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Chapter 4
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Selfish Gene, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Gene’s Eye View of Evolution
Selfishness, Altruism, and Cooperation
Culture and Memes
The Unit of Evolution
Summary
Analysis
Dawkins thinks that aggressive behavior has been largely misunderstood. He is going to describe these behaviors from the gene’s eye view in order to clear up some of these misunderstandings. The first thing one should realize is that every individual is a “selfish machine,” programmed by its genes to make the best use of its environment in order to survive. This “environment” includes other individuals. Survival machines of different species might compete for resources. They can be predators, prey, parasites, or hosts. Survival machines of the same species interact even more often. For example, they also compete for mates.
Many group selectionists argue that aggression in the animal world is much less hostile than it needs to be. A lot of animals hold back from fighting as hard as they can, so they think this implies evidence of altruism in nature. Dawkins disagrees, and he wants to convince the reader that he’s right by describing a series of aggressive behaviors in nature from the gene’s eye view, to show that genetic programming is never altruistic.
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It might be logical to assume that a survival machine who competes for mates would do best by murdering its rivals (and maybe also eating them for food). Murder and cannibalism do happen in nature, but nowhere near as often as one might think. Lorenz, for example, talks a lot about the “restrained” way in which many animals fight. Lorenz says many animals fight to scare off others in their species, but not to kill them. On the surface, this looks like a form of altruism, but Dawkins disagrees.
Lorenz, a group selectionist, considers the fact that animals don’t murder, fight, and eat each other as much as they could as evidence for altruism in nature. Dawkins will counteract this claim by showing that these behaviors are avoided when they keep genes alive, which is a selfish rather than altruistic cause.
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Indiscriminately killing every rival that crosses an individual’s path won’t always be the best survival strategy. This comes down to a simple “cost-benefit analysis.” Imagine that one face two rivals (B and C). If one meets B first and kills him, one will be spending energy to do that, and then one also has to deal with C. But if one lets B live, he might fight with C and leave one to use one’s energy in better ways.
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Dawkins thinks that Maynard Smith has a good way of explaining behavior strategies in animals from an evolutionary perspective. Maynard Smith uses the term evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) to describe behavior that best increases the chance of survival, relative to the way others in the environment behave.
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Imagine there are two kinds of fighting strategies in a society. “Hawk” is an aggressive strategy, because hawks fight hard, but they tend to win. “Dove” is a less aggressive strategy, because doves only threaten, but don’t actually fight.
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In a society where all the creatures use the dove strategy, nobody gets hurt. But if one creature mutates and starts acting more aggressive (or hawk-like), it will win all the fights, get food and territory, and mate the most. So, the next generation would contain more aggressive individuals, who are more likely to fight and injure themselves. This means that individuals who act less aggressively (or act dove-like) would then end up less likely to become injured, and therefore survive to reproduce.
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Each generation goes back and forth in aggressiveness like a “pendulum” until a particular balance of more and less aggressive behaviors become “stable,” meaning they stay relatively consistent from generation to generation. This is called an evolutionarily stable strategy. One can also think of an evolutionarily stable strategy as a situation in which the number of hawk-genes and dove-genes stays consistent from generation to generation. Put another way, this means the ratio of hawk-genes to dove-genes stays stable in the gene pool.
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Many perplexing animal behaviors start to make sense when one realizes they are the result of evolutionarily stable strategies. These include behaviors like “gloved fist” aggression, meaning threatening but not always fighting, or the “poker face,” meaning bluffing.
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Maynard Smith says there are three factors affecting behaviors that will become evolutionarily stable strategies. The first is differences in size and strength. For example, large animals are more likely to benefit from being aggressive than small animals. The second factor is age differences. An older bird (who has already mated) has less to lose from fighting than a young one who has yet to mate. The third factor is chance: happening to be in the right place at the right time.
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Many scientists assume that dominance hierarchies arise in groups to make the group overall less aggressive, which seems beneficial for the group overall, even if those lower in the hierarchy suffer. But Dawkins thinks that dominance hierarchies are just another example of an evolutionarily stable strategy.
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R. D. Alexander conducted an experiment showing that crickets act less aggressively if they remember losing fights in the past. Dawkins thinks this means that animals who tend to win fights act more aggressive over time, enabling them to assert dominance. Meanwhile, animals that tend to lose fights act less aggressively over time, keeping the aggressive animals in charge. That’s how dominance hierarchies come about.
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Many scientists also assume that animals tend to avoid cannibalism because of some inherent altruism toward others in their species. Dawkins thinks that this is wrong. He thinks many behaviors that look altruistic exist because they happen to be evolutionarily stable strategies.
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For example, lions eat antelopes, but they don’t eat other lions. Dawkins thinks it’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy for lions to be cannibals. If a lion eats all the other lions who are its rivals for mates, it will be able to mate more and pass on its cannibalistic trait more widely. Then more cannibalistic lions would be born, but they’d be more likely to be eaten by each other, causing the trait to eventually die out in lions.
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Similarly, an antelope that decides to fight back when attacked by a lion is more likely to be eaten (simply because the lion is stronger), so it fails to survive and reproduce. Dawkins thinks the general tendency for lions to chase antelopes and for antelopes to run away is evolutionarily stable. In the long run, this combination of behavior strategies keeps enough antelopes and lions alive for these respective traits to be passed on.
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Dawkins believes that explaining behavior in terms of evolutionarily stable strategies is going to be one of the “most important advances to evolutionary theory since Darwin.” Dawkins thinks this type of explanation is important because it shows how a group of selfish organisms can resemble “a single organized whole” that appears to be cooperating for the good of their species.
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The evolutionarily stable strategy concept is also useful for explaining why genes appear to “cooperate.” Dawkins revisits the oarsmen metaphor to explain genetic cooperation. Imagine the coach is mixing up candidates at random to see which ones work best as a rowing team. If, by chance, one of those teams is made up of four left-handed rowers and four right-handed rowers, they’ll tend to perform better. Dawkins thinks it might look like the coach picked them as a unit, but in actual fact, they came together by chance.
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In general, it’s hard for a new oarsman to infiltrate a well performing team. For example, replacing one of the right-handed rowers with a left-handed one will throw the team off balance and undermine their overall performance. Similarly, it’s hard for genes to infiltrate a survival machine that is already a fine-tuned mixture of genes that cooperate well. This is why most new mutated genes getting shuffled into the gene pool do not survive to reproduce. They throw off the balance that has prevailed from generation to generation, and most likely cause their survival machines to perform more poorly in their environments.
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Once in a while, a new gene will make a survival machine work better. There will be a transition period of instability, which tests how the enhanced survival machine functions in its environment relative to other organisms. If the environment overall finds a new balance, it becomes stable under these new terms, and a new evolutionarily stable state is reached. This means “a little bit of evolution has occurred.”
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So far, it has made sense to think of each organism as a single “selfish machine” but this model runs into problems for family members, because relatives are often unselfish toward each other. Dawkins thinks that selfless behavior within families actually makes perfect sense, because relatives share genes.
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