The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

We humans are familiar with rules, and so powerful are they that if we are small minded we obey a rule itself, even when we can see perfectly well that it is not doing us, or anybody else, any good.

Conceivably, racial prejudice could be interpreted as an irrational generalization of a kin-selected tendency to identify with individuals physically resembling oneself, and to be nasty to individuals different in appearance.

In this case the rule ‘Be nice to any member of the species whom you meet’ could have positive survival value, in the sense that a gene predisposing its possessors to obey the rule might become more numerous in the gene pool.

we may expect that natural selection will have favoured a degree of altruism appropriate to the average degree of relatedness in a typical pride.

It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!

We therefore must expect individual selfishness in nature, to an extent greater than would be predicted by considerations of genetic relatedness alone.

If anybody does not want to admit that parental care is an example of kin selection in action, then the onus is on him to formulate a general theory of natural selection that predicts parental altruism, but that does not predict altruism between collateral kin. I think he will fail.