Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins  · 1 Jan 1976  · 365pp  · 117,713 words

Animal Behaviour Our genes made us. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines. The world of the selfish gene is one of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit. But what of the acts of apparent altruism found in nature-the bees who commit suicide

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of duty in attending to all aspects of the production of this book. RICHARD DAWKINS Preface to 1989 edition In the dozen years since The Selfish Gene was published its central message has become textbook orthodoxy. This is paradoxical, but not in the obvious way. It is not one of those

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as the book's reputation for extremism has escalated, its actual content has seemed less and less extreme, more and more the common currency. The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly

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Robert Trivers. I now see that it was one of those mysterious periods in which new ideas are hovering in the air. I wrote The Selfish Gene in something resembling a fever of excitement. When Oxford University Press approached me for a second edition they insisted that a conventional, comprehensive, page by

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page revision was inappropriate. There are some books that, from their conception, are obviously destined for a string of editions, and The Selfish Gene was not one of them. The first edition borrowed a youthful quality from the times in which it was written. There was a whiff of

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little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to

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in an unfamiliar way. The argument takes time to develop, and we must begin at the beginning, with the very origin of life itself. The Selfish Gene 2. The replicators. In the beginning was simplicity. It is difficult enough explaining how even a simple universe began. I take it as agreed that

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our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. The Selfish Gene 3. Immortal coils. We are survival machines, but 'we' does not mean just people. It embraces all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses. The total

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particularly relevant to this book: at the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good. This follows inexorably from our definitions of altruism and selfishness. Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future

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for the existence of sexual reproduction. Whether or not it benefits all the rest of an individual's genes is comparatively irrelevant. Seen from the selfish gene's point of view, sex is not so bizarre after all. This comes perilously close to being a circular argument, since the existence of sexuality

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to a fundamental, independent agent of evolution. Sex is not the only apparent paradox that becomes less puzzling the moment we learn to think in selfish gene terms. For instance, it appears that the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction of

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. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true 'purpose' of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the

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to survival machines themselves, and the sense in which genes may be said to control their behaviour, that we turn in the next chapter. The Selfish Gene 4. The Gene Machine. Survival machines began as passive receptacles for the genes, providing little more than walls to protect them from the chemical warfare

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least some conflict of interest. The next chapter introduces a powerful way of thinking about conflicts of interest from an evolutionary point of view. The Selfish Gene 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine. This chapter is mostly about the much-misunderstood topic of aggression. We shall continue to treat the

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and then, preferably, to eat them. Although murder and cannibalism do occur in nature, they are not as common as a naive interpretation of the selfish gene theory might predict. Indeed Konrad Lorenz, in On Aggression, stresses the restrained and gentlemanly nature of animal fighting. For him the notable thing about animal

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take place within cells, notably the cells of developing embryos. Well-integrated bodies exist because they are the product of an evolutionarily stable set of selfish genes. But I must return to the level of interactions between whole animals which is the main subject of this book. For understanding aggression it was

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reinforce the erroneous idea (favoured, as we have seen, by Wilson) that kin selection is specifically about relationships other than the parent/ child relationship. The Selfish Gene 7. Family planning. It is easy to see why some people have wanted to separate parental care from the other kinds of kin-selected altruism

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see ahead to the disastrous consequences of over-population. It is the basic assumption of this book that survival machines in general are guided by selfish genes, who most certainly cannot be expected to see into the future, nor to have the welfare of the whole species at heart. This is

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that that is exactly what they do. But even here there is less disagreement than you might think from reading his book. Adherents of the selfish gene theory would readily agree that animals do regulate their birth-rates. Any given species tends to have a rather fixed clutch-size or litter-size

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at-a-gate strategy. Similarly, the many other examples where animals appear to 'accept' non-reproductive status passively can be explained quite easily by the selfish gene theory. The general form of the explanation is always the same: the individual's best bet is to restrain himself for the moment, in the

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for life in the wild, and it is likely that in natural conditions over-crowding is a reliable indicator of future famine. What does the selfish gene theory say? Almost exactly the same thing, but with one crucial difference. You will remember that, according to Lack, animals will tend to have

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therefore end up with almost exactly the same conclusion as Wynne-Edwards, but we get there by an entirely different type of evolutionary reasoning. The selfish gene theory has no trouble even with 'epideictic displays'. You will remember that Wynne-Edwards hypothesized that animals deliberately display together in large crowds in order

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birth-rates accordingly. There is no direct evidence that any aggregations are in fact epideictic, but just suppose some such evidence were found. Would the selfish gene theory be embarrassed? Not a bit. Starlings roost together in huge numbers. Suppose it were shown, not only that over-crowding in winter reduced fertility

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exposed to a recording of a quieter, less dense, roost. By definition, this would indicate that the calls of starlings constituted an epideictic display. The selfish gene theory would explain it in much the same way as it handled the case of the mice. Again, we start from the assumption that genes

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he may have been right all along, but for the wrong reasons. More generally, the Lack type of hypothesis is powerful enough to account, in selfish gene terms, for all evidence that might seem to support the group-selection theory, should any such evidence turn up. Our conclusion from this chapter is

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to answer in the next chapter. The related question of whether there may be conflict of interest between mates, we postpone until Chapter 9. The Selfish Gene 8. Battle of the generations. Let us begin by tackling the first of the questions posed at the end of the last chapter. Should a

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At least that is what would happen in the best of all possible worlds, if individuals did not cheat. But in the light of our selfish gene concept we must expect that individuals will cheat, will tell lies about how hungry they are. This will escalate, apparently rather pointlessly because it might

