The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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 haemoglobin of our blood is a typical protein molecule. It is built up from chains of smaller molecules, amino acids, each containing a few dozen atoms arranged in a precise pattern. In the haemoglobin molecule there are 574 amino acid molecules. These are arranged in four chains, which twist around each other to form a globular three-dimensional structure of bewildering complexity.

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

You may make a molecule consisting of a few dozen atoms like that, but a man consists of over a thousand million million million million atoms. To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.

Chemists have tried to imitate the chemical conditions of the young earth. They have put these simple substances in a flask and supplied a source of energy such as ultraviolet light or electric sparks—artificial simulation of primordial lightning. After a few weeks of this, something interesting is usually found inside the flask: a weak brown soup containing a large number of molecules more complex than the ones originally put in. In particular, amino acids have been found—the building blocks of proteins, one of the two great classes of biological molecules.

I suppose the scholars of the Septuagint could at least be said to have started something big when they mistranslated the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’, coming up with the prophecy: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son

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.

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don’t die young!

Muscles are engines which, like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, use energy stored in chemical fuel to generate mechanical movement.

The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting. Human typists will be needed for many decades yet.

Remember that any positive action involves consumption of energy and time, both of which could have been spent doing other things.

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.

Instead of fighting directly over females themselves, individuals fight over social status, and then accept that if they do not end up high on the social scale they are not entitled to breed.

Any gene for over-indulgence is promptly punished: the children containing that gene starve.

But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

If a baby cuckoo screamed loudly enough to attract predators, it would have a lot to lose—its life—but the foster mother would have even more to lose, perhaps four of her young. It could therefore pay her to feed it more than its share, and the advantage of this to the cuckoo might outweigh the risk.

For instance, there are honeyguides who, like cuckoos, lay their eggs in the nests of other species. The baby honeyguide is equipped with a sharp, hooked beak. As soon as he hatches out, while he is still blind, naked, and otherwise helpless, he scythes and slashes his foster brothers and sisters to death: dead brothers do not compete for food!

The familiar British cuckoo achieves the same result in a slightly different way. It has a short incubation-time, and so the baby cuckoo manages to hatch out before its foster brothers and sisters. As soon as it hatches, blindly and mechanically, but with devastating effectiveness, it throws the other eggs out of the nest. It gets underneath an egg, fitting it into a hollow in its back. Then it slowly backs up the side of the nest, balancing the egg between its wing-stubs, and topples the egg out on to the ground. It does the same with all the other eggs, until it has the nest, and therefore the attention of its foster parents, entirely to itself.

By insisting on a long engagement period, a female weeds out casual suitors, and only finally copulates with a male who has proved his qualities of fidelity and perseverance in advance. Feminine coyness is in fact very common among animals, and so are prolonged courtship or engagement periods. As we have already seen, a long engagement can also benefit a male where there is a danger of his being duped into caring for another male’s child.

A male who waits for a coy female eventually to copulate with him is paying a cost: he is forgoing the chance to copulate with other females, and he is spending a lot of time and energy in courting her. By the time he is finally allowed to copulate with a particular female, he will inevitably be heavily ‘committed’ to her. There will be little temptation for him to desert her, if he knows that any future female he approaches will also procrastinate in the same manner before she will get down to business.

Mothers certainly do more direct work for children than fathers do, but fathers often work hard in a more indirect sense to provide the material resources that are poured into the children.

Nevertheless the act of calling seems, at least at first sight, to be altruistic, because it has the effect of calling the predator’s attention to the caller.

Many children and even some adults believe that they will suffer ghastly torments after death if they do not obey the priestly rules. This is a peculiarly nasty technique of persuasion, causing great psychological anguish throughout the Middle Ages and even today. But it is highly effective. It might almost have been planned deliberately by a Machiavellian priesthood trained in deep psychological indoctrination techniques.

But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool.

That is to say, each dug-in group of British soldiers could expect to be facing the same dug-in group of Germans for many months. Moreover, the ordinary soldiers never knew when, if ever, they were going to be moved; army orders are notoriously arbitrary, capricious, and incomprehensible to those receiving them.

So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, times of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that … Colonel Jones … knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.