The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, first released in 1976 is almost 30 years old–but it is far from being dated.

Here is a bit of the blurb from one second edition’s jacket:

Our genes made use. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines. The world of the selfish gene is one of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit. But what of the acts of apparent altruism found in nature - the bees who commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, or the birds who warn the flock of an approaching hawk ? Do they contravene the fundamental law of gene selfishness ? By no means: Dawkins shows that the selfish gene is also the subtle gene. And he holds out the hope that our species - alone on earth - has the power to rebel against the designs of the selfish gene.

The books main argument and focus is the idea of “replicator power”, a replicator simply being a thing that can make copies of itself. A replicator can be anything, from an autocatalytic molecule (one that facilitate the appearance of molecules similar to itself) to the most prevalent form of replicator on this planet, the gene.

Dawkins put forth the fact that in any system where replicators exist, the ones with the greatest fecundity, longevity and fidelity will prevail (increasing their numbers the most). Add to the mix the occasional copying error and you get evolution, where certain errors will hinder replication but, once in a while, a transcription error will actually make the replicator more successful. In a world of limited space and resources this leads to a sort of competition, an arms race between replicators: those that evolve spread, those that don’t are eventually used for spare parts.

When seen in terms of replicator competition, it becomes clear that natural selection doesn’t operate at the level of the species or even the individual–it’s all about the survival of genes. The book goes on to detail how this deceptively simple assertion, that evolution is the outcome of competition between the replicators in the world, is used as a founding principle–a way of seeing the world which provides a clear view of Darwinism and allows a host of thorny issues to be resolved. Why do organisms devote time and energy, potentially at the cost of their lives, to procreate? Why do many animals expend resources helping their sibling even sometimes participating in raising their progeny?

Seen from the point of view of genes, these all make perfect sense. A set of genes that cooperate to make an organism likely to procreate ensures that multiple copies of itself will be unleashed into the world–eventually, any organism will be destroyed, so it makes sense to make backups… A gene which encourages a sense of kinship between siblings is also more likely to spread: there’s a 50% chance that any gene you have is shared with your little sister, so if you can forgo a meal at the cost of some discomfort which saves your younger and weaker sibling’s life then you’ve again acted in a way to maximise the number of your genes in the environment, even if it goes against your own self-interest. In this way, Dawkins demonstrates that even altruistic behavior can be explained in terms of “selfish genes”, replicators only interested in maximising their own survival.

Reading this book was, to me, equivalent to learning the principle of conservation of energy in physics: it is a simple tool that clarifies all aspects of evolutionary biology. The hard part is getting the right mindset to use this tool, and Dawkins does a fabulous job detailing and demonstrating the implications of the idea. At times, it felt a bit overdone and I caught myself thinking “ok, you’re preaching to the choir… let’s move along” about half way through but you can’t blame the author for creating such a solid foundation (and it was written 30 years ago… perhaps a number of these ideas have filtered through to the shared consensus at some level that wasn’t present in the 70s).

One of the most thought provoking chapters is at the end, when Dawkins speculates about other types of potential replicators. These musings have lead to an explosion of research in memetics (one mind blowing book on this subject is Susan Blackmore’s Meme Machine, the subject of an upcoming review here).

I thoroughly enjoyed the read and recommend it to anyone interested in evolution, biology or the motive forces behind what we call life.