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surviving. But he would pay the penalty when he came to be a parent himself, because his own children would tend to inherit the same selfish gene, and this would reduce his overall reproductive success. He would be hoist with his own petard. Therefore the gene cannot succeed, and parents must

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avoided using the word in this book. There is really only one entity whose point of view matters in evolution, and that entity is the selfish gene. Genes in juvenile bodies will be selected for their ability to outsmart parental bodies; genes in parental bodies will be selected for their ability to

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I must emphasize that I am not talking about conscious motives. Nobody is suggesting that children deliberately and consciously deceive their parents because of the selfish genes within them. And I must repeat that when I say something like 'A child should lose no opportunity of cheating ... lying, deceiving, exploiting...', I

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to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. The Selfish Gene 9. Battle of the sexes. If there is conflict of interest between parents and children, who share 50 per cent of each others' genes,

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extra males might be regarded as social parasites. This is just one more example of the difficulties that the group selection theory gets into. The selfish gene theory, on the other hand, has no trouble in explaining the fact that the numbers of males and females tend to be equal, even

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hold in the back of our mind that this is just a figure of speech. A body is really a machine blindly programmed by its selfish genes. Consider again the mated pair with which we began the chapter. Both partners, as selfish machines, 'want' sons and daughters in equal numbers. To

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Among birds and mammals these cases of paternal devotion are exceptionally rare, but they are common among fish. Why? This is a challenge for the selfish gene theory which has puzzled me for a long time. An ingenious solution was recently suggested to me in a tutorial by Miss T. R. Carlisle

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male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why? The Selfish Gene 10. You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours. We have considered parental, sexual, and aggressive interactions between survival machines belonging to the same

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numbers of individuals have died because their alarm calls were not quite perfect. Therefore there seems to be danger attached to giving alarm calls. The selfish gene theory has to come up with a convincing advantage of giving alarm calls which is big enough to counteract this danger. In fact this is

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mentioned in Chapter 1, and whose apparently suicidal altruism moved Ardrey to state categorically that it could be explained only by group selection? Here the selfish gene theory has a more exacting challenge. Alarm calls in birds do work, but they are clearly designed to be as inconspicuous and discreet as possible

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to wax mystical about the social insects, but there is really no need for this. It is worth looking in some detail at how the selfish gene theory deals with them, and in particular at how it explains the evolutionary origin of that extraordinary phenomenon of worker sterility from which so much

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into mutual back-scratching arrangements. But we have learnt to beware of what seems intuitively sensible. The gene has no foresight. Can the theory of selfish genes account for mutual back-scratching, or 'reciprocal altruism', where there is a delay between good deed and repayment? Williams briefly discussed the problem in his

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with the right kind of dance. Instead they go into a trance-like state and allow the cleaner free access to their exterior and interior. Selfish genes being what they are, it is not surprising that ruthless, exploiting cheats have cashed in. There are species of small fish that look just

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species. Tempting as it is, I am no better at such speculation than the next man, and I leave the reader to entertain himself. The Selfish Gene 11. Memes: the new replicators. So far, I have not talked much about man in particular, though I have not deliberately excluded him either.

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on a note of qualified hope. One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. Selfish genes (and, if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. The fact that they replicate,

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a 'conspiracy of doves', and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism

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machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. The Selfish Gene 12. Nice guys finish first. Nice guys finish last. The phrase seems to have originated in the world of baseball, although some authorities claim priority

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one another's success. They do not have to do down rivals in order to benefit themselves. Without departing from the fundamental laws of the selfish gene, we can see how cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish even in a basically selfish world. We can see how, in Axelrod's meaning

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attitude is an error of great profundity. It is the truth turned crashingly on its head. They will also recognize that the alternative attitude, the selfish gene view of life, has a deep problem of its own. That problem-almost the reverse one-is why individual organisms exist at all, especially in

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own' body to influence phenotypes in other bodies. To quite a large extent the interests of parasite genes and host genes may coincide. From the selfish gene point of view we can think of both fluke genes and snail genes as 'parasites' in the snail body. Both gain from being surrounded by

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for the precise methods that they use, there is no reason why these should be any different from the machinations-all too predictable to a selfish gene/extended phenotype theorist-of viruses. When we have a cold or a cough, we normally think of the symptoms as annoying byproducts of the virus

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hope, nevertheless, that I have succeeded in conveying the flavour of the argument. Let me end with a brief manifesto, a summary of the entire selfish gene/extended phenotype view of life. It is a view, I maintain, that applies to living things everywhere in the universe. The fundamental unit, the prime

The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

by Richard Dawkins  · 1 Jan 1982  · 506pp  · 152,049 words

position in 1995. Richard Dawkins’s bestselling books have played a significant role in the renaissance of science book publishing for a general audience. The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition 1989) was followed by The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and

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, of course, graduate and undergraduate students in all these disciplines. Therefore, although this book is in some ways the sequel to my previous book, The Selfish Gene, it assumes that the reader has professional knowledge of evolutionary biology and its technical terms. On the other hand it is possible to enjoy a

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the gene—was the fundamental assumption of my previous book. The present book goes further. To dramatize it a bit, it attempts to free the selfish gene from the individual organism which has been its conceptual prison. The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into

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rest of the book does some necessary sorting out on the way. Chapters 2 and 3 are replies to criticisms of the now widely accepted ‘selfish gene’ view of evolution. The middle chapters deal with the ‘units of selection’ controversy currently fashionable among philosophers of biology, taking the gene’s-eye view

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’. ‘Extended phenotype’ is misunderstood if it is taken to have any connection with adaptation at the level of the group. The selfish organism, and the selfish gene with its extended phenotype, are two views of the same Necker Cube. The reader will not experience the conceptual flip-over that I seek to

