The Selfish Gene: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

According to Dawkins, intelligent life becomes “intelligent” when it starts to ask why it exists. There’s been life on Earth for thousands of millions of years, yet he believes there wasn’t have a credible explanation of why we exist until Charles Darwin argued that human beings evolved out of simple organisms. Many people still doubt Darwin’s theory of evolution, but Dawkins is convinced that there’s much more to be learned from it. 

Dawkins wants to understand selfishness and altruism from an evolutionary perspective, because these govern so much of human life, including loving, hating, stealing, fighting, greed, and generosity. The problem is, Dawkins thinks, that until now, these behaviors have been mischaracterized, because a lot of scientists, including Konrad Lorenz, think that evolution happens to groups, or species. But Dawkins thinks that humans (and every other living organism) are just “machines created by our genes.”

If that’s true, successful genes share one quality: selfishness. Sometimes it looks like animals are behaving selflessly, but underneath it all, that behavior really happens because it helps a gene survive. But this doesn’t mean that it’s okay to be selfish. In fact, it shows that people should try harder to be altruistic, since that tendency isn’t biological.

Of course, just because people are biologically programmed to be selfish doesn’t mean we have to be. We might even think that culture has a lot more to do with our “nature” than biology. But even if genes have absolutely nothing to do with our behavior, we’d be the “exception” among all living things that breaks the “rule.” Either way, we’d better find out what the “rule” is. 

Dawkins clarifies something important. When he talks about “selfish” and “altruistic” behavior, he’s not referring to how psychologically kind or cruel somebody feels. Rather, Dawkins thinks something (or someone) is altruistic when acting in a way that increases another’s welfare at the expense of their own. In other words, Dawkins is only concerned with the effects of behavior on survival rates.

Darwin would perhaps articulate altruism like this: somebody who acts selflessly makes themselves slightly more likely to die than the person who benefits from that altruism. If selfless animals are more likely to die, they’d be less likely to survive, reproduce, and pass on their altruistic traits, meaning that selfless behavior would die out in the long run. But it still exists, which seems paradoxical. Dawkins suggests that perhaps some behaviors seem altruistic on the surface, but they’re really “selfishness in disguise.”

For example, a female praying mantis will eat her mate if she gets the chance. So, it seems that the male praying mantis is acting selflessly in mating with her. Parents too, often sacrifice their own well-being for their children, which also seems altruistic. However, Dawkins argues that when individuals appear to be acting altruistic, they actually act that way because it increases the chance of their genes surviving.

Some scientists offer an alternative explanation for altruistic behavior, but Dawkins thinks they are wrong. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, for example thinks that some animals will sacrifice themselves to ensure their group, or species survives.  Dawkins says this idea is appealing to human beings, because we tend to admire people who put others first, and we tend to value our own species over others. But this still doesn’t explain why selflessness hasn’t died out, considering that altruistic individuals in a group are less likely to survive and pass on those traits.

Another problem group selectionists face is deciding which “group” is the right one to analyze. Lions are in the group “lion,” but they’re also mammals. Does this mean they shouldn’t kill antelopes who are also mammals (for the good of all mammals), and focus on birds? Dawkins thinks that sounds a bit ridiculous.   

Dawkins thinks that the “fundamental unit of selection” is self-interested, and this “unit” isn’t the group, or species, or even the individual. It’s the gene. Dawkins knows that this sounds a bit extreme, so to unpack the idea, he’s going to start at the beginning with the origins of life itself.