Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

It is sobering to realize that I have lived nearly half my life with The Selfish Genefor better, for worse. Over the years, as each of my seven subsequent books has appeared, publishers have sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to the new book, whichever one it is, with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and ask intelligent questions. Then they line up to buy, and have me signThe Selfish Gene. That is a bit of an exaggeration. Some of them do buy the new book and, for the rest, my wife consoles me by arguing that people who newly discover an author will naturally tend to go back to his first book: having read The Selfish Gene, surely theyll work their way through to the latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?

I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now, or apologize for. Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in 1976 as a young mans book. He was deliberately quoting a commentator on A.J. Ayers Language Truth and Logic. I was flattered by the comparison, although I knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and I could hardly miss Cains pointed implication that I should, in the fullness of time, do the same.

Let me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975, through the mediation of my friend Desmond Morris I showed the partially completed book to Tom Maschler, doyen of London publishers, and we discussed it in his room at Jonathan Cape. He liked the book but not the title. Selfish, he said, was a down word. Why not call it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an up word, the immortality of genetic information was a central theme of the book, and immortal gene had almost the same intriguing ring as selfish gene (neither of us, I think, noticed the resonance with Oscar Wildes The Selfish Giant). I now think Maschler may have been right. Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that The Selfish Gene on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. Nowadays, an American publisher would in any case have insisted on a subtitle.

The best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize selfish and you will think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is gene and let me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, selfish. Altruism might well be favoured at other levels. Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might expect individual organisms to behave altruistically for the good of the species. They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation, or restrain their hunting behaviour to conserve the species future stocks of prey. It was such widely disseminated misunderstandings of Darwinism that originally provoked me to write the book.

Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically for the good of the genes, for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altruism is only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism. This book explains how it works, together with reciprocation, Darwinian theorys other main generator of altruism. If I were ever to rewrite the book, as a late convert to the Zahavi/Grafen handicap principle (see pages 40612) I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavis idea that altruistic donation might be a Potlatch style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!