The Selfish Gene

A Question That Took Three Billion Years to Ask

For roughly three billion years, life on Earth went about its business without anyone knowing why. Bacteria split. Plants reached for the sun. Animals chased each other and ate each other and bred. Then one species, on one planet, finally noticed the pattern. His name was Charles Darwin, and the year was 1859. The zoologist G. G. Simpson put it bluntly: any attempt to answer the question "why are we here?" before Darwin was worthless, and we are better off ignoring it completely.

Richard Dawkins picks up where Darwin left off, but with a twist. The unit of selection, he argues, is not the organism, not the species, not even the population. It is the gene. We are the vehicles. Genes are the passengers. And every leg, eye, instinct, and impulse you have was built by ancestors of those genes to keep them traveling.

Here is the trick to making the rest of the book click. Imagine genes that have survived for millions of years in a fiercely competitive world. Dawkins compares them to Chicago gangsters who have outlived the prohibition era — the very fact that they are still here tells you something about their character. You can guess, just from their longevity, that they are ruthless and good at it. Successful genes will be selfish. Not selfish in the sense that they sit around plotting; selfish in the sense that any gene which behaved otherwise was outcompeted long ago and is no longer with us. Selfishness here is a statistical residue, not a personality.

This matters because most popular biology before Dawkins assumed evolution was working for the good of the species, or the group, or some abstract collective. Lorenz, Ardrey, Eibl-Eibesfeldt — all of them, in different ways, slipped this assumption into their popular books. A BBC zoologist on Australian spiders said baby spiders die "for the survival of the species." A Nuffield biology guide for schoolchildren explained that animals sometimes commit suicide "to ensure the survival of the species." Dawkins calls this what it is: a gem of a circular argument. If groups of altruists really did exist, one selfish individual landing in their midst would have more children than anyone else, and within a few generations the altruists would be gone. Group selection is slow. Individual selection is fast. Evolution is blind to the future.