a grasshopper — not a different species or subspecies, but a sort of hopper gone mad.


How does this happen? Does something happen to their genes? Yes, but — and here was the point of Rogers’s talk — their genes don’t actually change. That is, they don’t mutate or in any way alter the genetic sequence or DNA. Nothing gets rewritten. Instead, this bug’s DNA — the genetic book with millions of letters that form the instructions for building and operating a grasshopper — gets reread so that the very same book becomes the instructions for operating a locust. Even as one animal becomes the other, as Jekyll becomes Hyde, its genome stays unchanged.

Twenty years ago, phase changes such as those that turn grasshopper to locust were relatively

unknown, and, outside of botany anyway, rarely viewed as changes in gene expression. Now, notes Mary Jane West-Eberhard, a wasp researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, sharp phenotype changes due to gene expression are ‘everywhere’. They show up in gene-expression studies of plants, microbes, fish, wasps, bees, birds, and even people. The genome is continually surprising biologists with how fast and fluidly it can change gene expression — and thus phenotype.

When one game plan written in the book can’t provide enough 

Imagine this genetic "book
reading" among small populations-
whether human or animal-as
they disperse across various
parts of the planet after Babel

flexibility, fast changes in gene expression — a change in the book’s reading — can provide another plan that better matches the prevailing environment.

This outmoded thinking grew from seeds planted 150 years ago by Gregor Mendel, the monk who studied peas. Mendel spent seven years breeding peas in a five-acre monastery garden in the town of Brno, now part of the Czech Republic. He crossed plants bearing wrinkled peas with those bearing smooth peas, producing 29,000 plants altogether. When he was done and he had run the numbers, he had exposed the gene.

And this conceptual gene, revealed in the tables and calculations of this math-friendly monk, seemed an agent of mathematical neatness. Mendel’s thousands of crossings showed that the traits he studied — smooth skin versus wrinkled, for instance, or purple flower versus white — appeared or disappeared in consistent ratios dictated by clear mathematical formulas.

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins gathered all the threads of the modern synthesis — Mendel, Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Watson, Crick, Hamilton, and Williams — into a single shimmering magic carpet...........the selfish-gene model is in tension with various ‘interesting evolutionary phenomena’, as Gregory Wray puts it in Evolution: The Extended Synthesis.

Of these genomic dynamics, perhaps the most challenging to the selfish-gene story are epistatic or gene-gene interactions. Epistasis refers to the fact that the presence of some genes (or their variants) can have profound and unpredictable influences on the activity and effects generated by other genes. To put it another way, a gene’s effect can vary wildly depending on which combination of other genes it finds itself with.

Epistasis is hardly a new concept. In fact, geneticists have been arguing about its importance ever since R.A. Fisher and Sewall Wright bickered about it in the 1920s. Dawkins acknowledges a role for gene-gene interactions in The Selfish Gene, noting that ‘the effect of any one gene depends on interaction with many others.’ But research since then show that these interactions take place in non-linear, non-additive ways of a complexity impossible to understand at the time Dawkins wrote his book. Casey Greene and Jason Moore of Dartmouth, for instance, recently found that in some cases epistatic interactions seem to warp conventional gene-trait relationships so profoundly that they can often negate the gene as a trait’s reliable carrier.

Individual bees morph from worker to guard to scout by gene expression alone, depending on the needs of the hive

This is not merely a matter of one gene muffling or amplifying another, though both these things happen. And it’s not a matter of additive effects, such as four ‘tall’ genes making you taller than would two. Rather, these multi-gene epistatic interactions can create endless possible combinations of mutual influence in which any given gene’s contribution seems to rise less from its inherent trait-making power than from what company that gene finds itself keeping.


......they’re finding that a lot of the work conventionally attributed to ‘genes’ (in the sense of

Richard  Dawkins
Another discredited
Atheist by Science

consistent, reasonably well defined clusters of DNA) appears to be done instead by networks of genes and strange DNA elements that doubly defy the selfish-gene model.

More important, some researchers believe these networks challenge the selfish-gene model because they often seem to behave not like selfish entities balancing their separate agendas, in selfish-gene style, but like managerial teams regulating the behaviour of individual genes for the interest of the organism. The chromosome’s three-dimensional nature brings those regulatory chunks into contact with individual genes in highly unpredictable ways. With each gene ‘surrounded by an ocean’ of such regulatory elements, as molecular biophysicist Joe Dekker told WIRED, each gene ‘can touch and interact with a whole collection of them’.

Genetic assimilation involves a three-step process.
First, an organism adapts to a changing environment by altering its gene expression to change its phenotype — its form or behaviour. Second, a gene emerges that locks in that phenotypic change. Finally, the gene spreads through the population.
I phoned Richard Dawkins to see what he thought of all this. Did genes follow rather than lead? I asked him specifically about whether processes such as gene assimilation might lead instead. He said that genetic assimilation doesn’t really change anything, because since the gene ends up locking in the change and carrying it forward, it all comes back to the gene anyway...........‘He’s backfilling,’ said West-Eberhard. ‘He and others have long been arguing for the primacy of an individual gene that creates a trait that either survives or doesn’t.’

The selfish gene has become a selfish meme.

West-Eberhard notes, any phrase with ‘gene’ in it still encourages a focus on single genes. And ‘evolution is not about single genes,’ she says. ‘It’s about genes working together.’"
From the essay ‘Die, selfish gene, die’. 13 December, 2013 by David Dobbs on Aeon
edited for main points