---
title: "The Selfish Gene"
chunk: 1/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:23.752400+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

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, but results from selection that occurs "at the level of the gene mediated by the phenotype" and that any selection at the group level occurred only under rare circumstances. W. D. Hamilton and others developed this approach further during the 1960s; they opposed the concepts of group selection and of selection aimed directly at benefit to the individual organism:

Despite the principle of 'survival of the fittest' the ultimate criterion which determines whether [a gene] G will spread is not whether the behavior is to the benefit of the behaver, but whether it is to the benefit of the gene G ...With altruism this will happen only if the affected individual is a relative of the altruist, therefore having an increased chance of carrying the gene.

— W. D. Hamilton, The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior (1963)
The book's central metaphor is a means of explicating the gene-centred view of evolution.

== 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."

=== Contents ===
1. Why Are People?
Dawkins writes that "Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. ... Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin." Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace, working independently) discovered the mechanism of evolution: natural selection. 

2. The Replicators
Dawkins introduces the term replicator to describe self-replicating molecules like DNA and RNA. He considers the origin of life with the emergence of replicators. The original replicator was the first molecule which managed to reproduce itself and thus gained an advantage over other molecules within the primordial soup. As replicating molecules became more complex, Dawkins postulates, they evolved cells serving as survival machines. Cells joined to form bodies. 

3. Immortal Coils
Dawkins expands on DNA, its helical structure and its organisation into chromosomes. Genes are DNA segments which are translated into proteins. Darwin’s coeval Gregor Mendel worked out the laws of inheritance and found that traits are inherited as discrete units. In meiosis, the production of gametes, genes are recombined during crossing over.

4. The Gene Machine
Dawkins discusses the evolution of behaviour. Genes encoding behaviours that cause those genes to be passed on will naturally be selected for. He provides various examples.

5. Aggression
Dawkins discusses John Maynard Smith’s evolutionarily stable strategy, "a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy … once an ESS is achieved it will stay: selection will penalize any deviation from it." A 50:50 ratio of 'hawks' (aggressors) and 'doves' (nonaggressors) is evolutionarily stable.  

6. Genesmanship
Dawkins discusses kin selection: "Close relatives – kin – have a greater than average chance of sharing genes. It has long been clear that this must be why altruism by parents toward their young is so common. What R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and especially W. D. Hamilton realized was that the same applies to other close relations—brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, close cousins. If an individual dies in order to save ten close relatives, one copy of the kin-altruism gene may be lost, but a larger number of copies of the gene is saved."

7. Family Planning
Dawkins discusses David Lack’s principle. Natural selection, according to Lack, adjusts initial clutch size so as to take maximum advantage of these limited resources. 

8. Battle of the Generations
Dawkins discusses R. L. Trivers’s concept of parental investment, "any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring".