John Dupre, Darwin's Legacy. What Evolution Means Today. Oxford Univ.Press 2003.

Developmental Systems Theory:

(23f.) "[developmental systems theory] provides a powerful critique of Dawkins [...] gene-centredness.

>> "that an organism's genes provide a plan or a blueprint for the whole organism" - "But this

sort of talk is highly misleading." -

"There is a technical meaning of 'information' [as opposed to "semantic"]

in which it means only that the state of one thing (the bearer of information) provides more or less

reliable predictions about the state of another (that about which it gives information)."

(24) "the unit of selection" [is] "the entire developmental cycle"

- "next generation" = "the next iteration of the cycle"

vs. "the spuriously Janus-faced gene - at one and the same time the unit of selection and the

fundamental cause of development" --

(24 Dawkins says that "natural selection picks out a set of genes in each generation", such de facto

(25) "black-boxing development" (gene-centred)

(25) "As just noted, the information required to build an organism in distributed over many levels of

biological and external organization. Genes are only selected to the extent that they participate in

complete successful developmental cycles."

(86) "...the smallest unit in terms of which evolutionary process can be properly understood

is the full developmental cycle from one stage of the life cycle through all the intervening stages

needed to reproduce that stage in the next generation ..." -

"... the genome is merely one developmental resource - no doubt a very important one ..."