The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.

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.

He's calling them replicators because anything that survives and replicates can form a building block of a unit that can be completely different to our believed perceptions. Read Chapter 11 'Meme' (he's actually coined this term in 1976) and has written a brilliant chapter on Meme and explains how memes are building blocks of something different to a DNA but, in any case, have a lot of similarities to it.

DNA works in mysterious ways.

And the Lord too, lest we forget ;)

any one individual body is just a temporary vehicle for a short-lived combination of genes. The combination of genes that is any one individual may be short-lived, but the genes themselves are potentially very long-lived. Their paths constantly cross and recross down the generations.

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. It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death.

Just spare some time and reflect on these words :)

The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title. We, the individual survival machines in the world, can expect to live a few more decades. But the genes in the world have an expectation of life that must be measured not in decades but in thousands and millions of years.

Sexual reproduction is not replication. 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. In a few generations the most you can hope for is a large number of descendants, each of whom bears only a tiny portion of you—a few genes—even if a few do bear your surname as well.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.

greenflies and elm trees don’t do it, why do the rest of us go to such lengths to mix our genes up with somebody else’s before we make a baby? It does seem an odd way to proceed. Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?

In most cases we should probably regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of a built-in rule. This is because the generous female is doing her own genes no good by caring for the orphan. She is wasting time and energy which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly future children of her own. It is presumably a mistake that happens too seldom for natural selection to have ‘bothered’ to change the rule by making the maternal instinct more selective.

Genes are selected for their ability to make the best use of the

levers of power at their disposal: they will exploit their practical opportunities. When a gene is sitting in a juvenile body its practical opportunities will be different from when it is sitting in a parental body. Therefore its optimum policy will be different in the two stages in its body’s life history.

The phrase ‘the child should cheat’ means that genes that tend to make children cheat have an advantage in the gene pool. If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.

Some gene effects show themselves only in bodies of one sex. These are called sex-limited gene effects. A gene controlling penis-length expresses this effect only in male bodies, but it is carried about in female bodies too and may have some quite different effect on female bodies. There is no reason why a man should not inherit a tendency to develop a long penis from his mother.

The female sex is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms.

explanation of the so-called 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.

Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution.

Kin selection and selection in favour of reciprocal altruism may have acted on human genes to produce many of our basic psychological attributes and tendencies.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.

even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight—our capacity to simulate the future in imagination—could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’, and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

A question that sociologists and psychologists sometimes ask is why blood donors (in countries, such as Britain, where they are not paid) give blood. I find it hard to believe that the answer lies in reciprocity or disguised selfishness in any simple sense. It is not as though regular blood donors receive preferential treatment when they come to need a transfusion. They are not even issued with little gold stars to wear. Maybe I am naïve, but I find myself tempted to see it as a genuine case of pure, disinterested altruism.

whichever way you look at it, close incest is not just mildly deleterious. It is potentially catastrophic. Selection for active incest-avoidance could be as strong as any selection pressure that has been measured in nature.

Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings.

Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

We, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.