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misunderstood as genetic determinism. A reviewer of Wilson’s (1978) On Human Nature, wrote: ‘…although he does not go as far as Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene …) in proposing sex-linked genes for “philandering”, for Wilson human males have a genetic tendency towards polygyny, females towards constancy (don’t blame your mates

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now realize that it is necessary to give more explanation. From 13 years’ experience of teaching it, I know that a main problem with the ‘selfish-gene survival machine’ way of looking at natural selection is a particular risk of misunderstanding. The metaphor of the intelligent gene reckoning up how best to

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supposed to be inflexible idiots. I also have to apologize for the fact that, without my knowledge, the cover of the German edition of The Selfish Gene was given a picture of a human puppet jerking on the end of strings descending from the word gene, and the French edition a picture

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some apparently maladaptive feature of modern human behaviour—adoption, say, or contraception—and fling down a challenge to ‘explain that if you can with your selfish genes’. Obviously, as Lewontin, Gould and others have rightly stressed, it would be possible, depending on one’s ingenuity, to pull a ‘sociobiological’ explanation out of

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recently usurped technical term is not universal among molecular biologists, for one of the greatest of them has recently written that ‘the theory of the “selfish gene” will have to be extended to any stretch of DNA’ (Crick 1979). And, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, another molecular biologist

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vehicles. The end result of the selection discussed is a change in gene frequencies, for example an increase of ‘altruistic genes’ at the expense of ‘selfish genes’. It is still genes that are regarded as the replicators which actually survive (or fail to survive) as a consequence of the (vehicle) selection process

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that the association between the effects would have to be there by luck right from the start. The green-beard effect is all about one selfish gene looking after copies of itself in other individuals, regardless of, indeed in spite of, the probability that those individuals will share genes in general. The

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instructive in further ways. Anyone who thinks about genes literally as molecular entities is in danger of being misled by passages like ‘What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA … It is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world … a

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one species ‘recognizing’ copies of themselves in the other species, and extending them a helping hand? The answer is no, although a naive application of ‘selfish gene’ reasoning at the molecular level might lead us to think otherwise. Natural selection at the gene level is concerned with competition among alleles for a

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no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what this surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus

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confirming that Darwin’s contemporaries often were so misled. Even today the confusion is not unknown, and an analogous muddle arises over the catch-phrase ‘selfish gene’: ‘This is an ingenious theory but far-fetched. There is no reason for imputing the complex emotion of selfishness to molecules’ (Bethell 1978); ‘Genes cannot

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. The problem would never have arisen, and no arbitrary ‘honorary diploid’ method would have been called for, had we all along thought in terms of selfish genes maximizing their survival rather than in terms of selfish individuals maximizing their inclusive fitness. Consider an ‘intelligent gene’ sitting in the body of a male

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out of the group effort would save himself the cost of synthesis. Such a saving would be of immediate benefit to him, and to the selfish gene that made him opt out. The loss of his contribution to the group synthesis would hurt his rivals just as much as it hurt him

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is this new way of thinking? It is not just the ‘gene’s-eye point of view’ made famous in Dawkins’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Building here on that foundation, he shows how our traditional way of thinking about organisms should be replaced by a richer vision in which the

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in the trenches, where the data are gathered, where the details matter, where relatively small-scale hypotheses about manageable phenomena can be actually tested. The Selfish Gene was written for educated lay readers, and glided over many of the intricacies and technicalities that a proper scientific assessment needs to consider at length

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of eusociality in termites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 76, 5764–5768. Bateson, P. P. G. (1978). Book review: The Selfish Gene. Animal Behaviour 26, 316–318. Bateson, P. P. G. (1982). Behavioural development and evolutionary processes. In Current Problems in Sociobiology (ed. King’s College Sociobiology

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are easily distracted. Science 165, 751. Dawkins, R. (1971). Selective neurone death as a possible memory mechanism. Nature 229, 118–119. Dawkins, R. (1976a). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1976b). Hierarchical organisation: a candidate principle for ethology. In Growing Points in Ethology (eds P. P. G. Bateson & R

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stable strategy? In Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? (eds G. W. Barlow & J. Silverberg), pp. 331–367. Boulder: Westview Press. Dawkins, R. (1981). In defence of selfish genes. Philosophy, October. Dawkins, R. (1982). Replicators and vehicles. In Current Problems in Sociobiology (ed. King’s College Sociobiology Group), pp. 45–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University

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London, B 205, 489–511. Dilger, W. C. (1962). The behavior of lovebirds. Scientific American 206 (1), 89–98. Doolittle, W. F. & Sapienza, C. (1980). Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution. Nature 284, 601–603. Dover, G. (1980). Ignorant DNA? Nature 285, 618–619. Eaton, R. L. (1978). Why some

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Review of Biology 51, 211–244. Gould, S. J. (1977a). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gould, S. J. (1977b). Caring groups and selfish genes. Natural History 86 (12), 20–24. Gould, S. J. (1977c). Eternal metaphors of palaeontology. In Patterns of Evolution (ed. A. Hallam), pp. 1–26. Amsterdam

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Tokyo Press. Dawkins, R. (1989a). The evolution of evolvability. In Artificial Life (ed. C. Langton). Santa Fe, N.M.: Addison Wesley. Dawkins, R. (1989b). The Selfish Gene, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1990). Parasites, desiderata lists, and the paradox of the organism. In The Evolutionary Biology of Parasitism (eds

