The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

We have come a long way from pure, disinterested altruism!

Like hume said

It was Hamilton who brilliantly realized that, at least in the ants, bees, and wasps, the workers may actually be more closely related to the brood than the queen herself is! This led him, and later Trivers and Hare, on to one of the most spectacular triumphs of the selfish gene theory. The reasoning goes like this. Insects

It follows that a hymenopteran female is more closely related to her full sisters than she is to her offspring of either sex.* As Hamilton realized (though he did not put it in quite the same way) this might well predispose a female to farm her own mother as an efficient sister-making machine.

It is presumably no accident that true sociality, with worker sterility, seems to have evolved no fewer than eleven times independently in the Hymenoptera and only once in the whole of the rest of the animal kingdom, namely in the termites.

True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects.

I thought chompz did this

But when the queen of a slave-making species changes the code, the slave workers cannot evolve any ability to break the code. This is because any gene in a slave worker ‘for breaking the code’ is not represented in the body of any reproductive individual, and so is not passed on.

We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes. One

In practice it may be difficult to distinguish cases of genuine two-way mutual benefit from cases of one-sided exploitation.

delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals.

He naturally seeks out B in order that B may pay back his good deed. B simply turns up his nose and walks off. B is a cheat, an individual who accepts the benefit of other individuals’ altruism, but who does not pay it back, or who pays it back insufficiently. Cheats do better than indiscriminate altruists because they gain the benefits without paying the costs. To be sure, the cost of grooming another individual’s head seems small compared with the benefit of having a dangerous parasite removed, but it is not negligible. Some valuable energy and time has to be spent.

But now, suppose there is a third strategy called Grudger. Grudgers groom strangers and individuals who have previously groomed them. However, if any individual cheats them, they remember the incident and bear a grudge: they refuse to groom that individual in the future.

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

for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. The gene will enter my thesis as an analogy,

This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ‘… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.* When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations

Very limited def of god possibly leaving ot most of thed world

As in the case of genes, fecundity is much more important than longevity of particular copies.

If a black and a white person mate, their children do not come out either black or white: they are intermediate.

Not necessarily true

Darwin if he read this book would scarcely recognize his own original theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory.

have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes them behave rather as if they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose. For example, when we say ‘genes are trying to increase their numbers in future gene pools’, what we really mean is ‘those genes that behave in such a way as to increase their numbers in future gene pools tend to be the genes whose effects we see in the world’.

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes.

Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected.

We should not seek immortality in reproduction.

Selfish genes (and, if you allow the speculation of this

Without the gene’s eye view of life there is no particular reason why an organism should ‘care’ about its reproductive success and that of its relatives, rather than, for instance, its own longevity.

The technical word phenotype is used for the bodily manifestation of a gene, the effect that a gene, in comparison with its alleles, has on the body, via development.

But we shall now see that the phenotypic effects of a gene need to be thought of as all the effects that it has on the world.

phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation.

It is sometimes said, as though in defence of this double standard, that spiders and caddises achieve their feats of architecture by ‘instinct’. But so what? In a way this makes them all the more impressive.

All that genes can really influence directly is protein synthesis. A gene’s influence upon a nervous system, or, for that matter, upon the colour of an eye or the wrinkliness of a pea, is always indirect.

the next step in the argument: genes in one organism can have extended phenotypic effects on the body of another organism.

The point of comparing rebel human DNA with invading parasitic viruses is that there really isn’t any important difference between them. Viruses may well, indeed, have originated as collections of breakaway genes. If we want to erect any distinction, it should be between genes that pass from body to body via the orthodox route of sperms or eggs, and genes that pass from body to body via unorthodox, ‘sideways’ routes. Both classes may include genes that originated as ‘own’ chromosomal genes.

In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal’s behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.

Vehicles don’t replicate themselves; they work to propagate their replicators. Replicators don’t behave, don’t perceive the world, don’t catch prey or run away from predators; they make vehicles that do all those things. For many purposes it is convenient for biologists to focus their attention at the level of the vehicle. For other purposes it is convenient for them to focus their attention at the level of the replicator. Gene and individual organism are not rivals for the same starring role in the Darwinian drama. They are cast in different, complementary, and in many respects equally important roles, the role of replicator and the role of vehicle.

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes

It undeniably happens to be the case that these phenotypic effects have largely become bundled up into discrete vehicles, each with its genes disciplined and ordered by the prospect of a shared bottleneck of sperms or eggs funnelling them into the future. But this is not a fact to be taken for granted. It is a fact to be questioned and wondered at in its own right. Why did genes come together into large vehicles, each with a single genetic exit route?

In the same way single enzymes in a living cell usually cannot, on their own, achieve the synthesis of a useful end-product from a given starting chemical.

The important thing is that a gene for a stage in pathway 1 will flourish in the presence of genes for other stages in pathway 1, but not in the presence of pathway 2 genes.

But the ancestral organs did not literally change themselves into the descendant organs, like swords being beaten into ploughshares.

Really radical change can be achieved only by going ‘back to the drawing board’, throwing away the previous design and starting afresh.

They make a clean start in every generation. Every new organism begins as a single cell and grows anew. It inherits the ideas of ancestral design, in the form of the DNA program, but it does not inherit the physical organs of its ancestors.

The argument is moving towards the idea of a stereotyped, regularly repeating life cycle. Not only does each generation begin with a single-celled bottleneck. It also has a growth phase—‘childhood’—of rather fixed duration. The fixed duration, the stereotypy, of the growth phase makes it possible for particular things to happen at particular times during embryonic development, as if governed by a strictly observed calendar. To varying extents in different kinds of creature, cell divisions during development occur

It is therefore quite possible that two cells in a daughter will be more distant relatives of one another than either is to cells in the parent plant. (By ‘relatives’, I literally mean cousins, grandchildren and so on.