Natural Selection

Naturally, we always prefer whatever is best for us, and nature does also. Nature's duty here on Earth is to create a balance in everything so that every species can do its own duty. If you take off one of the millions of species of animals on Earth, you'll mess up the entire planet. That's why extinction is so dangerous not only for whatever is getting extinct, but for us as well. In the third chapter of the selfish gene, we are introduced to Gregory Mendel's theory. Gregory Mendel experimented with plants to find out more about dominant and recessive alleles. In this experiment, Mendel planted purple and white flowers, which he knew had no different-colored ancestors. The white allele was a recessive allele, while the purple allele was a dominant one. After Mendel planted the flowers, he crossed the white flowers with the purple ones, and the result were lots of 100% purple flowers, not a trace of white ones. This was because the purple allele was dominant, so even the flowers that had the white allele in their DNA were purple because the purple beat the white. However, when Mendel allowed the plants to reproduce, he found that about ¼ of the plants were white, because some plants had inherited the white gene from both their parents, even though both their parents had also a purple gene and therefore were purple. The diagram above can explain Mendel’s experiment if you switch the blue eyes for white flowers and the brown eyes for purple flowers. This experiment demonstrated how nature creates a balance in everything. If one of the genes is brown then the body will receive the order to produce the protein that makes eyes brown. Otherwise, it won’t, and the eyes will remain colorless (blue). Is this the idea of a selfish gene? Or is it just nature’s effort to create a balance? Out of four alleles, only one was brown, but because of it the person will have brown eyes. In other words, the brown allele is “better” than all the rest, making it selfish, since it doesn’t care about what the other 3 blue alleles say. On the other hand, this brown allele could be nature’s effort to create balance. Since there’s only one brown allele and 3 blue ones, then naturally the brown one should be granted more power to compensate the lack of other brown alleles. However, what if there were 3 brown alleles and one blue allele? The brown alleles would beat the blue one by far, and whoever inherited those genes could just forget about having blue eyes. Therefore, the brown one has more power, but why? Maybe it has some scientific reason, just like dark skin. It is proven that dark skin was a result of evolution in Africa because it is much more resistant to the sun. Maybe having brown eyes has its advantages, and that’s why nature made it more powerful.