A Matter of Time

After reading several of the chapters from The Selfish Gene, I am not completely certain if I have learned a lot or am simply confused by the enormous amount of information, definitions, examples, and conclusions that Dawkins draws throughout the book. It seems as if sometimes, by trying to enhance his point he goes a little overboard using allegories in order to make the reader understand and ends up doing exactly the opposite.

In chapter ten, he addresses social insects, such as bee, wasps, ants, and termites that rely on cooperation and apparent altruism for the survival of their species. The individuality of these social insects is subjugated to the welfare of the community as a whole, not to their individual benefit. He went into great detail talking about how this works with bees, and how this is possible because most males have no father. They all have only half the number of genes and all of them come from their mother. It is weird to write about this in Mother's Day, seeing as those sterile male bees owe their entire existence to their mother.

Dawkins also mentions mutualism and symbiosis, the relationship of mutual benefit between members of different species. He states that the mitochondria in our cells were probably separate species from us a long time ago, but we became so dependent on each other that we evolved into the same organism, and if we were to eliminate all the mitochondria in our bodies, we would be dead within seconds. I find this type of dependency amazing, but a little contradictory to the whole “selfish gene” idea.