Called the brain worm which infects ants and an infected ant has its behavior change. The brain worm burrows into the brain of the ant ant and make solution in the brain of the ant just like a physiologist might make a lesion in the brain of an ant and causes the ants to instead of going down into the ground in the heat of the day the ant goes up grass stems to the top where it shouldnt be in the middle of the day and there it becomes vulnerable to being eaten by a sheep which is exactly what the brain worm wants because the brain worms next host after the ant is a sheep. There are lots and lots of examples of parasites manipulating their hosts for their own advantage. I want to regard every one of those changes in the host behavior as an extended phenotype. Finally, a parasite doesnt actually have to live inside its host. Cuckoos and the american equivalent of cuckoos parasitize other birds by laying eggs in the other birds nest in the cuckoo hatches out and i talk about cuckoos, euro
Because its not limited to how they behave but its also how they look in their size and so forth tends to maximize the survival of the genes for that behavior or physical characteristic. Whether or not those genes happened to be in the body of the particular organism performing it. That may be a little complicated. Okay, when i said the fate of the gene which is bound up in the vehicle that they write about that is true most of the time. But my second book extended phenotype which was for professional audience generalizes this support and point out that actually the phenotype is the external manifestation of genetic tendencies. Mostly phenotypes are parts of the body in which the genes ri ride. So the legs of a, the tale of the eyes and whiskers of a, the for of late are phenotypic manifestations of genes inside the jeans the genes writing in around the vehicle that is the and their survival is served by the affects that they have on the hair, the tale, the legs, the eyes and the muscl
The big open questions. Its something that happened a very long time ago for probably about 4 billion years ago, not long after the earth came into existence about 4. 5 billion years ago. We know the kind of thing it had to be. It had to be the origin of the first cells replicating information, the first gene although it certainly would not have been dna. Dna would have almost certainly come in later and usurped the role of the original replicator so most of the theorizing and i would say perhaps all the theorizing going on now is looking for the chemical event, some kind of a lucky random chemical event which gave rise to a molecule which was self replicating. As i say it would not have been dna. Dna can do its job without protein and protein can do its job without dna so theres a catch22 there. It could have been rna because rna is capable both of doing the job of protein which is being a capitalistic in some sort of an executive function in the cell and rna also can do what dna does