The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Yet the chimp feels and thinks and—according to recent experimental evidence—may even be capable of learning a form of human language. The foetus belongs to our own species, and is instantly accorded special privileges and rights because of it. Whether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, to use Richard Ryder’s term, can be put on a logical footing any more sound than that of ‘racism’, I do not know. What I do know is that it has no proper basis in evolutionary biology.

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.

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things.

the struggle was conducted without any hard feelings,

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.

sexual partnership, as a relationship of mutual mistrust and mutual exploitation,

‘Body, if you are female, copulate with any old male, whether he is a donkey or a horse’,