The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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.

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

Natural selection in its most general form means the differential survival of entities.

The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

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.

And if sexual, as opposed to non-sexual, reproduction benefits a gene for sexual reproduction, that is a sufficient explanation for the existence of sexual reproduction.

Muscles are engines which, like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, use energy stored in chemical fuel to generate mechanical movement.

Each one of us knows, from the evidence of our own introspection, that, at least in one modern survival machine, this purposiveness has evolved the property we call ‘consciousness’.

Such purpose machines often oscillate due to over-shooting and time-lags, and it is part of the engineer’s art to build in supplementary devices to reduce the oscillations.

The genes too control the behaviour of their survival machines, not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer.

A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot

The reason why they cannot manipulate our puppet strings directly is the same: time-lags.

Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives. But as brains became more highly developed, they took over more and more of the actual policy decisions, using tricks like learning and simulation in doing so.

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.*

will deceive their parents, that husbands will cheat on wives, and that brother will lie to brother.

The poker face would evolve.

Maynard Smith’s concept of the ESS will enable us, for the first time, to see clearly how a collection of independent selfish entities can come to resemble a single organized whole. I think this will be true not only of social organizations within species, but also of ‘ecosystems’ and ‘communities’ consisting of many species.

Genes are selected, not as ‘good’ in isolation, but as good at working against the background of the other genes in the gene pool.

We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene.

because bodies are large things which we can see. But such interactions between genes sitting in different bodies are only the tip of the iceberg.

It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA,

We can now see that parental care is just a special case of kin altruism.

When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.

in the societies which they study. They do not mean real genetic kinship, but subjective and cultural ideas of kinship. Human customs and tribal rituals commonly give great emphasis to kinship; ancestor worship is widespread, family obligations and loyalties dominate much of life. Blood-feuds and inter-clan warfare are easily interpretable in terms of Hamilton’s genetic theory.