Расширенный фенотип: Гены, организмы и эволюция

1982 book by Richard Dawkins

The Extended Phenotype is a 1982 book by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author introduced a biological concept of the same name. The book’s main idea is that phenotype should not be limited to biological processes such as protein biosynthesis or tissue growth, but extended to include all effects that a gene has on its environment, inside or outside the body of the individual organism. Dawkins considers The Extended Phenotype to be a sequel to The Selfish Gene (1976) aimed at professional biologists, and as his principal contribution to evolutionary theory.

A technical review of The Extended Phenotype in the Quarterly Review of Biology states that, it is an “interesting and thought provoking book, once one gets to the last five chapters.” In the reviewer’s opinion, the book poses interesting questions, such as « What is the survival value of packaging life into discrete units called ‘organisms’ even though the units of selection appear to be individual ‘replicators’? » The reviewer states that no “satisfactory answer is given” to this question in the book, though Dawkins suggests that replicators that “interact favorably to create ‘vehicles’ (organisms) may be at an advantage over those that do not (Chapter 14).” The reviewer takes issue with the first nine chapters as being essentially a defense of Dawkin’s first book, The Selfish Gene. Another review in American Scientist praises the book for convincingly promoting the idea of replication as being central to the evolutionary process. However, in the reviewer’s opinion, “its main theme that the gene is the only unit of selection results from incorrectly interpreting the constraints on organismal adaptation and from too narrow an interpretation of replication, a process of more general relevance than the author is willing to allow.”

The concept of extended phenotype has provided a useful frame for subsequent scientific work. For example, research into the relationship between “the bacterial flora of the gut and their mammalian hosts" which, "has become a hot topic of late." makes use of this concept. As an illustration, one might ask: could an architect's buildings be considered part of his or her extended phenotype, much as a beaver's dam is part of its extended phenotype? The answer is clearly no: in humans, an “architect's specific alleles are neither more nor less likely to be selected based on the design of his or her latest building.”