The unselfish gene - Can the kind of society we live in

influence
• 25 October 1997
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Laura Spinney
• Robert Matthews
http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg15621054.800-the-unselfish-gene--can-the-kind-of-
society-we-live-in-influence.html
SOME ideas are just ahead of their time. When Charles Darwin began work in 1856 on what was
to become On the Origin of Species, the monk Gregor Mendel was doing his first experiments on
the heredity of pea plants. Darwin's book was an immediate hit. A copy of the German edition
held in the library of Mendel's monastery in Brno, Moravia, still bears the marginal notes he
made. The "father of modern genetics" had been getting to grips with Darwinian evolution.
Darwin, on the other hand, never encountered Mendel's work. The monk was seeking answers to
questions that no one else was asking—and his ideas remained in obscurity until 1900, two
decades after both scientists had died.
Had Darwin known about genes and their inheritance according to the rules of mathematical
probability, his later work might have been very different. He might, for instance, have revised
his views about why births of human males outnumber those of females. According to the
Mendelian system, numbers of the two sexes should be equal, and it is difficult to explain the
anomaly at the level of the gene. But working without a proven model of heredity, Darwin's idea
that the skewed balance of the sexes might be the result of countless generations of female
infanticide seemed plausible. Today his explanation seems laughable—after all, there is no way
that a cultural tradition, however deep-rooted, can affect the genetic predisposition of parents to
conceive either a boy or a girl. Or is there?
A small but growing band of evolutionary biologists, geneticists and psychologists is beginning
to think that Darwin's choice of a cultural cause for the sex bias was probably right (see "A
cultured left hand"). They claim that natural selection does not act on genetic variation alone, but
on a combination of genes and culture. This controversial idea challenges evolutionary thinking
that has focused for a generation at the level of the gene. The reductionist view, which emerged
in the early 1960s, was popularised by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, in which he
claimed that evolution works not at the level of the group or even the organism, but on the
smallest element of life, the gene.
Genetic imperialism
Dawkins's approach has been dubbed "genetic imperialism" by Steven Rose of the Open
University. This outlook asserts that "the unit of selection is an individual gene and genes
struggle for survival," says Rose. "The organism is passive when confronting its environment—
the environment sets the gene certain challenges which it either passes or fails." In his new book
Lifelines, Rose argues that organisms select and transform environments by learning new
practices and creating new cultures. Most converts to the new thinking refer to it as gene-culture
coevolution. It's an idea that might possibly inflict the first serious damage on the dogma of the
selfish gene.
Interactions between the two strands of inheritance—genes and culture—are complex, say
proponents of the idea. Some cultural practices alter the environment, generating new selection
pressures that speed up the selection of genes. Other cultural traditions may sidestep evolutionary
pressures that would normally have an impact on genetic makeup, reining back the pace of
evolution. On the other hand, the likelihood that a population acquires a behaviour or knowledge
"depends to a large extent on its genetic makeup", says Kevin Laland, of the subdepartment of
animal behaviour at the University of Cambridge. For animals that have to learn behaviours to
survive, culture and genetics can become twin driving forces in directing the evolutionary
pathway.
That's the theory. In practice, such complex process are difficult to pinpoint. But there do seem
to be instances where cultural traditions have altered genetic selection (see "A cultured left
hand"). Marc Feldman of the department of biological sciences at Stanford University in
California gives the example of milk-drinking. Humans can digest cow's milk only if they can
produce an enzyme, lactase, which allows absorption of the milk sugar, lactose. In those human
populations where cow's milk has been drunk for 300 generations or so, up to 90 per cent of
people have the enzyme. In groups that do not have a history of dairy farming, four out of five
people carry a different version of the enzyme and are prone to sickness and diarrhoea if they
drink milk.
If cultural practices can lead to such differences in human populations, might this also be
happening in other species? Bennett Galef of McMaster University, Ontario, points out that
"culture" is a loaded word and one that carries all sorts of human connotations. Whether other
species can be said to contain cultural groups is contentious. Even so, many animal species are
able to adopt the innovative behaviour of a group member and pass this information down the
generations. Some researchers call this behaviour cultural transmission, but most prefer to use
the more neutral term social learning. Either way, the subject is now a hot topic of study among
animal behaviourists.
They are finding that the animal kingdom is full of examples of innovative behaviours that give
rise to populations with distinct "cultural" traditions. A recent report by Thomas Strusaker of
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, describes how red colobus monkeys in
just one part of the east African island of Zanzibar have developed a taste for charcoal, which
helps neutralise the toxins found in some leaves. Young monkeys seem to pick up the practice
from watching their mothers. As a result, group members can eat plants that are normally
poisonous to these monkeys. This has greatly extended their evolutionary niche and led to a
population explosion (This Week, 9 August, p 7).
