The Selfish Gene Quotes

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as genes.

I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.

I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

It is as though, in every room of a gigantic building, there was a book-case containing the architect’s plans for the entire building. […] Incidentally, there is of course no ‘architect.’ The DNA instructions are assembled by natural selection.

Genes have no foresight. They do not plan ahead. Genes just are, some more than others, and that’s all there is to it.

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

Each entity must exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the copies must be potentially capable of surviving—in the form of copies—for a significant period of evolutionary time. Small genetic units have these properties: individuals, groups, and species do not.

The oarsmen are the genes. The rivals for each seat in the boat are alleles potentially capable of occupying the same slot along the length of a chromosome. Rowing fast corresponds to building a body which is successful at surviving. The wind is the environment. The pool of alternative candidates is the gene pool. As far as the survival of any one body is concerned, all its genes are in the same boat.

Nowadays the intricate mutual co-evolution of genes has proceeded to such an extent that the communal nature of an individual survival machine is virtually unrecognizable. Indeed, many biologists do not recognize it, and will disagree with me.

Just as the Andromedans had to have a computer on earth to take day-to-day decisions for them, our genes have to build a brain.

[A] gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? […] Obviously I do not know, but if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet.

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is starting us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, 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.

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

I agree with Axelrod and Hamilton that many wild animals and plants are engaged in ceaseless games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, played out in evolutionary time.

With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting at the center of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power. An object in the world is the centre of a converging web of influences from many genes sitting in many organisms. The long reach of the gene knows no obvious boundaries. The whole world is criss-crossed with causal arrows joining genes to phenotypic effects, far and near.

The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.

An organism has a frequency of one, and therefore cannot ‘serve as a unit of natural selection.’ Not in the same sense of replicator anyway.

So powerful is the gene’s eye view, the genome of a single individual is sufficient to make quantitatively detailed inferences about historical demography. What else might it be capable of?