The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.

universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature.

Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The

We may frequently behave selfishly as individuals, but in our more idealistic moments we honour and admire those who put the welfare of others first. We

Often altruism within a group goes with selfishness between groups. This is a basis of trade unionism.

(Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.)

Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and—according to recent experimental evidence—may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation—rocks, galaxies, ocean waves—are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms.

There is no need to think of design or purpose or directedness. If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA—but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them.

DNA molecule is too small to be seen, but its exact shape has been ingeniously worked out by indirect means. It consists of a pair of nucleotide chains twisted together in an elegant spiral; the ‘double helix’; the ‘immortal coil’. The nucleotide building blocks come in only four different kinds, whose names may be shortened to A, T, C, and G. These are the same in all animals and plants. What differs is the order in which they are strung together.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes’ way of preserving the genes unaltered.

According to this theory then, senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been allowed to slip through the net of natural selection simply because they are late-acting.