Zoologist Joseph Terkel of Tel Aviv University has been studying the changing behaviour of
Israel's black rats. Over the past century much of their traditional forest habitat has been
destroyed and subsequently replaced with plantations of Jerusalem pines. Terkel and his
colleague Ran Aisner noticed groups of black rats living among the Jerusalem pines and
surviving on seeds extracted from their cones. This would be unsurprising but for the fact that
cone stripping is a complex process, requiring a precise series of manipulations. So how did the
practice originate and how does it spread?
After more than a decade of research, the origins of cone stripping still remain something of a
mystery. Hungry adults do not spontaneously strip cones, neither can they learn the behaviour by
watching other rats do it. Only a very few individuals are capable of the innovation needed to
generate the practice but, once established, it spreads readily through the group, passing from
mothers to their pups. The key element seems to be the "theft" by the pups of partially opened
cones, from their mothers. These apparently give the young an insight into the skill that they
must later use to work out how to start the stripping process.
Even guppies do it
So, clever animals like monkeys and rats can learn novel behaviours from one another, but how
far down the animal kingdom does this ability stretch? Laland is convinced that most vertebrates
are capable of social learning. He spends his days poring over water-filled tanks in a rickety
portable hut, exploring how novel behaviours spread through shoals of brightly coloured
guppies. He concludes that even these intellectual pygmies can have their attention directed to a
novel feature in their environment by the actions of another animal.
What is interesting, says Laland, is how a new behaviour is introduced and the way in which it
spreads. One of his students, Simon Reader, recently showed that when it comes to learning
about a new source of food, juvenile female guppies tend to be the innovative ones, passing on
their new-found knowledge initially to the adult females, with the males being the last to acquire
it. The diffusion of information resembles the spread of innovative practices among human
groups. This follows a bell-shaped or normal distribution. The novel behaviour of a handful of
innovators is copied by a small band of dominant, influential individuals, with the majority of the
group following closely behind and a few laggards bringing up the rear.
Such studies are not designed to address questions about evolution. They merely show how a
group comes to adopt a new practice. But, as Laland points out, if all individuals are doing the
same thing, it creates an unusually uniform selection pressure. "We tend to think of the
evolutionary process as one in which the population or organism is shaped by natural selection to
fit a pre-established environment," he says. "But in many cases organisms are constructing or
modifying their own environment, creating their own selection pressures. And one way in which
they can do this particularly effectively is through social learning."
Biologists already know that the most intelligent animals evolve quickest. Perhaps this
correlation has nothing to do with an animal's ability to innovate and learn, but research
published recently in Animal Behaviour(vol 53 p 549) suggests that it does. Louis Lefebvre and
colleagues at McGill University, Montreal, analysed data on birds in North America and Britain,
and found a clear link between size of forebrain—a part of the brain known to be associated with
learning—and exploitation of new food sources or foraging techniques.
The link between intelligence and social learning is already tacitly accepted by many researchers.
Some even go so far as to suggest that the ease with which humans learn from one another puts
us in a different league in evolutionary terms. We have crossed a threshold of cultural learning
which leaves us open to an additional evolutionary pressure that does not affect less intelligent
animals—group selection. The traditional, highly contentious, theory of group selection holds
that individuals cooperate to ensure that their genes pass down to a new generation: cultural
group selection is different because what is inherited is the cultural trait itself and any spread of
genes is a side effect.
Group selection
Theories of group selection, no matter how they are dressed up, are guaranteed a hostile reaction
from most evolutionary biologists. Their main objection is that cultural groups are not distinct
enough to act as units of selection. They claim there are strong forces that break down
differences between groups—such as migration from one to another and natural selection
working on individuals within a group—whereas those forces that maintain differences are weak.
But, say Robert Boyd of the University of California at Los Angeles and Peter Richerson of the
University of California at Davis, this overlooks the power of culture itself to keep tribal groups
distinct from one another.
They argue that although individuals migrating into a new tribe will bring in new genes, they
will probably reject their old cultural habits in favour of local customs. In a slowly changing
environment, the best way to ensure your own survival is to copy the locals. By conforming,
incomers reinforce the cultural practices that make the tribe different from others and that adapt
it to the particular environmental challenges it faces. In fact, say Boyd and Richerson, there may
even be a form of sexual selection at work where people are attracted to potential mates who are
"team players", who observe group norms and cooperate. To put it very simplistically, selection
may favour a genetic predisposition to conform (see "Born to trade", 26 October 1996, p 34).
David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton, a prominent advocate
of group selection, describes Boyd and Richerson's theory as "just a beginning: a first stab at
exploring some of the consequences of the ways that groups become behaviourally uniform".
But many advocates of gene-culture coevolution think that talk of group selection is pushing the
theory too far.
Group selection is especially reviled by adherents of the reductionist theory of evolution.
