Abstract
Technical terms are apt to be misunderstood when they bear deceptive resemblance to ones used in every day language. Terms that are vague or equivocal can be misleading even to those who use them routinely. Sociobiological discourse is particularly misleading because it implicitly suggests metaphysical notions that conflict with the fundamentals of evolutionary thinking. Its language is misleading about agency, or the role of various entities in evolutionary processes. Calling genes ‘replicators’ falsely implies that they are active agents in the process of replicating something, when in fact they are passively replicated.
Calling a gene ‘selfish’ suggests that it is some kind of economic agent. A reductio adabsurdum of such claims is provided by ‘selfish chromosomal deletions’ that confer higher fitness than their alleles do upon the organisms that contain them. To avoid linguistic and metaphysical pitfalls one needs to ask what the various evolutionary units are and what they do. Calling something a unit that is replicated rather than a replicator reduces the confusion. In economics and bioeconomics some clarity is gained by focusing upon the units that are resources and those that exploit them. Genes and routines are resources; organisms and firms are what make use of them. The latter might be called ‘exploiters’ to make the distinction clear.
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