Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

The Selfish Gene

Overview

Dawkins' account of evolution from the gene's point of view. Organisms are survival machines built by genes to copy themselves, and behaviour that looks like altruism or cooperation is explained by asking what strategy a gene would follow if it could. The book popularised kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and the evolutionarily stable strategy, and its final chapter coined the word "meme" for a unit of cultural transmission that spreads by the same logic. The title has misled a generation of readers; the book is about why selfish genes build cooperative animals.

Notes

The book that made natural selection make sense to me as a mechanism rather than a slogan. It is also, read properly, a book about the origins of morality: the chapters on reciprocal altruism and stable strategies are the biological groundwork for my view that moral rules are heuristics that paid off on average. Dawkins is a clearer writer about biology than about anything else, and this is his clearest book.

Also see