The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

The programmer’s actual role is rather more like that of a father teaching his son to play chess. He tells the computer the basic moves of the game, not separately for every possible starting position, but in terms of more economically expressed rules. He does not literally say in plain English ‘bishops move in a diagonal’, but he does say something mathematically equivalent, such as, though more briefly: ‘New coordinates of bishop are obtained from old coordinates, by adding the same constant, though not necessarily with the same sign, to both old x coordinate and old y coordinate.

But the genes are not only the Andromedans who sent the coded instructions; they are also the instructions themselves.

Genes work by controlling protein synthesis. This is a powerful way of manipulating the world, but it is slow. It takes months of patiently pulling protein strings to build an embryo.

Like the Andromedans, the genes can only do their best in advance by building a fast executive computer for themselves, and programming it in advance with rules and ‘advice’ to cope with as many eventualities as they can ‘anticipate’.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business.

A gene for altruistic behaviour means any gene that influences the development of nervous systems in such a way as to make them likely to behave altruistically.

An individual who scores high points, who has a high average ‘pay-off’, is an individual who leaves many genes behind him in the gene pool.

even those that are to everybody’s advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.

Why do antelopes run away from lions instead of hitting back?

the odds of an outcast’s succeeding to a territory in this way are greater than the odds of his gaining one by fighting, then it may pay him, as a selfish individual, to wait in the hope that somebody will die, rather than squander what little energy he has in futile fighting.

Our conclusion from this chapter is that individual parents practise family planning, but in the sense that they optimize their birth rates rather than restrict them for public good.

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.

They will be replicas but not replicators.

Selfish DNA increases in frequency for precisely the opposite reason— because it has no effect on bodies …