The key ideas

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins, 1976

Why does a mother risk her life for her young, and why do unrelated birds groom each other's feathers? Richard Dawkins invites you to look at life through the eyes of a gene, and much of what seemed a mystery falls into place. You'll understand how a "selfish" gene builds a generous body, how cooperation arises without any agreement and where memes came from.

Who it is for

For anyone who wants to understand where care, deceit and cooperation in nature come from. And for anyone who has used the word "meme" for years without knowing that a biologist coined it.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

The question visitors from space would ask

Imagine that beings from another world have landed on Earth and want to know how advanced our civilisation is. Richard Dawkins is sure that the first thing they would ask is: have these people discovered evolution yet? In his words, intelligent life comes of age when it first works out why it exists at all. Living things had inhabited the Earth for more than three billion years without knowing any of this, until Charles Darwin found the answer.

Dawkins is a zoologist from Oxford. In 1976 he published his first book and asked an awkward question in it: who, exactly, does evolution benefit? The species? The group? The individual animal? His answer sounds strange: none of them. The real beneficiary is the gene, a stretch of hereditary information copied from generation to generation.

The book contains almost no new facts about animals. What it changes is the point of view. Dawkins invites you to look at life through the eyes of a gene, and then much of what seemed a mystery becomes clear: why a mother risks her life for her young, why birds groom each other's feathers, why children argue with their parents and why a tune can go round in your head for a week.

You'll find out how every living body grew out of a molecule in an ancient ocean, why "selfish" doesn't mean "evil", where kindness between strangers comes from and how ideas live by the same rules as genes. And at the end, why humans, according to Dawkins, are the only ones on Earth able to turn against their creators.

The first molecule that could copy itself

Dawkins starts the story of life long before the first cell. Billions of years ago, simple chemicals floated in the ancient ocean. This mixture is usually called the primeval soup. And one day, by pure chance, a molecule of a special kind appeared in it. It could act as a template and assemble a copy of itself from the particles around it. Dawkins calls such molecules replicators, that is, copiers.

A replicator does not need to be clever or alive. It is enough that it copies itself. The copies were not perfect, and copying errors gave rise to variety. Some variants were sturdier, others copied faster, still others more accurately. There was not enough building material in the soup for everyone, and those that did better became more numerous.

That is how competition began, without any wish to compete. Some replicators may have learned to break down their neighbours and take their parts. Others surrounded themselves with a protein coat and became better protected. For Dawkins these were the first survival machines: walls built around a copying molecule.

Dawkins himself makes clear that this is a picture, not a record of events. Nobody knows for certain exactly how life appeared. But what matters for his argument is not the chemistry but the logic. If something copies itself with small errors, selection starts on its own.

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About the author

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and science communicator who worked at the University of Oxford for many years. The Selfish Gene is his first and best known book.

All books by this author: Richard Dawkins

Terms from the book

  • prisoner's dilemma
  • Darwin
  • Williams
  • Hamilton
  • natural selection
  • Axelrod
  • Evolutionarily stable strategy
  • Gene
  • Midgley
  • Group selection
  • Primeval soup: A figurative name for the ancient ocean, rich in simple organic substances, in which, according to one hypothesis, life began.
  • Replicator: A concept from the book: anything able to make copies of itself. The first replicators were hypothetical molecules of the ancient ocean; today's are genes.
  • Survival machines: Dawkins's image, not a scientific term: the bodies of living things, which genes build to preserve and copy themselves.
  • Wynne-Edwards: Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards (1906 to 1997), a British zoologist who held that animals limit their breeding for the good of the group.
  • Lack: David Lack (1910 to 1973), a British ornithologist who studied what determines the number of eggs in a bird's clutch.
  • Kin selection: The mechanism by which genes that prompt help for relatives spread, since relatives carry copies of the same genes with a certain probability.
  • Maynard Smith: John Maynard Smith (1920 to 2004), a British biologist who applied game theory to evolution and introduced the idea of the evolutionarily stable strategy.
  • Trivers: Robert Trivers, an American evolutionary biologist, the author of the theories of reciprocal altruism and parent-offspring conflict.
  • Reciprocal altruism: Mutual altruism: helping unrelated individuals, which pays because over time the help comes back in return.
  • Rapoport: Anatol Rapoport (1911 to 2007), a Russian-born mathematician and psychologist who worked in the United States and Canada. The author of Tit for Tat, the strategy that won Axelrod's tournament.
  • Meme: A word Dawkins coined in this book: a unit of cultural transmission, such as a tune, an idea or a fashion, that spreads through imitation.

All terms

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