The Selfish Gene

I read this Richard Dawkin’s work only recently, about 30 years after it was originally written. It’s a superb book and helps one understand behavior, among other things.

A difficulty in discussing the book, particularly with people who haven’t read the book is that people conclude that it says that human beings are selfish, or are naturally inclined to be selfish. This switches them off. However, a gene is different from a human being and a selfish gene is not a selfish human being. The gene’s selfishness is looking for its preservation, and that is what it strives for.

The book also goes on to introduce and discuss the concept of a meme, an idea stored in brains, and which can reproduce and grow like genes, and which differentially does better or worse according to its previous experience in the world. The conditions are there for evolution to occur among these abstract things. This is a far more complex issue to grasp, but has tremendous implications. It helps explain the altruistic actions of men and groups of men – why do they do this even when the genes are driving you towards preservation. Somewhere, in societies, the preservation of ideas and ideals takes over from preservation of genes.

In his book Dawkin included a chapter on the iterative prisoner's dilemma tournaments (this happened in the 1989 edition), in which cooperative and forgiving strategies thrive over cheats. Which indicates that evolution promotes a large dose of altruism.

It’s a fascinating mix. I have found the iterative prisoner’s dilemma to be very interesting. Dawkins work on the genes and the memes comes from a very different approach and yet the two approaches meet somewhere in a powerful way.