The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

And if our species is not so exceptional as we might like to think, it is even more important that we should study the rule.

It is important to realize that the above definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural,

An apparently altruistic act is one that looks, superficially, as if it must tend to make the altruist more likely (however slightly) to die, and the recipient more likely to survive.

acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

But the bees who do the stinging are kamikaze fighters.

a group, such as a species or a population within a species, whose individual members are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of the group, may be less likely to go extinct than a rival group whose individual members place their own selfish interests first.

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

the vast majority of baby spiders end up as prey for other species, and she then went on to say: ‘Perhaps this is the real purpose of their existence, as only a few need to survive in order for the species to be preserved’!

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

If selection goes on between groups within a species, and between species, why should it not also go on between larger groupings?

survival of the stable.

Haemoglobin is a modern molecule, used to illustrate the principle that atoms tend to fall into stable patterns.

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.

In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible.

Anyway, as we shall see, erratic copying in biological replicators can in a real sense give rise to improvement, and it was essential for the progressive evolution of life that some errors were made.

is ultimately these mistakes that make evolution possible.

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 were the ancestors of life; they were our founding fathers.

The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in.

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

It embraces all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses.

A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.

A body is the genes’ way of preserving the genes unaltered.

Any one chromosome in a sperm would be a patchwork, a mosaic of maternal genes and paternal genes.

The life-span of a chromosome is one generation.

inversion. A piece of chromosome detaches itself at both ends, turns head over heels, and reattaches itself in the inverted position.

The slightly selfish big bit of chromosome and the even more selfish little bit of chromosome.

altruism must be bad and selfishness good. This follows inexorably from our definitions of altruism and selfishness.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

Why do we and most other survival machines practise sexual reproduction? Why do our chromosomes cross over? And why do we not live for ever?

‘Old individuals die as an act of altruism to the rest of the species, because if they stayed around when they were too decrepit to reproduce, they would clutter up the world to no good purpose.’

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!

For instance, a gene that made old bodies develop cancer could be passed on to numerous offspring because the individuals would reproduce before they got cancer.

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.

For instance, suppose that it incidentally happens to be a fact that a substance S is more concentrated in the bodies of old individuals than of young individuals.

Reminds me of Alzeihmers, and the its buildup of incorrectlt cut proteins in the brain

only a ‘label’ for old age.

What is the good of sex?

sex appears paradoxical because it is an ‘inefficient’ way for an individual to propagate her genes: each child has only 50 per cent of the individual’s genes, the other 50 per cent being provided by the sexual partner.

sex ‘facilitates the accumulation in a single individual of advantageous mutations which arose separately in different individuals.’

Seen from the selfish gene’s point of view, sex is not so bizarre after all.

the immediate manifestation of natural selection is nearly always at the individual level.

But the long-term consequences of non-random individual death and reproductive success are manifested in the form of changing gene frequencies in the gene pool.

I prefer to think of the body as a colony of genes, and of the cell as a convenient working unit for the chemical industries of the genes.

The basic unit of biological computers, the nerve cell or neurone, is really nothing like a transistor in its internal workings.

When we watch an animal ‘searching’ for food, or for a mate, or for a lost child, we can hardly help imputing to it some of the subjective feelings we ourselves experience when we search. These may include ‘desire’ for some object, a ‘mental picture’ of the desired object, an ‘aim’ or ‘end in view’.

Now, what is the role of the human programmer? First, he is definitely not manipulating the computer from moment to moment, like a puppeteer pulling strings. That would be just cheating. He writes the program, puts it in the computer, and then the computer is on its own: there is no further human intervention, except for the opponent typing in his moves. Does the programmer perhaps anticipate all possible chess positions, and provide the computer with a long list of good moves, one for each possible contingency? Most certainly not, because the number of possible positions in chess is so great that the world would come to an end before the list had been completed. For the same reason, the computer cannot possibly be programmed to try out ‘in its head’ all possible moves, and all possible follow-ups, until it finds a winning strategy.

There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the galaxy.