The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

An example of a deliberately engineered misfiring of the maternal instinct is provided by cuckoos, and other ‘brood-parasites’—birds that lay their eggs in somebody else’s nest. Cuckoos exploit the rule built into bird parents: ‘Be nice to any small bird sitting in the nest that you built.’ Cuckoos apart, this rule will normally have the desired effect of restricting altruism to immediate kin, because it happens to be a fact that nests are so isolated from each other that the contents of your own nest are almost bound to be your own chicks. Adult herring gulls do not recognize their own eggs, and will happily sit on other gull eggs, and even crude wooden dummies if these are substituted by a human experimenter. In nature, egg recognition is not important for gulls, because eggs do not roll far enough to reach the vicinity of a neighbour’s nest, some yards away. Gulls do, however, recognize their own chicks: chicks, unlike eggs, wander, and can easily end up near the nest of a neighbouring adult, often with fatal results, as we saw in Chapter 1.