The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene is a 1976 popular science book by Richard Dawkins that espouses the gene-centred view of evolution. It builds upon the thesis of George Christopher Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) and W. D. Hamilton's work on kin selection. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more genes two individuals share, the more sense it makes for them to co-operate.

The book introduced the term meme for a unit of cultural evolution analogous to the gene. Memetics has become a subject in its own right in the years since. In popularising Hamilton's ideas, as well as making its own valuable contributions to the field, the book has also stimulated research on human inclusive fitness.

The "selfish gene" is a metaphor for the gene-centred view of evolution. As such, the book is not about a particular gene that causes selfish behaviour; in fact, much of it is devoted to explaining the evolution of altruism. Dawkins says of the title that he "can readily see that it might give an inadequate impression of its contents" and in retrospect wishes he had taken Tom Maschler's advice and titled it The Immortal Gene. He laments that “Too many people read it by title only.” In response, he expanded on the evolution of altruism in the BBC documentary Nice Guys Finish First.

Background

Dawkins builds upon George Christopher Williams's book Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), which argued that altruism is not based upon group benefit per se,

Book

Title

Dawkins recalls showing The Selfish Gene to Tom Maschler, who "liked the book but not the title". He suggested The Immortal Gene. Dawkins writes that "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." W. D. Hamilton wrote that "The book should be read, can be read, by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution." John Maynard Smith writes that "The Selfish Gene was unusual in that, although written as a popular account, it made an original contribution to biology." Tim Radford, reviewing it in 2012, wrote that "To re-read it is to be reminded of what an extraordinary achievement it was."

Ian McEwan writes "It hastened a sea change in evolutionary theory, it affected profoundly the teaching of biology, it enticed an enthusiastic younger generation into the subject, and spawned a huge literature, and eventually a new discipline - memetics. At the same time, and this is the measure of its achievement, it addressed itself without condescension to the layman. It did so provocatively, and with style." More generally, critics argue that The Selfish Gene oversimplifies the relationship between genes and the organism.

In 1976 the ecologist Arthur Cain, one of Dawkins's tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, called it a "young man's book", a quote of a critique of the New College, Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). Dawkins noted that he had been "flattered by the comparison, [but] knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and [he] could hardly miss Cain's pointed implication that [he] should, in the fullness of time, do the same." However, according to Wilkins and Hull, Dawkins's thinking has developed:

:In Dawkins's early writings, replicators and vehicles played different but complementary and equally important roles in selection, but as Dawkins honed his view of the evolutionary process, vehicles became less and less fundamental...In later writings Dawkins goes even further and argues that phenotypic traits are what really matter in selection and that they can be treated independently of their being organized into vehicles...Thus, it comes as no surprise when Dawkins proclaims that he "coined the term 'vehicle' not to praise it but to bury it." As prevalent as organisms might be, as determinate as the causal roles that they play in selection are, reference to them can and must be omitted from any perspicuous characterization of selection in the evolutionary process. Dawkins is far from a genetic determinist, but he is certainly a genetic reductionist.

::— John S Wilkins, David Hull, Dawkins on Replicators and Vehicles, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

As to the unit of selection, Stephen Jay Gould, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, finds Dawkins's position tries to have it both ways:

:Dawkins claims to prefer genes and to find greater insight in this formulation. But he allows that you or I might prefer organisms—and it really doesn't matter.

Choice of words

A good deal of objection to The Selfish Gene stemmed from its failure to be always clear about "selection" and "replication". Dawkins says the gene is the fundamental unit of selection, and then points out that selection does not act directly upon the gene, but upon "vehicles" or '"extended phenotypes". Stephen Jay Gould took exception to calling the gene a 'unit of selection' because selection acted only upon phenotypes. Summarising the Dawkins-Gould difference of view, Sterelny says:

:Gould thinks gene differences do not cause evolutionary changes in populations, they register those changes.

The word "cause" here is somewhat tricky: does a change in lottery rules (for example, inheriting a defective gene "responsible" for a disorder) "cause" differences in outcome that might or might not occur? It certainly alters the likelihood of events, but a concatenation of contingencies decides what actually occurs. Dawkins thinks the use of "cause" as a statistical weighting is acceptable in common usage. Like Gould, Gabriel Dover in criticising The Selfish Gene says:

:It is illegitimate to give 'powers' to genes, as Dawkins would have it, to control the outcome of selection...There are no genes for interactions, as such: rather, each unique set of inherited genes contributes interactively to one unique phenotype...the true determinants of selection.