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, unit of, 81, 82, 89 selective neurone death, 170 selecton, 81 selfish cell, 170 selfish centriole, 160 selfish DNA, 83, 155–164, 170, 223, 224 selfish gene, 85, 180 selfish mitochondria, 177, 223–224 selfish nucleotide, 90–92 selfish organism, 5 selfish plasmagene, 177 selfish sperm, 141–143 self-inspection, 145–147

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think

by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley  · 1 Jan 2006  · 286pp  · 90,530 words

third section a philosopher, a computer scientist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist describe how they have pursued the logic of Dawkins’ work, and The Selfish Gene in particular, in their respective fields. Dawkins’ writing and public appearances have, of course, engendered considerable controversy and resistance, though much of the latter, as

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specifically in the middle section, in which three, admittedly friendly, critics discuss where in their view Dawkins has gone wrong. The most controversial applications of selfish gene ideas have been to humans, and these form the theme of the fifth section. The issues discussed will be familiar to many readers through their

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on hosts and inexplicably ignoring the infectious disease agents themselves. We had left them to microbiologists and parasitologists, who quite plainly did not think in selfish gene terms. Yet infectious diseases evolve on experimentally measurable timescales, so we could test theory, and because they make us sick, there must be money in

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and the wilful. I started in philosophy, where Darwinism was persistently maligned. Surveying the science, I rapidly concluded that the philosophers were profoundly wrong. The Selfish Gene became my staunchest guide. Here was a Darwinian world that was gene-centred, adaptationist; this had to be how natural selection worked. That, and The

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can exploit is the potential for cooperation with other genes. And, if it pays to cooperate, natural selection will favour genes that do so. Thus selfish genes can come to be accomplished cooperators—selfish cooperators, pragmatic cooperators, but accomplished cooperators nonetheless. Their cooperation arises not in spite of but because of genetic

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gene could build alone. And each cooperative enterprise creates a platform for the next. Thus, from modest beginnings and from a foundation of implacable genetic selfishness, genes have evolved the means to transform the world’s resources in ever more ingenious ways, proliferating adaptations of ever greater complexity and sophistication. Cooperation is

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both Richard and myself) accepted the ‘information for mutual benefit’ view of animal signalling in his masterly 1966 review of ritualization.3 Anyone familiar with ‘selfish gene’ thinking will immediately spot the problem. The view that communication evolves for mutual benefit is essentially an argument based on the premise that natural selection

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doubting quite as comprehensively and constructively. (The mention of guidebooks and journeys has incidentally reminded me of a less serious memory of living with The Selfish Gene. The Zoology Department in Oxford used to have a tradition of having comic sketches at its Christmas party in which graduate students would impersonate various

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groups are castigated as ‘genetic determinists’ by those who reject biological explanations of human behaviour. How then did Dawkins define the eponymous protagonist of The Selfish Gene? Dawkins recognized that there is ‘no universally agreed definition of a gene. Even if there were, there is nothing sacred about definitions. We can define

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that he neither wanted nor intended this definition. If all humans came to share the same DNA sequence, the theory of the selfish gene would not predict universal benevolence. A selfish gene does not ‘care’ about all replicas of its sequence, but only about some of its replicas in a smaller group of related

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Romanes, Darwin, and After Darwin. II. Post-Darwinian questions: Heredity and Utility (Chicago: Open Court, 1895), vol. 2, page 32. The intellectual contribution of The Selfish Gene to evolutionary theory Alan Grafen A phenomenon such as Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene1 can be seen from many points of view and set in many

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Darwinism available, it established a single conceptual framework within which old and new ideas in adaptationism could be understood. This overarching coherent structure in The Selfish Gene provides the kind of logical foundation and conceptual unity across a broad spectrum of ideas that is usually associated with mathematics. The irony will become

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then ‘known’ from mathematical population genetics. In short, readers untrammelled by the authority of population genetics are likely to have accepted the arguments in The Selfish Gene at face value; those who accepted that authority fully would have rejected them; and a large number of biologists, caught in between, had to find

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a way to reconcile the conflict. The apparent conflict with population genetics explains how the arguments in The Selfish Gene can have been right, but been rejected by theoreticians at the time. It explains why within biology the considerable scientific contributions it makes are seriously

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into anthropology and evolutionary psychology, among other subjects, was greatly facilitated by the book. Within biology, too, the clarity of the vision offered by The Selfish Gene encouraged field biologists to apply the newfangled ideas they now understood, and theoreticians to take up and further develop the theories that now seemed so

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on to be studied and developed by philosophers, and has contributed many further explanations of evolutionary topics. The link between the political objections to The Selfish Gene and the rejection of it by mathematical population geneticists is fascinating, but too large a topic to be included here. The mathematical arguments needed to

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there are sharply in-drawn breaths of imagined theoreticians at one’s shoulder (as described in the book’s original preface), they are unjustified. The Selfish Gene was a work of immense scientific creativity in 1976, providing the conceptual foundations and unifying framework of modern Darwinian biology, and remains unsurpassed, whether by

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word or by mathematics, to this day. ENDNOTES 1 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 2 G. C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 3 W. D. Hamilton, ‘The genetical evolution

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’ syntheses of Wilson and Dawkins actually like? What were their core emphases? Which were the theories and recent empirical findings covered in Sociobiology and The Selfish Gene, respectively? What was each book’s message? To anticipate, I shall argue that we are here dealing with two very different syntheses— indeed, two

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if one is looking for the actual core of new evolutionary ideas, the essence of the emerging new evolutionary paradigm, one had better consult The Selfish Gene rather than Sociobiology. However, if one desires a more comprehensive view, a wealth of contemporary theories and observations on animals in their environments—a naturalist

