The Cooperative Gene: How Mendel's Demon Explains the Evolution of Complex Beings

This is another great and endlessly enjoyable work by Mark Ridley.Just to eliminate any confusion, I want to reiterate what an earlier reviewer pointed out; the title of this book is "Mendel's Demon: Gene Justice and the Complexity of Life". The American edition of the book was published with an altered title, creating the absurd impression that this book is somehow a challenge to the landmark work "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. Some misleading reviews printed here reflect that this silliness actualy worked as a marketing tool aimed at simpletons.Mark Ridley was an undergraduate student of Richard Dawkins at the University of Oxford and is now a colleague of his there. Throughout Dawkins' work (ie. the preface to "The Extended Phenotype") he has lauded Ridley's brilliance, and he did so again in his review of this book.Anyone who is confused by the name change (a routine by American publishers that plays havoc with citations) ought not to be confused about the book's implied content; it is a fascinating read about fascinating topics, not a "challenge" to something that Mark Ridley hasn't the faintest desire to attack.

Read "Selfish Gene"? You have to read this book!

The Cooperative Gene: How Mendel's Demon Explains the Evolution of Complex Beings written by Mark Ridley who is one of today's leading evolutionary thinkers. This is a well-written book that brings to the reader an intellectual treat."The Cooperative Gene" give us clues as to why and how complex life came about. It was by natural selection by ingenious solutions to copying errors and uncooperative genes. The author explains everything in a distinctive style that is very cleve... indeed.This book is geerd to a person with a scientic background as it delves into biology, biochemistry, and cell biology, but it isn't out of reach of a well read lay person. The author's wit and intelligence comes through and he seems to get the reader involved so you're not lost. I was pleasantly intrigued by the author's historical grounding of this book and the up to date relevance. From the initial wobbly, replicating molecules, through microbes, worms and flies till we get to mankind, the author reveals how life evolved on earth.Natural selection encouragess genes that look out for themselves, while delfish genes that could easily evolve to sabotage the development of complex life forms. Ther author painstakenly explains the difference between a selfish and a cooperative gene. As well as giving the reader his definition of Gregor Mendel's fundamental laws of inheritance... Mendel's Demon, thus, we find out about the origins of sex, gender, and cloning.The DNA in a human being is 6600 Million letters long and codes for about thirty thousand genes. In contrast, the DNA of a bacterium is two or three million letters long and codes for two or three thousand genes. You see where coding for a human being can bring on more mistakes. Mendelian inheritance controls how genes are inherited in complex life. It combines sex, reproduction, and the probabilistic rather than certain inheritance of genes.All in all, this book was rather captivating to me, the narrative wasn't overbearing and it easily readable, but you have to have a scientific origin to get the most out this book.

Our view of life is usually pretty limited. Seeing trees, the family dog, winging birds, ourselves, we forget, if we ever knew, that complex life forms are in the historical and numerical minority. Even after 3 thousand million years, single-celled animals have the longest duration and largest population. Globs of material with a string of molecules, which we call "bacteria" were and are the most common form of life. Mark Ridley traces how those simple creatures underwent a radical change. They became restructured in a revolutionary step that would enable highly complex life to exist and evolve. Part of that revolution was the development of the most absurd concept in life's long history - sex. Gregor Mendel investigated the passing on of traits by counting peas. Ridley introduces an avatar, "Mendel's Demon" to explain how sex regulates what is passed on in us.In this superbly written account, Ridley clearly explains the advantage sex has in the evolution of life. He uses the children's game of Chinese Whispers [called Gossip in my childhood] to explain how evolution operates. In Gossip [forgive the chauvinism], a group of children whisper a message from one to another. Record the original message "when the tiger comes, freeze." Compare it with the version expressed by the final child. There will certainly be changes. In almost all occurrences, the errors are in misunderstood whole words, not just letters - "freeze" becomes "wheeze." The "words" of life are our genes. Acting as instructions to forming a new individual, the message must be clear enough to build the organism. That organism must survive to produce another. Sex provides ways of assessing the message to assure its validity before generating an offspring. Ridley goes on to discuss how complex life forms emerged. The most important steps were the protecting of DNA in a cell nucleus and the addition of mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy modules of cells - chloroplasts in plants probably being the best known. Their joining the nuclear cell provided a trade-off. Mitochondria were given a place to live, paying rent by transferring much of their DNA to the cell's nuclear version. Once these two changes had been achieved, sex evolved with mechanisms to overcome the problems of DNA playing Gossip. Ridley shows how the processes surrounding sex overcome the mistakes that inevitably occur in the copying process. Gross errors don't survive - indeed they rarely achieve the development level of a fetus. The apparent dichotomy here is that while reducing errors may mean conserving an organism's traits, it may also reduce the diversity necessary to survive in a changing environment. The balance is delicate, as the fact that 99.9 per cent of all species having gone extinct over time testifies.Ridley sensibly brings each detailed description of the cell's processes back to how it relates to humans. This ploy is highly successful in making the book readable and focusse

Evolutionary history is considered in Mark Ridley's Cooperative Gene, a superbly presented and insightful survey of the evolution of complex beings and genetic influences. Among the unusual contentions here: gender may be an evolutionary fluke, our mutation rate is higher than a living system can have, and being single is one of the biggest risk factors in human life. And there's more! Riveting.