R. D. Alexander

R. D. Alexander is an evolutionary biologist whose work appears in the book both as experimental evidence about animal fighting and as a contested explanation of parent–offspring conflict. The contrast is central to his portrayal: the model-cricket experiment supplies a concrete result, while his claim that parents must win is examined and rejected by the book’s gene-centered argument.

Experimental Work on Fighting

Alexander demonstrated that recent experience can shift a cricket’s likelihood of winning a fight. He used a model cricket to defeat real crickets; afterward, those crickets became more likely to lose against other real crickets. The experiment supports the idea that a cricket’s fighting behavior reflects a general estimate of its own ability relative to others, updated by its recent record.

The book connects this result to the development of dominance order in a closed group. If individuals accustomed to winning become still more likely to win, while habitual losers increasingly give way, an initially random distribution of victories can sort into a rank order. The resulting hierarchy can reduce the number of serious fights. This is described as a kind of dominance hierarchy: crickets need not recognize particular opponents for general memories of winning and losing to shape later encounters.

The Parent–Offspring Argument

Alexander also proposes a general answer to the conflict between parent and child: the parent always wins. His claim matters because, if correct, it would make parental manipulation an evolutionary source of altruistic behavior, distinct from an explanation based on benefits to the individual’s relatives. The book therefore treats his argument as a serious challenge rather than a passing alternative.

In Alexander’s reasoning, a juvenile gene that causes a child to secure a disproportionate share of parental resources may improve that individual’s chances of survival as a child, but later harm its reproductive success. The same selfish tendency would be inherited by the individual’s offspring, who would compete for parental benefits in turn. The juvenile, in this account, would eventually pay for the advantage it gained earlier, so the gene could not succeed and the parent would prevail.

The Book’s Response

The rebuttal begins by questioning the assumed genetic difference between parent and offspring. Their practical circumstances differ, but their relatedness is 50 per cent in either direction. Reversing Alexander’s reasoning would appear to show, just as plausibly, that a gene favoring even distribution of parental benefits helps an individual as a parent and therefore must have harmed it as a juvenile. That opposite conclusion exposes the weakness: the argument changes its result when it changes which life stage it treats as the point of view that matters.

The book’s alternative is to assess the different opportunities available to genes at different stages of a body’s life. A gene in a juvenile body can be selected for exploiting the opportunities available to the young; the same gene in a parental body faces different opportunities and can be selected for a different policy. The fact that the same genes successively occupy juvenile and parental bodies does not mean that the later-stage policy must override the earlier one.

The rebuttal also incorporates Alexander’s concern about the costs of juvenile selfishness rather than dismissing it. A child’s future offspring may suffer if they inherit the same tendency to take more than their share, so those costs belong in the calculation alongside losses to siblings. But future children are relatives, not a special counterweight that gives parents an automatic advantage. The conclusion is that a child may still benefit from selfishness when its net gain is at least half the net cost to close relatives, including both siblings and its own future offspring. Alexander’s argument identifies a relevant cost, the book holds, but does not establish that parents necessarily win.

Significance and Limits

Alexander’s two appearances show different levels of evidential strength. The model-cricket experiment is reported as a demonstration of a specific effect of recent fighting history. The parent–offspring claim, by contrast, is presented as a theoretical argument whose apparent force depends on an asymmetry the book considers mistaken. Alexander is consequently both a source of empirical evidence and an interlocutor whose reasoning helps clarify how evolutionary conflicts should be analyzed from the gene’s perspective.