THE SELFISH GENE - LMU

1 THE SELFISH GENER ichard 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-prizewinning ethologist Niko Tin-bergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was an Assistant Professor at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, returning as UniversityLecturer and later Reader in /oology at New College, Oxford,before becoming the first holder of the Simonyi Chair in is a fellow of New SELFISH Gene (1976; second edition 1989) catapulted RichardDawkins to fame, and remains his most famous and widely readwork. It was followed by a string of bestselling books: TheExtended Phenolype (1982), The blind watchmaker (1986), RiverOut of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996),Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), and The Ancestor's Tale (2004).

2 A Devil's Chaplain, a collection of his shorter writings, waspublished in 2003. Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Societyand the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient ofnumerous honours and awards, including the 1987 Royal Societyof Literature Award, the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize ofthe same year, the 1990 Michael Faraday Award of the RoyalSociety, the 1994 Nakayama Prize, the 1997 InternationalCosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science, the KistlerPrize in 2001, and the Shakespeare Prize in page intentionally left blank THESELFISHGENERICHARD DAWKINSOXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESSOXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESSG reat Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6opOxford University Press is a department of the University of furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship.

3 And education by publishing worldwide inOxford New YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City NairobiNew Delhi Shanghai 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 Pressin the UK and in certain other countriesPublished in the United Statesby Oxford University Press Inc., 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.

4 No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriatereprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproductionoutside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,Oxford University Press, at the address aboveYou must not circulate this book in any other binding or coverand you must impose 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)13579 10 8 6 42 Printed in Great Britain byClays Ltd.

5 , St Ives picCONTENTSI 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.

6 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 guysfinishfirst213. The long reach of the gene 234 Endnotes 267 Updated bibliography 333 Index and key to bibliography 345 Extracts from reviews 3531202 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION TO THE 30 THANNIVERSARY EDITIONIt is sobering to realise that I have lived nearly half my life with TheSelfish Gene for better, for worse.

7 Over the years, as each of my sevensubsequent books has appeared, publishers have sent me on tour topromote it. Audiences respond to the new book, whichever one it is,with gratifying enthusiasm, applaud politely and ask intelligent ques-tions. Then they line up to buy, and have me sign .. The SELFISH is a bit of an exaggeration. Some of them do buy the new bookand, for the rest, my wife consoles me by arguing that people whonewly discover an author will naturally tend to go back to his first book:having read The SELFISH Gene, surely they'll work their way through tothe latest and (to its fond parent) favourite baby?I would mind more if I could claim that The SELFISH Gene had be-come severely outmoded and superseded.

8 Unfortunately (from onepoint of view) I cannot. Details have changed and factual examplesburgeoned mightily. But, with an exception that I shall discuss in amoment, there is little in the book that I would rush to take back now,or apologise for. Arthur Cain, late Professor of Zoology at Liverpooland one of my inspiring tutors at Oxford in the sixties, described TheSelfish Gene in 1976 as a 'young man's book'. He was deliberatelyquoting a commentator on A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic. I wasflattered by the comparison, although I knew that Ayer had recantedmuch of his first book and I could hardly miss Cain's pointed implica-tion that I should, in the fullness of time, do the me begin with some second thoughts about the title.

9 In 1975,through the mediation of my friend Desmond Morris I showed thepartially completed book to Tom Maschler, doyen of London pub-lishers, and we discussed it in his room at Jonathan Cape. He liked thebook but not the title. ' SELFISH ', he said, was a 'down word'. Why notcall it The Immortal Gene? Immortal was an 'up' word, the immor-tality 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 Wilde's TheSelfish Giant). I now think Maschler may have been right. Many crit-ics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discov-ered, prefer to read a book by title only.

10 No doubt this works wellviii Introduction lo the jolh anniversary editionenough 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 wouldin any case have insisted on a best way to explain the title is by locating the emphasis. Em-phasize ' SELFISH ' and you will think the book is about selfishness,whereas, if anything, it devotes more attention to altruism. The cor-rect word of the title to stress is 'gene' and let me explain why. Acentral debate within Darwinism concerns the unit that is actuallyselected: what kind of entity is it that survives, or does not survive, asa consequence of natural selection.