The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition - …

1 {ii}THE Selfish GENE Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor for the PublicUnderstanding of Science at Oxford University. Born in Nairobiof British parents, he was educated at Oxford and did hisdoctorate under the Nobel-prize winning ethologist NikoTinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor atthe University of California at Berkeley, returning as UniversityLecturer and later Reader in Zoology at New College, Oxford,before becoming the first holder of the Simonyi Chair in is a fellow of New College. The Selfish Gene (1976; second Edition 1989) catapulted RichardDawkins to fame, and remains his most famous and widely readwork.

2 It was followed by a string of bestselling books: TheExtended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986),River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996),Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), and The Ancestor's Tale (2004).A Devil's Chaplain, a collection of his shorter writings, waspublished in 2003. Dawkins is a Fellow of both the RoyalSociety and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient ofnumerous honours and awards, including the 1987 RoyalSociety of Literature Award, the Los Angeles Times LiteraryPrize of the same year, the 1990 Michael Faraday Award of theRoyal Society, the 1994 Nakayama Prize, the 1997 InternationalCosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science, the KistlerPrize in 2001, and the Shakespeare Prize in 2005.

3 {iv} THESELFISHGENE RICHARD DAWKINSOXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESS {v} OXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESSG reat Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6 DPOxford University Press is a department of the University furthers the University's objective of excellence in research,scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in OxfordNew YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New DelhiShanghai Taipei TorontoWith offices inArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine VietnamOxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press inthe UK and in certain other countriesPublished in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc.

4 ,New York Richard Dawkins 1989 The moral rights of the author have been assertedDatabase right Oxford University Press (maker)First published 1976 Second Edition 198930th Anniversary Edition 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in anyform or by any means, without the prior permission in writingof Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, orunder terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rightsorganizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside thescope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,Oxford University Press, at the address above You must notcirculate this book in any other binding or cover and you mustimpose this same condition on any acquirerBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication DataData availableLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataData availableISBN 0-19-929114-4 978-0-19-929114-4 ISBN 0-19-929115-2 (Pbk) 978-0-19-929115-1 (Pbk)1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd.

5 , St Ives plc {vi} CONTENTSI ntroduction to 30th Anniversary Edition viiPreface to second Edition xvForeword to first Edition xixPreface to first Edition xxi1. Why are people? 12. The replicators 123. Immortal coils 214. The gene machine 465. Aggression: stability and the Selfish machine 666. Genesmanship 887. Family planning 1098. Battle of the generations 1239. Battle of the sexes 14010. You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours 16611. Memes: the new replicators 18912. Nice guys finish first 20213. The long reach of the gene 234 Endnotes 267 Updated bibliography 333 Index and key to bibliography 345 Extracts from reviews 353 {vii}INTRODUCTION TO THE 30TH Anniversary EDITIONIt is sobering to realise that I have lived nearly half my life withThe Selfish Gene for better, for worse.

6 Over the years, aseach of my seven subsequent books has appeared, publishershave sent me on tour to promote it. Audiences respond to thenew book, whichever one it is, with gratifying enthusiasm,applaud politely and ask intelligent questions. Then they line upto buy, and have me sign .. The Selfish Gene. That is a bit ofan exaggeration. Some of them do buy the new book and, forthe rest, my wife consoles me by arguing that people who newlydiscover an author will naturally tend to go back to his firstbook: having read The Selfish Gene, surely they'll work theirway through to the latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?

7 I would mind more if I could claim that The Selfish Gene hadbecome severely outmoded and superseded. Unfortunately(from one point of view) I cannot. Details have changed andfactual examples burgeoned mightily. But, with an exception thatI shall discuss in a moment, there is little in the book that Iwould rush to take back now, or apologise for. Arthur Cain, lateProfessor of Zoology at Liverpool and one of my inspiringtutors at Oxford in the sixties, described The Selfish Gene in1976 as a young man's book . He was deliberately quoting acommentator on A.

8 J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic. I wasflattered by the comparison, although I knew that Ayer hadrecanted much of his first book and I could hardly miss Cain'spointed implication that I should, in the fullness of time, do me begin with some second thoughts about the title. In 1975,through the mediation of my friend Desmond Morris I showedthe partially completed book to Tom Maschler, doyen of Londonpublishers, and we discussed it in his room at Jonathan Cape. Heliked the book but not the title. Selfish , he said, was a downword . Why not call it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an up word, the immortality of genetic information was a centraltheme of the book, and immortal gene had almost the sameintriguing ring as Selfish gene (neither of us, I think, noticedthe resonance with Oscar Wilde's The Selfish giant ).

9 I nowthink Maschler may have been right. Many critics, especiallyvociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered,prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well {viii} enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Declineand Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that TheSelfish Gene on its own, without the large footnote of the bookitself, might give an inadequate impression of its , an American publisher would in any case haveinsisted on a best way to explain the title is by locating the Selfish and you will think the book is aboutselfishness, whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention toaltruism.

10 The correct word of the title to stress is gene and letme explain why. A central debate within Darwinism concerns theunit that is actually selected: what kind of entity is it thatsurvives, or does not survive, as a consequence of naturalselection. That unit will become, more or less by definition, Selfish . Altruism might well be favoured at other levels. Doesnatural selection choose between species? If so, we might expectindividual organisms to behave altruistically for the good of thespecies . They might limit their birth rates to avoidoverpopulation, or restrain their hunting behaviour to conservethe species future stocks of prey.