---
title: "The Selfish Gene"
chunk: 3/4
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"
---

=== 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. The book has been translated into at least 23 languages including Arabic, Thai and Turkish.
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."

=== Editions ===