Unended knights' tournaments.

opinion opinion F or my generation, science has resem­ bled the tournaments of medieval knights: fierce, but fair. peter Mitchell started an uphill battle for his chemi­ osmotic theory in the 1960s and persisted until his adversaries avowed defeat in a joint publication with him in 1977 (Boyer et al, 1977). He received the Nobel prize for his work in 1978. My generation also grew up under the doctrine of genocentrism. When richard Dawkins presented the theory in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976), i agreed with the majority for whom the mystery of life appeared to be solved: living beings, includ­ ing humans, function as " lumbering robots " , " blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes " , the preservation of which was the " ultimate rationale for our existence ". the idea also applied to society, as Edward O. Wilson argued independently in his book Sociobiology (1975). Dawkins and Wilson both referred to the " inclusive fitness theory " of William D. Hamilton as the foundation stone of their reasoning. the creed of selfish genes became orthodoxy in molecular and evolutionary biology for more than 40 years. Opponents were stultified by the prodigious eloquency of Dawkins, who bluntly dismissed Konrad Lorenz and other evolutionists as " totally and utterly wrong ". Dawkins' acolysts took up his emotionally charged rhetoric, labelling their adversaries as " naive " or as " heretics ". in august 2010, Martin a. Nowak, corina E. tarnita and Edward O. Wilson published a paper in Nature, which might mark a turning point in the genocentric orthodoxy (Nowak et al, 2010). in it, they argue against inclusive fitness theory and its " selfish gene " basis, and essentially favour multilevel selection, which had already been proposed by others. Nowak himself (2006) had previ­ ously declared that " we might add 'natural cooperation' as a third fundamental princi­ ple of evolution beside mutation and natural selection ". By March 2011, more than 100 experts in evolutionary biology had reacted to the paper, proclaiming that the arguments therein " are based upon a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and misinterpretation of empirical literature " (abbot et al, 2011). the Nature paper and the reaction to it might find their place in the history of biol­ ogy as a scientific parallel of Hans christian andersen's tale about the Emperor's new clothes, in which it takes …