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but unlikely phenomenon: altruists within a group would not have the chance to band together before getting out-competed by selfish group members. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene also reflects this view of kin selection replacing group selection. This view was taken for granted in the new gene-selectionist paradigm emerging triumphant in

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referring to Hamilton. Harvey and Seger traced the mutant reference to Sociobiology, where it indeed appeared in Wilson’s bibliography. However, an examination of The Selfish Gene shows that this book, too, had the same incorrect mutant reference! Moreover, it can be shown that a visible upswing actually started already in the

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: W. H. Freeman, 1982). 29 Richard Dawkins, ‘Twelve misunderstandings of kin selection’, Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, 51 (1979b): 184-200. 30 Richard Dawkins, ‘In defence of selfish genes’, Philosophy, October (i98ia): 562-579. 31 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W Norton, 1987). 32 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (1982), 19. 33

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the Cause’, see note 20. 41 Eldredge, ‘A battle of words’ (1995), 122. 42 See Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth (2000), 325 ff. LOGIC The Selfish Gene as a philosophical essay Daniel C. Dennett One critic complained that my argument was ‘philosophical’, as though that was sufficient condemnation. Philosophical or not, the

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carve nature, but they are better only in that they make life easier for the theorist. As we climb the scale from utterly mindless (but selfish) genes through almost equally mindless (but still striving) macro-molecular mousetraps to ingeniously designed (but still clueless) fledgling cuckoos to clever apes (and robots) to

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Will not Go Away’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 5 (1975): 169-187. 6 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1st edn., 1976), v. 7 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., 1989), ix. 8 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., 1989), 1. 9 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Darwinian Fundamentalism’, New York Review of Books (12 June 1997

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and Contrast’, in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford, 1978). 13 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). 14 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., 1989), 4. 15 Mary Midgley, ‘Gene-juggling’, Philosophy, 54 (1979): 439-458. 16 John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press 1985). 17 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 18 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., 1989), 18. 19 Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). 20 George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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to his response. 23 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (2nd edn., 1989), 32. 24 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 33-34. 25 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 35-36. 26 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 35. 27 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 63. 28 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 64. 29 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 64. 30 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989), 64-65. 31 C

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from the ‘four Fs’, thereby becoming readily applicable to a wider range of non-genetic (quasi-) evolutionary systems. Most famously, and much earlier, in The Selfish Gene Dawkins was able to reapply the abstracted principles of natural selection within the realm of ideas, conjuring the meme as an ideational equivalent of the

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may not be equivalent to his. 9 R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 10 R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Selfish genes and information flow David Deutsch ALONG with countless other people, I had been labouring under some significant misconceptions before I relearned the theory

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things such as being nice to relatives, extending favors in certain circumstances, flaunting their generosity under other circumstances, and so on. (Indeed much of The Selfish Gene consists of explanations of how the altruism of organisms is a consequence of the selfishness of genes.) Another example of this kind of confusion is

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King’s College Sociobiology Group (eds.), Current Problems in Sociobiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982a), 45-54. 5 P. Bateson [P.G.], ‘Book Review: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins’, Animal Behaviour, 26 (1978): 316-318. 6 R. Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1982). 7 M. Mameli, ‘Nongenetic selection

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accumulation of adaptations. The idea is that, like a gene, a meme is a replicator (a concept also first defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene). Genes replicate through the duplication of DNA strands; cultural replication, or the duplication of memes, takes place through the social transmission of information. Dawkins was

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: Simon & Schuster, 2002); and Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4 Dawkins, ‘Introduction’ (1999). 5 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 6 John Bowker, Is God a Virus? (Oxford: SPCK, 1995). 7 Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999); see also ‘The

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Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, i976) and Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). HUMANS Selfish genes and family relations Martin Daly and Margo Wilson What did research on human family relations look like before Richard Dawkins made the advantages of taking

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genes’ interests, most readers followed blithely to the implication that individuals made by genes must be naturally and unavoidably selfish. Like a surreptitious inoculation, the selfish gene metaphor slipped a foreign idea into millions of minds where it aroused intense reactions that sped its spread. For me, like many others, reading The

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Wilson’s Sociobiology brought wide interest in evolution and animal behavior, but was not mainly about group selection and human altruism. Instead, it was The Selfish Gene that brought the fall of group selection and the power of kin selection to wide attention. In a display of utterly unselfish scholarship, Dawkins repeatedly

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gives credit to others for originating these core ideas. Thirty years later, The Selfish Gene still provokes admiration, astonishment, and rage. The admiration is easily explained by the lucid prose, the astonishment by the startling ideas. But why such enduring

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help other individuals are actually altruistic or somehow covertly selfish is an emotionally charged personal issue. Almost everyone has a strong reaction. Some experience The Selfish Gene as a personal accusation of secret selfishness and respond with indignant rage. Others find a justification for their selfish impulses. In a book about the

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what Professor Dawkins said ...’ And so on. Richard Dawkins changed the conversation. He has been changing the conversation ever since 1976, when his book The Selfish Gene changed the way we look at ourselves and our world. * * * Humans are a hierarchical social primate species who, despite centuries of democratic rule, still

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mechanism of natural selection which Huxley could never bring himself fully to embrace). It is possible to contemplate the ideological landscape and conclude that The Selfish Gene was inevitably destined to flow into the neoliberal current, but that would be the reverse of its author’s intentions. The Huxleyan divide also puts

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Menon for bringing this quotation to my attention. 2 William Paley, Natural Theology (1803). WRITING Richard Dawkins and the golden pen Matt Ridley BEFORE The Selfish Gene, scientists wrote books for each other, or for laymen, but rarely for both. The great interpreters of science, such as Peter Medawar, J. B.