Ironically, though, in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins himself put forward a theory of culture and
evolution. He coined the term "meme" to describe a sociocultural equivalent of a gene—an
element of culture, passed on by imitation. But here the similarity with gene-culture coevolution
ends. Dawkins's memes are not a product of individual organisms interacting with their
environment, they are independent entities which shape evolution in the same selfish and
mechanical way that genes do. "The driving force is not individual human beings or giant
cultures, but these little bits of information—these selfish memes—which are struggling to get
replicated," says Susan Blackmore from the University of Bristol.
Blackmore supports Dawkins's ideas and rejects gene-culture coevolution with its implication
that creatures have some control over their destiny. "I don't take the view that we humans are in
charge of our life and we teach our children what we want them to know," she says.
Nevertheless, she welcomes the increased interest in culture as an evolutionary factor. Most
evolutionary biologists would rather ignore it altogether. "They tend to treat culture as some
fluffy little thing to do with minds that we don't have to bother about," she says. Perhaps the
whole idea that cultural practices can affect evolution is still ahead of its time.
***
A cultured left hand
ONE of the most impressive demonstrations of the gene-culture coevolution theory has centred
on the mystery of why around 10 per cent of the Western population is left-handed. For years,
the standard explanation has been that it's all in our genes. A classic study of the handedness of
hundreds of parents and offspring done in 1940 by the American geneticist David Rife seemed to
show clear evidence of genes at work.
But recent studies have cast serious doubt on this explanation. Researchers have now shown that
knowing the handedness of people reveals virtually nothing about the handedness of their
siblings. Even identical twins turn out to be no more likely to share handedness than their
nonidentical counterparts, even though they are genetically the same.
In contrast, growing up in a particular society at a particular time seems to have a powerful
impact on the rates of left-handedness. A century ago, only about 2 per cent of the population of
North America were left-handed: the rate is now around 12 per cent. Yet in Taiwan, the rate
remains less than 1 per cent.
Such findings prompted an international team of researchers, led by Kevin Laland of the
subdepartment of animal behaviour at the University of Cambridge, to investigate the possibility
that handedness is under the influence of both genes and culture. Their approach was to set up a
mathematical model to reflect both genetics and cultural influences on the inheritance of
handedness through a set of constants.
The mathematics, detailed in Behavior Genetics (vol 25, p 433) is complex, but the results are
straightforward. The researchers estimated the magnitude of the genetic effect by feeding into
their model data about the frequencies of left (L) and right (R) handed offspring from the three
possible pairings of parents (R x R, R x L and L x L). This suggested that genetic influences tip
the probability of being right-handed up from 50:50 to 78:22—closer to the observed ratio of
90:10, but far from a perfect match.
The gap is bridged by the effect of the other, cultural, influences. Laland and his colleagues
calculated these using numerical estimates of the extra bias towards having right-handed
offspring caused by having parents of a particular handedness pairing.
Fitting the model to the data on the different handedness frequencies, Laland and his colleagues
found, for example, that having both parents right-handed boosted the chances of right-handed
offspring by an extra 14 per cent, while having two left-handed parents cut the chances by a
similar amount.
Armed with figures for the different sources of bias, the team then tested their model by using it
to predict the expected rates for handedness among identical and ordinary twins. The results
were impressive: the predicted rates gave a good fit to 27 of the 28 studies of handedness of
twins carried out to date.
In a final flourish, Laland and his colleagues used their model to predict the expected rate of left-
handedness in the general population. Their figure of 11.74 per cent is right in line with the
observed rate.
Mathematical models are one thing, explaining their implications another. Where, for instance,
do the cultural biases come from? "There are a number of mechanisms by which parental
influence could be exerted," says Laland. "Some studies have shown that mothers appear to
actively encourage their infants to imitate them, while some seem to instruct their children and
punish them if they use their left hand. Our findings are also consistent with claims that there
may be a prenatal effect."
As for the genetics of handedness, the gene-culture model suggests that everyone has genes that
make right-handedness considerably more likely than left-handedness. If identical twins do not
always have identical handedness it is because of the different cultural pressures they face. And
such pressures are at work throughout the population. "Variations in handedness among humans
are caused by accidents of early development," says Laland. "All our genes do is simply load the
handedness die to favour the right."
Laland and others are now wielding the mathematics of gene-culture theory to probe more
controversial issues. For example, Sally Otto of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
and colleagues have examined IQ. Conventional genetic studies typically find that genes account
for around 70 per cent of the similarity in IQ in identical twins. But Otto's analysis suggests that
just 30 per cent is genetically determined, with the rest coming from the social environment.
Laland, together with Jochen Kumm and Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, have used
gene-culture theory to show that a cultural determination of parents to have sons may explain the
skewed sex ratio. Parents who were genetically more likely to produce daughters ended up
killing more of their children, steadily reducing their representation in the gene pool relative to
parents predisposed to have sons. So the bias towards male births may be a grim echo of past
female infanticide.
Laura Spinney is a freelance science writer
From issue 2105 of New Scientist magazine, 25 October 1997, page 28
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