However, from a comparison with Dawkins's discussion of this very same point, it would seem both Gould's and Dover's comments are more a critique of his sloppy usage than a difference of views. Hull suggested a resolution based upon a distinction between replicators and interactors.

Andrew Brown has written:

:"Selfish", when applied to genes, doesn't mean "selfish" at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word—but "selfish" isn't it.

Donald Symons also finds it inappropriate to use anthropomorphism in conveying scientific meaning in general, and particularly in this instance. He writes in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979):

:In summary, the rhetoric of The Selfish Gene exactly reverses the real situation: through [the use of] metaphor genes are endowed with properties only sentient beings can possess, such as selfishness, while sentient beings are stripped of these properties and called machines...The anthropomorphism of genes...obscures the deepest mystery in the life sciences: the origin and nature of mind.

Influence

Selfish genetic elements

Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel introduced the term “selfish genetic element” to describe replicators that spread through the genome at their host's expense. Ford Doolittle and Carmen Sapienza used "selfish gene" to describe the phenomena shortly thereafter.

Memes

The psychologist Susan Blackmore wrote The Meme Machine (2000), with a foreword by Dawkins. James Gleick describes Dawkins's meme as "his most famous and memorable invention".

The Selfish Gene popularised sociobiology in Japan after its translation in 1980. The "meme" entered the country's consciousness. Yuzuru Tanaka of Hokkaido University wrote Meme Media and Meme Market Architectures. The information scientist Osamu Sakura has published a book in Japanese and several papers in English on the topic. Nippon Animation produced the educational series The Many Dream Journeys of Meme.

Publication

The Selfish Gene was first published by Oxford University Press in 1976 in eleven chapters with a preface by the author and a foreword by Robert Trivers. A second edition was published in 1989. This edition added two new chapters and substantial endnotes to the preceding chapters, reflecting thoughts from The Extended Phenotype. It also added a second preface by the author, but the original foreword by Trivers was dropped.

In 2006 a 30th-anniversary edition was published with the Trivers foreword and a new introduction by the author in which he states, "This edition does, however---and it is a source of particular joy to me---restore the original Foreword by Robert Trivers." This edition was accompanied by a festschrift entitled Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (2006). In March 2006 a special event entitled The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On was held at the London School of Economics. In March 2011 Audible published an audiobook edition narrated by Dawkins and his wife at the time, the actress Lalla Ward.

In 2016 Oxford University Press published The Extended Selfish Gene, a 40th-anniversary edition with a new epilogue in which Dawkins discusses the endurance of the gene's eye view of evolution and states that it, along with coalescence analysis "illuminates the deep past in ways of which I had no inkling when I first wrote The Selfish Gene..." It contains two chapters from The Extended Phenotype. He thanks Yan Wong, "my co-author of The Ancestor's Tale, from whom I learned everything I know about coalescence theory and much else besides."

The Royal Institution conducted a poll to determine the best science book ever. The Selfish Gene made the shortlist, along with Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring and, in first place, Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.

Ian McEwan writes that it "stood at the beginning of a golden age of science writing. With a fine sense of literary tradition, the physicist Steven Weinberg, in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, revisited Huxley's lecture on chalk in order to make the case for reductionism. Steven Pinker's application of Darwinian thought to Chomskyan linguistics in The Language Instinct is one of the finest celebrations of language I know. Among many other indispensable 'classics', I would propose EO Wilson's The Diversity of Life on the ecological wonders of the Amazon rain forest, and on the teeming micro-organisms in a handful of soil; David Deutsch's masterly account of the Many Worlds theory in The Fabric of Reality; Jared Diamond's melding of history with biological thought in Guns, Germs and Steel..."

Weinberg included it on his list of the 13 best science books for the general reader.

Bibliography

External links

Video introduction by Richard Dawkins from Google Videos
The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On and mp3 from Edge Foundation, Inc.
Richard Dawkins discusses The Selfish Gene on the BBC World Book Club
Richard Dawkins on the origins of The Selfish Gene Royal Institution event video, 20 September 2013