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. They were in the explaining, not the exploring, tradition. Not until Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct in 1994 did a true successor to The Selfish Gene appear: an argumentative book aimed at persuading professional scientists as well as enlightening laymen and written in unputdownable prose. Publishers are herd animals. The success

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest

by Yochai Benkler  · 8 Aug 2011  · 187pp  · 62,861 words

relaunched the practice of applying evolutionary theory to human behavior and introduced the basic arguments that played out more popularly in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (and more recently in the extensive and popular work in evolutionary psychology). Genes, Wilson argued, had human culture on a leash. Human behavior developed and

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Peter Kropotkin, who in a 1902 book, Mutual Aid, documented widespread cooperation in the animal kingdom, than it is of Herbert Spencer. What Is the “Selfish” Gene? The best way, perhaps, to see the arc of the debate over the last thirty years concerning the role of evolution and genetics in shaping

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compare two very strong statements, made by two highly accomplished scientists, at the bookends of this period. The first is from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, in 1976. The second is from a review of the discipline of the evolution of cooperation, published thirty years later by Martin Nowak in Science

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expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to

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do. —DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene, p. 3 Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world. Thus, we might add “natural cooperation

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by the 1970s was considered a dead branch of evolutionary theory). Moreover, Dawkins often wrote in terms that lent his work to be somewhat misinterpreted. “Selfish gene” does not imply “selfish person.” Under the right circumstances, in fact, nonselfish, cooperative human attitudes and behavior can be “selfish” if they increase that person

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to the next generation. According to that definition, even acts that we would in normal language call altruistic are “selfish” from the perspective of the selfish gene. Take this simplified example. Imagine that there were an altruism gene (we’ll call it the AS gene) that predisposes people toward selfless behavior. Let

Unweaving the Rainbow

by Richard Dawkins  · 7 Aug 2011  · 339pp  · 112,979 words

been decoded, and presumably has never been of any use. (Never useful for the animal's survival, anyway. From the point of view of the selfish gene, as I explained in another book, we could say that any kind of junk DNA is 'useful' to itself if it just keeps surviving and

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the sort of entity to which a word like 'selfish' should be applied. But I vigorously challenge anyone to maintain the criticism after reading The Selfish Gene itself, as opposed to just the title.) To apply 'evolving' to the universe is defensible but, as we shall see, it is probably best not

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worthwhile arguments are to be had between vantage points along its length. To invoke the rainmakers yet again, there is no more connection between a selfish gene and a selfish human than there is between a rock and a rain cloud. To explain the poetic continuum I am criticizing, I might as

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, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley and all those, such as the distinguished American evolutionist George C. Williams and today's advocates of 'the selfish gene', who emphasize that nature really is red in tooth and claw. At the other end of the continuum are Prince Peter Kropotkin the Russian anarchist

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nice and sometimes nasty, since either can suit the self-interest of genes at different times. That is precisely the reason for speaking of 'the selfish gene' rather than, say, 'the selfish chimpanzee'. The opposition that de Waal and others have erected, between biologists who believe human and animal nature is fundamentally

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the underlying genes maximize their self-interest. However, I don't want to dwell on what I have expounded in earlier books such as The Selfish Gene. What I would now re-emphasize from that book—it has been overlooked by critics who appear to have read it by title only—is

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well with the other. I take this to be a model for what often goes on among working genes within any gene pool. In The Selfish Gene, I used a rowing analogy. A crew of eight oarsmen needs to be well coordinated. Eight men who have trained together can expect to work

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, still poetic science but (it is the purpose of this chapter to persuade you) good poetic science, sees the forest as an anarchistic federation of selfish genes, each selected as being good at surviving within its own gene pool against the background of the environment provided by all the others. Yes, there

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than one stable solution to the same problem may exist. Once a gene pool starts to become dominated by one stable solution, further selection of selfish genes favours the ingredients of the same solution. The other solution could equally well have been favoured if the starting conditions had been different. In any

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is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service. 'The selfish gene' is a metaphoric image, potentially a good one but capable of sadly misleading if the metaphor of personification is improperly grasped. If interpreted aright it

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us into paths of deep understanding and fertile research. This chapter has used the metaphor of the personified gene to explain a sense in which 'selfish' genes are also 'cooperative'. The key image to be floated in the next chapter is that of a species' genes as a detailed description of the

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. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 30. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin Books. 31. Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 32. Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 33. Dawkins, R. (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable. New

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

by Richard Dawkins  · 15 Mar 2017  · 420pp  · 130,714 words

the list at the back of the book. Editor’s introduction RICHARD DAWKINS has always defied categorization. One eminent biologist of mathematical bent reviewing The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype was startled to find scientific work apparently free of logical errors and yet containing not a single line of mathematics; he

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for me reminders – and I stress the perception is mine, not Richard’s – of the tragic aspect of his writing and speaking life since The Selfish Gene. If ‘tragic’ seems too strong a word, consider this. In that first explosive book he explained how evolution by natural selection proceeds through a logic

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an awful warning. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. The weakest really do go to the wall, and natural selection really does favour selfish genes. The racing elegance of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Ancient antelopes

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single-mindedly devoting our time and energy to disseminating our genes. This is easy stuff; there is no philosophical difficulty at all. Natural selection of selfish genes gave us big brains which were originally useful for survival in a purely utilitarian sense. Once those big brains, with their linguistic and other capacities

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place, there is no contradiction at all in saying that they took off in wholly new ‘emergent’ directions, including directions opposed to the interests of selfish genes. There is nothing self-contradictory about emergent properties. Electronic computers, conceived as calculating machines, emerge as word processors, chess players, encyclopedias, telephone switchboards, even, I

