The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Emphasize ‘selfish’ and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism.

Amotz Zahavi’s idea that altruistic donation might be a ‘Potlatch’ style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!

There are two kinds of unit of natural selection, and there is no dispute between them. The gene is the unit in the sense of replicator. The organism is the unit in the sense of vehicle. Both are important. Neither should be denigrated. They represent two completely distinct kinds of unit and we shall be hopelessly

once had the honour of hearing the great molecular biologist Jacques Monod talking about creativity in science. I have forgotten his exact words, but he said approximately that, when trying to think through a chemical problem, he would ask himself what he would do if he were an electron.

A gene is being favoured in natural selection if the aggregate of its replicas forms an increasing fraction of the total gene pool.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.

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 lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.

we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. 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 same principle can and should work on a wider scale.

Whole industries have grown up in the social sciences dedicated to the construction of a pre-Darwinian and pre-Mendelian view of the social and psychological world.

if (as Dawkins argues) deceit is fundamental in animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray—by the subtle signs of self-knowledge—the deception being practiced. Thus, the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

you can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

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.

‘Welfare’ is defined as ‘chances of survival’, even if the effect on actual life and death prospects is so small as to seem negligible.

it is possible that the female improves the male’s sexual performance by eating his head.*

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

evolution is blind to the future.

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.)

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

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.

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

In the beginning was simplicity.

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

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

Previously it is probable that no particular kind of complex molecule was very abundant in the soup, because each was dependent on building blocks happening to fall by luck into a particular stable configuration. As soon as the replicator was born it must have spread its copies rapidly throughout the seas, until the smaller building block molecules became a scarce resource, and other larger molecules were formed more and more rarely.

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a ‘good thing’, especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually ‘wants’ to evolve. Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.

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!’

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

acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes’ way of preserving the genes unaltered.

Genes have no foresight. They do not plan ahead. Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is all there is to it.

Sexual reproduction has the effect of mixing and shuffling genes. This means that any one individual body is just a temporary vehicle for a short-lived combination of genes.

crossing-over does not respect boundaries between cistrons. Splits may occur within cistrons as well as between them.

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

It is just a length of chromosome, not physically differentiated from the rest of the chromosome in any way.

The shorter a genetic unit is, the longer—in generations—it is likely to live.

Just as an individual is either definitely male or definitely female,

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. 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.

The genes are the immortals, or rather, they are defined as genetic entities that come close to deserving the title.

population is not a discrete enough entity to be a unit of natural selection, not stable and unitary enough to be ‘selected’ in preference to another population.

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.

at the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good.

Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

the basic unit of natural selection is best regarded not as the species, nor as the population, nor even as the individual, but as some small unit of genetic material which it is convenient to label the gene.

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.

As W. F. Bodmer has succinctly put it, sex ‘facilitates the accumulation in a single individual of advantageous mutations which arose separately in different individuals.’