---
title: "The Selfish Gene"
chunk: 2/4
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"
---

9. Battle of the Sexes
Dawkins discusses Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Females can afford to be choosy in their mates, and select for attractive traits in males. Fisher's principle explains why a 50:50 ratio of males to females is evolutionarily stable. This is true even in an extreme case like the harem-keeping elephant seal, where 4% of the males get 88% of copulations. In that case, the strategy of having a female offspring is safe, as she will have a pup, but the strategy of having a male can bring a large return (dozens of pups), even though many males live out their lives as bachelors. 

10. You Scratch My back, I’ll Ride on Yours
Dawkins discusses reciprocal altruism. Amotz Zahavi's theory of honest signalling explains stotting as a selfish act that improves the springbok's chances of escaping from a predator by indicating how difficult the chase would be. Dawkins discusses why many species live in groups, achieving mutual benefits through mechanisms such as Hamilton's selfish herd model: each individual behaves selfishly but the result is herd behaviour. Altruism can evolve, as in the social insects such as ants and bees, where workers give up the right to reproduce in favour of a sister, the queen; in their case, the unusual (haplodiploid) system of sex determination may have helped to bring this about, as females in a nest are exceptionally closely related.

11. Memes
Dawkins discusses cultural evolution, which is in some ways analogous to biological evolution. Dawkins proposes that units of information can propagate themselves like genes. "The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ’memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’."

== Reception ==
The Selfish Gene was extremely popular when published and it remains widely read. Proponents argue that the central point, that replicating the gene is the object of selection, usefully completes and extends Darwin's explanation of evolution. Peter Medawar wrote that it is "a most skillful reformulation of the central problems of social biology in terms of the genetical theory of natural selection. Beyond this, it is learned, witty and very well written." W. D. Hamilton wrote that "The book should be read, can be read, by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution." John Maynard Smith writes that "The Selfish Gene was unusual in that, although written as a popular account, it made an original contribution to biology."
The New York Times wrote "it's the kind of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius." Tim Radford, reviewing it in 2012, wrote that "To re-read it is to be reminded of what an extraordinary achievement it was." 
Ian McEwan writes "It hastened a sea change in evolutionary theory, it affected profoundly the teaching of biology, it enticed an enthusiastic younger generation into the subject, and spawned a huge literature, and eventually a new discipline - memetics. At the same time, and this is the measure of its achievement, it addressed itself without condescension to the layman. It did so provocatively, and with style."

=== Critiques ===
According to the psychologist Nicky Hayes, "Dawkins presented a version of sociobiology that rested heavily on metaphors drawn from animal behaviour, and extrapolated these...One of the weaknesses of the sociological approach is that it tends only to seek confirmatory examples from among the huge diversity of animal behaviour. Dawkins did not deviate from this tradition." More generally, critics argue that The Selfish Gene oversimplifies the relationship between genes and the organism.
In 1976 the ecologist Arthur Cain, one of Dawkins's tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, called it a "young man's book", a quote of a critique of the New College, Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936). Dawkins noted that he had been "flattered by the comparison, [but] knew that Ayer had recanted much of his first book and [he] could hardly miss Cain's pointed implication that [he] should, in the fullness of time, do the same." The philosopher Mary Midgley mused that "This hasn't occurred to Dawkins. He goes on saying the same thing." However, according to Wilkins and Hull, Dawkins's thinking has developed:

In Dawkins's early writings, replicators and vehicles played different but complementary and equally important roles in selection, but as Dawkins honed his view of the evolutionary process, vehicles became less and less fundamental...In later writings Dawkins goes even further and argues that phenotypic traits are what really matter in selection and that they can be treated independently of their being organized into vehicles...Thus, it comes as no surprise when Dawkins  proclaims that he "coined the term 'vehicle' not to praise it but to bury it." As prevalent as organisms might be, as determinate as the causal roles that they play in selection are, reference to them can and must be omitted from any perspicuous characterization of selection in the evolutionary process. Dawkins is far from a genetic determinist, but he is certainly a genetic reductionist.
— John S Wilkins, David Hull, Dawkins on Replicators and Vehicles, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
As to the unit of selection, Stephen Jay Gould, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,  finds Dawkins's position tries to have it both ways:

Dawkins claims to prefer genes and to find greater insight in this formulation. But he allows that you or I might prefer organisms—and it really doesn't matter.