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there to ring philosophical alarm bells. Nor in the statement that our brains have overtaken, even overreached, their Darwinian provenance. Just as we defy our selfish genes when we wantonly detach the enjoyment of sex from its Darwinian function, so we can sit down together and with language devise politics, ethics and

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paths of gene survival. Only the past can have an influence, not the future. Animals behave as if striving for the future values of the selfish gene simply and solely because they bear, and are influenced by, genes that survived through ancestral generations in the past. Those ancestors that, in their own

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important to wear sophisticated spectacles. Do not ask how a middle manager’s ambitions for a bigger desk and a softer office carpet benefit his selfish genes. Ask, instead, how these urban partialities might stem from a mental module which was selected to do something else, in a different place and time

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had important consequences for the evolution of our values. In particular, it might help us to understand why, from the point of view of our selfish genes, we are so absurdly nice to each other. It is not quite as absurd as it might naively appear. Genes may be selfish, but this

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is far from saying that individual organisms must be harsh and selfish. A large purpose of the doctrine of the selfish gene is to explain how selfishness at the gene level can lead to altruism at the level of the individual organism. But that only covers altruism

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inbreeding calculations. So the ‘village model’ leads us, by two quite distinct lines of theory, to expect ingroup altruism jockeying with tendencies to xenophobia. Now, selfish genes are not conscious little agents, taking decisions for their own future good. The genes that survive are the ones that wired up ancestral brains with

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slow process of natural selection to catch up. So the same rules of thumb will be acted out as if nothing had happened. From the selfish genes’ point of view it is a mistake, like our love of sugar in a modern world where sugar is no longer scarce and rots our

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own values. Natural selection gives rise to these only at second remove, by making brains that grow big. From the point of view of the selfish genes our brains raced away with their emergent properties, and my personal value system regards this with a distinctly positive sign. The tyranny of the texts

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I have already disposed of one source of scepticism about my notion of rebellion against the selfish genes. Radical, left-wing scientists wrongly smelled a concealed Cartesian dualism. A different kind of scepticism comes from religious sources. Time and again, religious critics have

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said to me something like this. It’s all very well issuing a call to arms against the tyranny of the selfish genes, but how do you decide what to put in its place? It’s all very well sitting round a table with our big brains and

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. If nerves carry information about the world as it is now, genes are a coded description of the distant past. This insight follows from the ‘selfish gene’ view of evolution. Living organisms are beautifully built to survive and reproduce in their environments. Or that is what Darwinians say. But actually it isn

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mathematical terms of qualitative arguments such as those of Amotz Zahavi. My own attempt to explain these matters is in the second edition of The Selfish Gene, written in a spirit of penance for the unjustified ridicule with which I had treated Zahavi’s ideas in the first edition. *3 See the

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a radical departure from orthodox neo-Darwinian ‘individual selection’. Nor did I, when I reiterated and extended the same argument a decade later in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. We thought we were just clarifying what orthodox neo-Darwinism really meant. Yet both critics and supporters misunderstood our view as

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developed by W. D. Hamilton, who later became my Oxford colleague and friend. It was one of the central themes of my first book, The Selfish Gene. Having been largely neglected for its first decade after Hamilton’s important papers of 1964, the theory of kin selection suddenly became much discussed in

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is John Maynard Smith’s phrase, and it represents a powerful way of thinking about evolution, one of which I made extensive use in The Selfish Gene. A ‘strategy’ is a piece of unconscious behavioural ‘clockwork’ such as ‘drop food into squawking gapes that you see in your nest’. An ESS is

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come up with explanations for human niceness: generalizations of the well-established models of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, the stocks-in-trade of the ‘selfish gene’ theory, which sets out to explain how altruism and cooperation among individual animals can flow from self-interest at the genetic level. The sort of

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, which, under the blind forces of natural selection, expanded to the point where, all unforeseen, it overreached itself and started to behave insanely from the selfish gene’s point of view. The most transparently un-Darwinian misfiring is contraception, which divorces sexual pleasure from its natural function of gene propagation. More subtle

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overreachings include intellectual and artistic pursuits that squander, by the selfish genes’ lights, time and energy that should be devoted to surviving and reproducing. The big brain achieved the evolutionarily unprecedented feat of genuine foresight: it became

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superniceness whose singular existence is the central paradox of my thesis. Big brains can take the driving, goal-seeking mechanisms that were originally favoured for selfish-gene reasons and divert (subvert? pervert?) them away from their Darwinian goals and into other paths. I am no memetic engineer, and I have very little

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, The Greatest Show on Earth: the evidence for evolution (London, Bantam, 2009) Dawkins, Richard, River Out of Eden (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994) Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976) Dawkins, Richard, Unweaving the Rainbow (London, Allen Lane, 1998; pb Penguin, 1999) Dennett, Daniel C., Elbow Room: the varieties of

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, 1975) Winston, Robert, The Story of God: a personal journey into the world of science and religion (London, Bantam, 2005) Also by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil’s Chaplain The Ancestor’s Tale The

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was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science. He was first catapulted to fame with his iconic work of 1976, The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of prestigious bestselling books including The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale and The God Delusion

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

as sex differences and mental illness.23 Other than Wilson, the major target of their attacks has been Richard Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins covered many of the same ideas as Wilson but concentrated on the logic of the new evolutionary theories rather than the zoological details. He

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good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, “The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong.”) In any case, the reviews contained

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of Alcock’s 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiology says it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about “sociobiology” or “selfish genes” anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science.58 In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience—beauty

