Get the Mosquitoes! 
John Whitfield
- Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Austin Burt and Robert Trivers Buy this book
Some flour beetles carry a gene called Medea. Their offspring look normal as larvae but, around the time of hatching, half the females become listless, then paralysed; and then they die. No one knows how it works, but the female offspring that inherit a copy of the gene are protected from the poison it uses, while those that don’t are killed by it.
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John Whitfield is the author of In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy and the Unity of Nature. He lives in London.
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