Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition

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THE SELFISH GENE

RichardDawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science atOxford University. Born in Nairobi of British parents, he was educated atOxford and did his doctorate under the Nobel-prize winning ethologist NikoTinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, returning as University Lecturer and later Reader inZoology at New College, Oxford, before becoming the first holder of the SimonyiChair in 1995. He is a fellow of New College.

TheSelfish Gene (1976; second edition 1989) catapulted RichardDawkins to fame, and remains his most famous and widely read work. It wasfollowed by a string of bestselling books: The Extended Phenotype(1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), ClimbingMount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), and TheAncestor's Tale (2004). A Devil's Chaplain, a collection of hisshorter writings, was published in 2003. Dawkins is a Fellow of both the RoyalSociety and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient of numeroushonours and awards, including the 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award, theLos Angeles Times Literary Prize of the same year, the 1990 Michael FaradayAward of the Royal Society, the 1994 Nakayama Prize, the 1997 InternationalCosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science, the Kistler Prize in 2001, andthe Shakespeare Prize in 2005.

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THE
SELFISH
GENE

RICHARDDAWKINS

OXFORD

UNIVERSITYPRESS

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OXFORD

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Richard Dawkins 1989

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Firstpublished 1976

Secondedition 1989

30thanniversary edition 2006

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Introductionto 30th anniversary edition vii

Prefaceto second edition xv

Forewordto first edition xix

Prefaceto first edition xxi

1. Whyare people? 1

2. Thereplicators 12

3. Immortalcoils 21

4. Thegene machine 46

5. Aggression:stability and the selfish machine 66

6. Genesmanship88

7. Familyplanning 109

8. Battleof the generations 123

9. Battleof the sexes 140

10. Youscratch my back, I'll ride on yours 166

11. Memes:the new replicators 189

12. Niceguys finish first 202

13. Thelong reach of the gene 234

Endnotes267

Updatedbibliography 333

Indexand key to bibliography 345

Extractsfrom reviews 353

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It is sobering to realise that I havelived nearly half my life with The Selfish Gene for better, for worse.Over the years, as each of my seven subsequent books has appeared, publishershave sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to the new book,whichever one it is, with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and askintelligent questions. Then they line up to buy, and have me sign... The Selfish Gene. That is a bit of an exaggeration. Someof them do buy the new book and, for the rest, my wife consoles me by arguingthat people who newly discover an author will naturally tend to go back to hisfirst book: having read The Selfish Gene, surely they'll work their waythrough to the latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?

I would mindmore if I could claim that The Selfish Gene had become severely outmodedand superseded. Unfortunately (from one point of view) I cannot. Details havechanged and factual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that Ishall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that I would rush totake back now, or apologise for. Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology atLiverpool and one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described TheSelfish Gene in 1976 as a young man's book. He was deliberately quoting acommentator on A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic. I was flattered bythe comparison, although I knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first bookand I could hardly miss Cain's pointed implication that I should, in thefullness of time, do the same.

Let me beginwith some second thoughts about the title. In 1975, through the mediation of myfriend 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. Whynot call it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an up word, theimmortality of genetic information was a central theme of the book, andimmortal gene had almost the same intriguing ring as selfish gene (neitherof us, I think, noticed the resonance with Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant).I now think Maschler may have been right. Many critics, especially vociferousones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by titleonly. No doubt this works well {viii} enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of theRoman Empire, but I can readily see that The Selfish Gene on its own,without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequateimpression of its contents. Nowadays, an American publisher would in any casehave insisted on a subtitle.

The best wayto explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Emphasize selfish and youwill think the book is about selfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes moreattention to altruism. The correct word of the title to stress is gene andlet me explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that isactually selected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does notsurvive, as a consequence of natural selection. That unit will become, more orless by definition, selfish. Altruism might well be favoured at other levels.Does natural selection choose between species? If so, we might expectindividual organisms to behave altruistically for the good of the species.They might limit their birth rates to avoid overpopulation, or restrain their huntingbehaviour to conserve the species future stocks of prey. It was such widelydisseminated misunderstandings of Darwinism that originally provoked me towrite the book.