The Selfish Gene offers an account of evolution from the perspective of genes. Darwinian evolution (as defined in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of the Species) claims that life on earth evolved from simpler organisms through natural selection. According to Darwin, natural selection favors organisms that are slightly better adapted to their natural environment, and therefore more likely to survive and reproduce, which results in those organisms passing on their traits to succeeding generations. Richard Dawkins argues that since hereditary traits are passed on through genes, it actually makes more sense to think of genes as the units that evolve. But this view raises a question about why organisms (like humans, cells, plants, and animals) need to exist at all. Dawkins argues that organisms exist and reproduce in the way that they do because this provides an evolutionary advantage for the genes that exist inside of them.
Dawkins tells the story of the origin of life on Earth from the “gene’s eye view,” to explain that organisms developed out of “simplicity” through the mechanism of gene-based evolution. As Dawkins describes it, at the start of the universe, there were just atoms floating around in energy. Dawkins calls this state a “primordial soup.” Eventually, atoms started clumping together to create molecules. At some point, one of these patterns resulted in molecules that attracted around them to form similar patterns. This process of attraction is a sort of “replication.” The molecule essentially creates a “copy” or “clone” of itself with other atoms that are still floating around. “Replicating” molecules, according to Dawkins, are the ancestors of DNA. Replication must have been an imperfect process, meaning some “copies” would have slightly different arrangements of molecules. In a universe with finite atoms, all the slightly different molecules would have to compete for free atoms in order to replicate. Eventually, one particular arrangement of atoms must have created a molecule that was able to build “protein” around itself, thereby protecting its atoms from being stolen. These were the first cells. Eventually, it must have been the case that cells that clumped together were better at protecting their replicating components. These clumps of cells were the first organisms. This is how cells containing DNA eventually formed into organisms over the course of thousands of million years.
Dawkins then argues that genes (or, DNA)—and not organisms—are the things that are evolving. After all, before organisms could exist, genetic code with the instructions to build organisms had to exist, and genetic code is still around. In fact, it’s genetic code—the “the unit of heredity”—that gets passed on through the processes of reproduction. Organisms, in this view, are simply “machines” that house genes. Organisms exist because they help genes survive. As Dawkins writes “[we] are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator— molecules called DNA—but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water. There is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.”
The “gene’s eye view” of evolution, thus, argues that life on earth exists in the way it does because genes are competing to survive, and the genes that win out through natural selection must be those that lay out the “blueprints” for creating organisms as we know them. These organisms—including humans—are “survival machines” for the genes they contain.
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The Gene’s Eye View of Evolution Quotes in The Selfish Gene
We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as genes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