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.5 A third vice with political implications is selfishness. If people, like other animals, are driven by selfish genes, selfishness might seem inevitable or even a virtue. The argument is fallacious from the start because selfish genes do not necessarily grow selfish organisms. Still, let us consider the possibility that people might have some

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come about when people exchange information that affects those mechanisms—even if we are nothing but meat puppets, glorified clockwork, or lumbering robots created by selfish genes. Not only is acknowledging human nature compatible with social and moral progress, but it can help explain the obvious progress that has taken place over

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it has nothing but itself to know itself with. Chapter 14 The Many Roots of Our Suffering THE FIRST EDITION of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene contained a foreword by the biologist who originated some of its key ideas, Robert Trivers. He closed with a flourish: Darwinian social theory gives us

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make peace, and humans in particular find comfort and joy in their families, friends, and communities. This, too, should be familiar to readers of The Selfish Gene and the other books on the evolution of altruism that have appeared in the years since.3 There are several reasons why organisms may evolve

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moral nihilism. If we are not created by God for a higher purpose, say the critics on the right, or if we are products of selfish genes, say the critics on the left, then what would prevent us from becoming amoral egoists who look out only for number one? Wouldn’t we

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selfish or evil instincts), and the Ghost in the Machine (an unfettered “we” that can choose better social arrangements). And here were scientists talking about selfish genes! And saying that adaptations are not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals and their kin (as if to vindicate

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violence. Science, 289, 591–594. Davis, B. D. 1983. Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press. Public Interest, 73, 41–59. Dawkins, R. 1976/1989. The selfish gene (new ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. 1983. Universal Darwinism. In D. S. Bendall (Ed.), Evolution from molecules to man. New York: Cambridge

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the descent of man. Chicago: Aldine. Trivers, R. 1974. Parent-offspring conflict.American Zoologist, 14, 249–264. Trivers, R. 1976. Foreword. In R. Dawkins, The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Trivers, R. 1981. Sociobiology and politics. In E. White (Ed.), Sociobiology and human politics. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath. Trivers

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Schlesinger, Laura Schwartz, Felice Schwarzenegger, Arnold science studies Scopes Monkey Trial Scott, Dred Scott, James Searle, John Segal, Nancy Sejnowski, Terrence self, unified self-deception Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins) selfishness Sen, Amartya Serrano, Andres Seville Statement sex differences in brain discomfort about gender gap and in parenting in violence women as researchers

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker  · 24 Sep 2012  · 1,351pp  · 385,579 words

to seek to harm other organisms? The answer is not as straightforward as the phrase “survival of the fittest” would suggest. In his book The Selfish Gene, which explained the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics and game theory, Richard Dawkins tried to pull his readers out of their unreflective familiarity

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of Diseases of Childhood, 89, 1103–5. Davis, D. B. 1984. Slavery and human progress. New York: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. 1976/1989. The selfish gene, new ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R., & Brockmann, H. J. 1980. Do digger wasps commit the Concorde fallacy? Animal Behavior, 28, 892–96

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man. Chicago: Aldine. Trivers, R. L. 1974. Parent-offspring conflict. American Zoologist, 14, 249–64. Trivers, R. L. 1976. Foreword. In R. Dawkins, ed., The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Trivers, R. L. 1985. Social evolution. Reading, Mass.: Benjamin/Cummings. Trivers, R. L. In press. Deceit and self-deception. Trivers

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together

by Bruce Schneier  · 14 Feb 2012  · 503pp  · 131,064 words

organism's ability to survive long enough to successfully pass its genes on to future generations. Or, to use Richard Dawkins's perspective from The Selfish Gene, genes that helped their host individuals—or other individuals with that gene—successfully reproduce tended to persist in higher numbers in populations. If we were

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of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. first animal predator Ben Harder (9 Apr 2002), “Was This the Earth's First Predator?” National Geographic. The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins (1976), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press. defend against William D. Hamilton, Robert Axelrod, and Reiko Tanese (1990), “Sexual Reproduction as an Adaptation to Resist Parasites (A

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley  · 395pp  · 116,675 words

is explicit, even Dawkinsian, in its directness. The historian of philosophy Anthony Gottlieb compares a passage from Lucretius with one from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The first talks of ‘the generation of living creatures’ by ‘every sort of combination and motion’; the second of how ‘unordered atoms could group themselves

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this is Richard Dawkins. Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene. ‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,’ he wrote. ‘This is a truth that still fills

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of an extremely important theory. He wrote: Sex is not the only apparent paradox that becomes less puzzling the moment we learn to think in selfish gene terms. For instance, it appears that the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction of

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thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. From the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus

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are mine but based on information supplied by Patrick Cramer and Venki Ramakrishnan. On selfish DNA, Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press; Doolittle, W.F. and Sapienza, C. 1980. Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution. Nature 284:601–603; and Crick, F.H.C. and Orgel, L. 1980. Selfish

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Davies, Stephen 175–6, 189, 243 Dawkins, Richard 11, 44, 46, 53, 58, 65–8, 71, 268, 307; The Greatest Show on Earth 76; The Selfish Gene 66–7 De Filippi, Primavera 313 Dead Sea scrolls 261 Defoe, Daniel 94 Delgado, Pat 265–6 Delhi 185 Democratic Republic of Congo 32 Democritus

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, 147 GCHQ 303 genes: background 59–61; function of 65; and the genome 62–4; and junk or surplus DNA 66–72; mutation 72–5; selfish gene 66, 68 Genghis Khan 87, 223 geology 17 George III 245 Georgia Inst. of Technology 272 German Society for Racial Hygiene 198, 202 Germany 12

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