The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane.

Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives.

The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 per cent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity while seeing themselves as stepping-stones to the Almighty.

Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.’*

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.

Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down.

When they mate, the male cautiously creeps up on the female, mounts her, and copulates. If the female gets the chance, she will eat him, beginning by biting his head off, either as the male is approaching, or immediately after he mounts, or after they separate. It might seem most sensible for her to wait until copulation is over before she starts to eat him.

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

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.)

Killing people outside war is the most seriously-regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

Jacques Monod made this point very well in his Herbert Spencer lecture, after wryly remarking: ‘Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!’

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

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

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

Another aspect of the particulateness of the gene is that it does not grow senile; it is no more likely to die when it is a million years old than when it is only a hundred.

The genes are the immortals,

Just as a population is contaminated by other populations, so an individual’s posterity is contaminated by that of his sexual partner. Your children are only half you, your grandchildren only a quarter you.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

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.

Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives. But as brains became more highly developed, they took over more and more of the actual policy decisions, using tricks like learning and simulation in doing so.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

But do animals ever communicate false information; do they ever tell lies?

As we shall see, we must even expect that children will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother.

it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.

How could wild animals ‘know’ who their kin are, or in other words, what behavioural rules could they follow which would have the indirect effect of making them seem to know about kinship? The rule ‘be nice to your relations’ begs the question of how relations are to be recognized in practice.

We humans are familiar with rules, and so powerful are they that if we are small minded we obey a rule itself, even when we can see perfectly well that it is not doing us, or anybody else, any good. For instance, some orthodox Jews and Muslims would starve rather than break their rule against eating pork.

To some extent, caring and bearing are bound to compete with each other for an individual’s time and other resources: the individual may have to make a choice: ‘Shall I care for this child or shall I bear a new one?’

For instance, the present population of Latin America is around 300 million, and already many of them are under-nourished. But if the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where the people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent.

It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile. Until recently this was true of man too. Most animals die in childhood, many never get beyond the egg stage. Starvation and other causes of death are the ultimate reasons why populations cannot increase indefinitely.

In many cases females refuse to mate with males who do not possess a territory. Indeed it often happens that a female whose mate is defeated and his territory conquered promptly attaches herself to the victor. Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.

It is obvious that if a parent tries to spread her limited resources of food and effort among too many children, she will end up rearing fewer than if she had set out with more modest ambitions. She has to strike a balance between bearing and caring.

Individuals who have too many children are penalized, not because the whole population goes extinct, but simply because fewer of their children survive. Genes for having too many children are just not passed on to the next generation in large numbers, because few of the children bearing these genes reach adulthood.

Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control; otherwise, the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.

This is true whether we are dealing with animals or plants. One group of individuals has large sex cells, and it is convenient to use the word female for them. The other group, which it is convenient to call male, has small sex cells. The difference is especially pronounced in reptiles and in birds, where a single egg cell is big enough and nutritious enough to feed a developing baby for several weeks. Even in humans, where the egg is microscopic, it is still many times larger than the sperm.

Since one male can theoretically produce enough sperms to service a harem of 100 females we might suppose that females should outnumber males in animal populations by 100 to 1. Other ways of putting this are that the male is more ‘expendable’, and the female more ‘valuable’ to the species.

A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes.

Bruce effect: male mice secrete a chemical which when smelt by a pregnant female can cause her to abort. She only aborts if the smell is different from that of her former mate. In this way a male mouse destroys his potential step-children, and renders his new wife receptive to his own sexual advances.

similar example is that of male lions, who, when newly arrived in a pride, sometimes murder existing cubs, presumably because these are not their own children.

Because of a fundamental difference between the size and numbers of sperms and eggs, males are in general likely to be biased towards promiscuity and lack of paternal care.

Because a male produces many millions of sperms to every egg produced by a female, sperms heavily outnumber eggs in the population. Any given egg is therefore much more likely to enter into sexual fusion than any given sperm is. Eggs are a relatively valuable resource, and therefore a female does not need to be so sexually attractive as a male does in order to ensure that her eggs are fertilized.

Another common sexual difference is that females are more fussy than males about whom they mate with.

In general, males should tend to be more promiscuous than females. Since a female produces a limited number of eggs at a relatively slow rate, she has little to gain from having a large number of copulations with different males. A male on the other hand, who can produce millions of sperms every day, has everything to gain from as many promiscuous matings as he can snatch.

When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex.

What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

In the ‘honey-pot’ ants there is a caste of workers with grotesquely swollen, food-packed abdomens, whose sole function in life is to hang motionless from the ceiling like bloated light-bulbs, being used as food stores by the other workers. In the human sense they do not live as individuals at all; their individuality is subjugated, apparently to the welfare of the community.