Science & ideas

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins

A zoologist's case for seeing evolution through the gene, and what that view says about fighting, caring and cooperating

  • No ratings yet
  • 11 key ideas
  • Text
  • Published 1976

Introduction

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist, asks why living things sometimes help each other when natural selection seems to reward selfishness. His answer is a way of seeing evolution from the point of view of the gene. In thirteen chapters he moves from the first molecule that copied itself to genes and bodies, the way brains carry out the genes' policy, why fights are limited, why animals care for relatives, how parents and children, and males and females, have partly opposed interests, how cooperation between unrelated creatures can arise, how ideas he calls memes spread in human culture, and how a gene's effects can reach beyond the body.

"Selfish" is a figure of speech, and Dawkins says so himself: genes have no plans, feelings or foresight, and he defines selfish and altruistic behaviour only by what they do to the chances of survival. The book describes how things evolved; it does not say how people ought to behave. It was first published in 1976, and this summary follows the text of the second edition (1989), which keeps the original chapters and adds two new ones and endnotes. The gene's-eye view, the rejection of group selection and the theory of memes are Dawkins's own positions, and they are summarized here as his.

Notes: the 1989 edition kept the original text, including its use of "he" for people in general. Several of the book's points are still debated. Biologists such as David Sloan Wilson and E. O. Wilson argued in 2007 that selection among groups matters too, which Dawkins rejects here. Dawkins himself calls his gene's-eye view, in the 1989 preface, "a different way of seeing, not a different theory", though he adds there that a new way of seeing can, at its best, achieve more than a new theory. In the main text he doubted Amotz Zahavi's idea that costly traits such as long tails are honest signs of quality; in the endnotes of the 1989 edition, after his Oxford colleague Alan Grafen had modelled the idea mathematically, he changed his mind, and in 2008 he wrote that he had been wrong to dismiss it. In 1993 Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund found in computer simulations that a strategy called win-stay, lose-shift can do better than Tit for Tat when players sometimes make mistakes. Dawkins himself allows that his theory of memes may be speculative. The endnotes of the 1989 edition are not part of this summary.

  1. 1Dawkins argues that to understand why animals help or harm each other, we should look at genes, not at the good of the group or the species
  2. 2Dawkins argues that life began with a molecule that copied itself, and that genes are its descendants, now living inside bodies
  3. 3Dawkins argues that genes, not bodies, are what lasts in evolution, because sex shuffles each body's genes apart but leaves short stretches of DNA intact
  4. 4Dawkins argues that genes build bodies and brains in advance, and that the brain then takes the moment-to-moment decisions
  5. 5Dawkins argues that animals fight with restraint not for the good of their kind, but because restraint can be a stable strategy
  6. 6Dawkins argues that a gene can spread by helping its own copies in other bodies, which explains why animals care for their relatives
  7. 7Dawkins argues that parents do not breed for the good of the group, and that even in a family the interests of parents and children only partly agree
  8. 8Dawkins argues that the differences between the sexes begin with one fact: eggs are few and large, sperm are many and small
  9. 9Dawkins argues that unrelated individuals can cooperate when they meet again and again, and that in repeated games nice, forgiving strategies do best
  10. 10Dawkins proposes that human culture has its own kind of replicator, the meme, which spreads from brain to brain by imitation
  11. 11Dawkins argues that a gene's effects can reach beyond its own body, and that bodies exist because their genes share one way into the next generation

This book is for Premium members

The introduction is free. Premium opens every key idea, in audio and text.

See Premium
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: summary | Daridanesh